When Long Duck Dong appears for the first time during Sixteen Candles, a gong rings, and if you’re Asian, as you see his face swing down over the bunk bed and the halo of black hair appear around his head, you experience a moment of PTSD, remembering every time anyone ever followed you on the [...]
Entries from August 2009
August 26, 2009
Bad Novel, Good Friend
Over at Cary Tennis’ Salon advice column today, he handles one of the most important questions of our age: What do you say when you don’t like a friend’s novel? And, I disagree with the answer. Here’s the letter: Two days ago, my friend sent me the final draft of a novel she’s been working [...]
August 25, 2009
Mary Gaitskill on lost cats, pet psychics, kids who are not your kids but also are your kids, and loss, over at Granta.com. Also in issue 107. If you also want to write your Senator, your Congressional Rep and your local newspaper in support of single payer healthcare, click here. If you want to be [...]
August 24, 2009
Birthday
1. August 21st, 1967, South Kingston, Rhode Island. A home economics teacher from Maine named Jane and a URI oceanography student named Chuck (his American name) welcome their first son into the world. Chuck names him Alexander, for Alexander the Great. Alexander’s Korean grandfather chooses his middle name, the suffix of it to be shared [...]
August 21, 2009
The Book Video, Done Right
This is a video of Luis Alberto Urrea, for his novel Into the North. I was taken with how it really moved me. Most book videos are too long as trailers go, clumsy and in many cases painful to watch. But I found this precisely what I might have wanted to know about the author [...]
August 20, 2009
Face Recognition Software Thinks Asians Are Blinking
Up and coming film-maker Alex Myung, a Korean adoptee, made an interesting discovery while taking pictures with his mom:
August 19, 2009
“Consider Writing an 86 Proof Sentence.” – Charles Baxter
1. Saturday, I drive to Vermont with my friend Tayari, to Bread Loaf. The mosquitoes are terrifying. At a cocktail reception, as we take turns outside spraying ourselves, Sigrid Nunez advances a theory that this is because the bats are dying and are not eating the mosquitoes anymore. All up and down the Eastern seaboard, [...]
August 3, 2009
I’m Not Done
[Press play, then read] The silence was full. The old monk let himself float down the river on the current, staring at the sky, anxious to be alone. He waited until he made out the old mine’s shadows. He paddled to the shore and pulled off his wet clothes, wringing them over the river and [...]
August 3, 2009
I’m Turning Myself Into a Demon
When I moved back to New York City after graduate school I lived for a while in a 3-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side with my brother and sister. I am the oldest—my younger sister was a student at Columbia, and my younger brother was beginning as a Wall Street analyst. And I worked [...]
