Street Boners: Having a laugh at your crazy get-ups

If you're a fan of The Sartorialist, you'll love Street Boners, a tongue-in-cheek version by Gavin McInnes, the former top dog at Vice. He has created an entire lexicon of looks from pocahipsters to the nerdy slut and rated them with a kitten rating system.
Read more about it here and here.

Bloom-ing Marvelous

The South African author, Kevin Bloom, stopped over in New York on his way back from launching his memoir, Ways of Staying, in Toronto. Editor At Large caught up with him at a punk bar on Bedford Av in Williamsburg for a pint of locally brewed Brooklyn Lager and a conversation about how even if he wanted to leave South Africa (which he doesn't), he can't now that he's written a book called Ways of Staying , but he did concede that if he had to leave the country, Williamsburg wouldn't be a bad place to land up.

See what the Economist had to say about his book here

Groucho's Rule

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx

India in Print

There's no better way to learn about the history, culture and quirks of a place than to read a mix of fiction, non-fiction and memoir.

I recommend:

1. A Princess Remembers by Gayatri Devi, especially if you'll be in Jaipur and other parts of Rajasthan.
2. Anything by William Dalrymple, but especially The Age of Kali
3. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Yes it's close to 1000 pages, but the descriptions of Mumbai are unbeatable.

Virgin Territory

I interviewed Jeffrey Eugenides last week for a piece about why his first novel, The Virgin Suicides is still so read.

Click on the link for more...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-22/the-virgin-suicides-sweet-16/?cid=topic:mainpromo1

Austerisms

I interviewed Paul Auster at his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn today. Here are a few of his thoughts:

NR: Your latest novel, Man in the Dark feels so visual. Why is that?
PA: Good. I’ve always been striving to achieve that effect. I’ve always wanted to write a book whose language would be so transparent that the reader would forget that the medium is words and just be inside the story.

NR: Can you take a break from your work, say to travel?
PA: The problem with leaving a book is that you stop believing in it. There’s some kind of state that you get yourself into when you’re working where everything that is imaginary becomes real. But as soon as you step back from that, the illusion bursts, and you have to work yourself back into it and it takes time. When I traveled over the summer, I just clung desperately to what the next sentence was going to be, I tried to keep it in my head, but when I got back it took me a good ten days or so to feel the rhythm of it.

NR: Are you ever influenced by what you read while you write?
PA: I never read fiction while I write fiction. I just can’t. I find that living in my imaginary universe all day, I need to get into the real world. Somehow it’s a stabilizing force. When I’m reading I’m reading for the most part biography, history, books about science, politics but not fiction. Between novels I try to catch up.

NR: Who do you read?
PA: Well, there are certain people that I read faithfully and I suppose these are the ones that mean the most to me. He died recently but Ryszard Kapuscinski is a writer who I read faithfully. Everytime he published a book I would go out and buy it. JM Coetzee. Everytime he publishes a book, I go out and I read it. Don DeLillo, I read every one of his books. Peter Carey, I’ve read every one of his books.

NR: He's dead, but what about Hawthorne.
I’ve read all of Hawthorne. He’s…I don’t know why he’s so important to me but I just love his work. I love his mind. I love what he did for American literature. He is just a stupendously great writer. Did you ever see the little book I put together for New York Review Books, the Hawthorne. It’s called Twenty Days with Julie and Little Bunny by Papa. And it’s something from Hawthorne’s notebooks. But it’s a self-contained text. About 50 or 60 pages. I wrote along essay introducing it. It’s in my collected prose. Hawthorne at Home. It was when Hawthorne move to the Berkshires in 1861. He had published The Scarlett Letter the year before and House of the Seven Gables had just come out and so he was at the top moment of his life as a writer and as a father and a husband. He was about 47 years old and for the first time in his life he was making his living through writing. And he and his wife rented a house in Lennox and they had two children, Oona, a girl, and Julian, a boy. They were about 7 and 5 and then they had a baby not long after they moved in. Rose. When Rose was born, Hawthorne’s wife Sophia took the two girls to the outskirts of Boston to visit her parents for two weeks. And Hawthorne was left alone in the house with this 5-year-old boy. There was some cook who came into the house to do work but essentially he was in charge of taking care of the kid. And I think it’s the first account in history of a man taking care of a child alone. He kept a very meticulous diary, day by day, of what he and the boy did. And how annoying the boy was and how he never stopped pestering him with his questions and his antics and what’s very moving about this piece to is that this is when he and Melville became friends and now Mellville who was living just six miles down the road in Pittsfield, finishing Moby Dick. I mean it was quite a moment. And there’s a great passage of Melville coming to visit and the two of them sitting up late into the night, smoking cigars and drinking and just talking about everything. It’s a great moment in American literature that passage. That’s one element of Hawthorne. The part that nobody knows. The very droll and bemused person. He was a writer of tremendous depth and psychological acuity. And in a sense I think unlike Hemingway who said all American literature comes out of one book – Huckleberry Finn – I beg to differ. I think it’s The Scarlett Letter which was published 30-something years before Huckleberry Finn.


NR: Man in the Dark is your most political book since Leviathan. What are your political views?
PA: Can I say this in one sentence? One wants humanity to be better. I think it’s within our capabilities to do better, so I keep hoping. I’m ever in despair and yet I keep hoping that things will get better.

Man in the Dark is published August 19.

Life at Page Six

My interview with Ann Leary "Secrets of an A-List Marriage" ran in Page Six Magazine today. Take a read

http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20080622/Real+Life+Ann+Leary+Reveals+Secrets+List+Marriage

Divorce and Buddhism

Storms Can't Hurt The Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce is Gabriel Cohen's excellent memoir-come-self-help book chronicling his journey to the other side of anger after his wife walked out one day and never came back. This is possibly the male answer to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Did anyone stop and think about the husband she left behind? Well if he was anything like Cohen, he may have stayed in New York and attended a talk about anger given by a Buddhist teacher and then gone on his own spiritual path. Like Eat, Pray, Love you don't have to have had the experience yourself to relate and get inspired. This book has taught me much and I've never been anywhere near a divorce. Read it, even if you do get quizzical looks on the subway.

Cohen will read from Storms Can't Hurt The Sky at Sunny's Waterfront Bar in Red Hook on April 6. He is the man behind the Sundays at Sunny's reading series, so it should be a good one. Get there early for the free Italian pastries.

The Brooklyn Book Festival

I went to hear Dave Eggars, the editor of the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly Concern in conversation with the Nigerian-born author, Chris Abani. Eggars most recently wrote What is the What, a novel based on the life story of a Sudanese Lost Boy, Valentino Achak Deng. All author proceeds to the Lost Boys of Sudan.
Achak Deng, 26, wasn’t at this talk – he’s studying international diplomacy at a college in Pennsylvania. “It’s strange for him,” said Eggars. “One day he’s a sophmore, but next week he’ll come to New York to speak at the Clinton’s Global Initiative.”
Eager to take any money made from the book to Marial Bai in Sudan to build a primary school, Achak Deng waited patiently for four years for Eggars to finish the book. Now he has started the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation in Sudan. He’ll take it over once he has completed his studies.
Eggars’ slide show showed the village of Marial Bai, razed to the ground during the war, now rebuilt as a returnee camp. “We went to see what could be done,” explained Eggars. “It was a listening tour.”
Achak Deng is particularly concerned with assisting young women in getting a secondary education. “Eventhough attitudes in Sudan are changing, it is still the tradition to marry off 13 and 14 year olds.”
One slide showed Achak Deng talking to two fourteen year old girls. One wanted to be a doctor; the second, a nurse. “Valentino who is usually very optimistic, told me that they will not reach their goals, not in this generation, but in the next,” said Eggars. “The men are becoming open to change and to women’s empowerment. The returnees like Val have brought with them a more progressive attitude from their time in the West.”
After taking in the needs of Marial Bai, Achak Deng has changed his original plan. “We realised that there are enough primary schools. So everything was adjusted according to the community’s needs,” explained Eggars. “Now he’ll set up a teacher training college, a secondary school, and a micro loan program for single mothers who are entrepreneurs.”
Eggars and Achak Deng are also working on another book that will form part of the McSweeney’s Oral Histories collection. They are telling the stories of women who survived the war. While listening to the stories, Eggars said that many times he and Achak Deng had to stop and ask the women if they were OK to continue. “They would say, ‘I’m not afraid. Let’s keep going’,” says Eggars. Many Sudanese girls were kidnapped and sold into slavery or to men who they would be forced to marry. They often endured horrific beatings and rape.

By Nadine Rubin. A version of this appeared as my Made in Manhattan column in the South African Sunday Times.