via Will Hermes, author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire:

“[Donna Summer] was known as a disco diva. But you could just as rightly call her an r&b, pop, or experimental-music singer. I write about what was arguably her greatest recording in Love Goes To Buildings On Fire:

On May 13, 1977, Casablanca released Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday. A concept album about musical evolution, it ends with a song that is ostensibly the future: “I Feel Love.” She cooed, “Love To Love You Baby” style, over a chugging track made up entirely of synth beats and arpeggiated chord washes, a yin to Kraftwerk’s yang. New York DJs loved it instantly. As unprecedented as “Trans Europe Express,” it became just as essential, an electronic dance music template. Blondie covered it live, faithfully, with Chris Stein adding Santana-style guitar licks. In Berlin, Brian Eno rushed into the studio where he and David Bowie were working on Heroes with a fresh copy of the record, raving that it would change the sound of club music “for the next 15 years” (Eno was fond of grand statements). One can imagine the record spinning while the two Philip Glass fans listened to its hypnotic repetitions, the sonic possibilities blooming in their minds like flowers in a stop-motion film.

Above, she performs ‘I Feel Love’ on The Midnight Special television show in 1977. RIP.”

(original post)

Also, tonight (Wednesday, May 16th) in NYC: Rosecrans Baldwin in conversation with Sloane Crosley at McNally Jackson Books (7PM, 52 Prince Street)

picadorbookroom:

Last night at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Rosecrans Baldwin discussed his memoir, Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, the story of his time spent living in the French city. He spoke of the comparisons between the two peoples and what a place is like once you’ve settled in and gotten to know a few locals.

While in Paris, Rosecrans, a self-described Francophile, couldn’t get enough and proceeded to read a bunch of books about his new home. Here are four books Rosecrans recommends:

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
“It’s a wonderful, screwy take on 1950s Paris. The narrator’s voice just rampages.” 

You can listen to Rosecrans talk about this novel on NPR.

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
“A novel in which nothing happens, and what does happen takes place in a Parisian bathroom for the most part. And yet: gripping, revealing, entertaining, and all in very few pages.”

The Friend of Madame Maigret by Georges Simenon
“It’s hard to pick one Simenon—I love so many. This one’s set in the Marais, where I used to live, so it’s a sentimental selection.”

Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant
“These are set around Europe in addition to Paris, so it’s a continental treat. Gallant has won all sorts of awards and she’s still underrated, I think. Effortlessly moving.”

You can listen to Rosecrans discuss Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate as well as with Brad Listi on the Other People podcast. You might also want to read an excerpt at Salon. Rosecrans is also on Twitter at @rosecrans.

In keeping with this wanderlusting, here are our suggestions for books with a great sense of place:

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal
Edmund de Waal The Hare with Amber EyesEdmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots—which are then sold, collected, and handed on—he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz
Tony Horwitz Blue LatitudesTwo centuries after James Cook’s epic voyages of discovery, Tony Horwitz takes readers on a wild ride across hemispheres and centuries to explore the Captain’s embattled legacy in today’s Pacific. 

Recounting Cook’s voyages and exotic scenes — tropical orgies, taboo rituals, cannibal feasts, human sacrifice — Horwitz relives Cook’s adventures by following in the captain’s wake to places such as Tahiti, Savage Island, and the Great Barrier Reef to discover Cook’s embattled legacy in the present day. 

Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil: A Book of Omissions
Peter Robb A Death in BrazilDeliciously sensuous and fascinating, Robb renders in vivid detail the intoxicating pleasures of Brazil’s food, music, literature, and landscape as he travels not only cross country but also back in time—from the days of slavery to modern day political intrigue and murder. 

Now in paperback for the first time at the end of this month, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown by Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham Land's End“Cunningham rambles through Provincetown, gracefully exploring the unusual geography, contrasting seasons, long history, and rich stew of gay and straight, Yankee and Portuguese, old-timer and ‘washashore’ that flavors Cape Cod’s outermost town… . Chock-full of luminous descriptions … . He’s hip to its studied theatricality, ever-encroaching gentrification and physical fragility, and he can joke about its foibles and mourn its losses with equal aplomb.” —Chicago Tribune

As seen on T.M. Wolf’s Facebook page, the UK edition of Sound. You can see the full US cover art on T.M. Wolf’s Tumblr… or tantalize yourself with the spine, as featured in NYT’s ”Bookshelf”:    “The formalist games continue with Sound (Faber & Faber, $18), by the hip-hop fanatic and Yale Law School grad T. M. Wolf, who also has degrees in intellectual history and urban planning. His dizzying interests somehow coalesce in this first novel, with the prose arranged here and there on horizontal lines, like musical notation.”

As seen on T.M. Wolf’s Facebook page, the UK edition of Sound. You can see the full US cover art on T.M. Wolf’s Tumblr… or tantalize yourself with the spine, as featured in NYT’s ”Bookshelf”:

  NYT Bookshelf

“The formalist games continue with Sound (Faber & Faber, $18), by the hip-hop fanatic and Yale Law School grad T. M. Wolf, who also has degrees in intellectual history and urban planning. His dizzying interests somehow coalesce in this first novel, with the prose arranged here and there on horizontal lines, like musical notation.”


For more stops on Rosecrans Baldwin’s tour, click here.

For more stops on Rosecrans Baldwin’s tour, click here.

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Our French Connection, by Rosecrans Baldwin

In which Rosecrans Baldwin (author of PARIS, I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN) visits U.S. towns called Paris to ask people what they think of France.

“Tupelo Hassman has to exist for me as an idea, a notion of a writer, the way my teenage self barely comprehended that there was a person who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird […]” vol1brooklyn: “But Hassman’s book is more then just Rory’s story. Under the words and images, there’s fury and compassion. Like Willy Vlautin, Hassman locates her stories in the dark corners of bus depots, the dingy bars way off the main road, the welfare reports that only tell half the story. Girlchild is just a story about a girl finding her way off the Calle, out of the trailer park, but there’s no “just” about it. Hassman is never going to tell you how terrible Rory’s life is, how you ought to pity her, how you shouldn’t take what you have for granted. She’s just going to show you, over and over again, how people keep moving, keep scraping by, keep surviving…” (via A Hundred Tiny Stories, Told With Fury and Compassion: Tupelo Hassman’s “Girlchild” Reviewed | Vol. 1 Brooklyn)

“Tupelo Hassman has to exist for me as an idea, a notion of a writer, the way my teenage self barely comprehended that there was a person who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird […]”

vol1brooklyn:

“But Hassman’s book is more then just Rory’s story. Under the words and images, there’s fury and compassion. Like Willy Vlautin, Hassman locates her stories in the dark corners of bus depots, the dingy bars way off the main road, the welfare reports that only tell half the story. Girlchild is just a story about a girl finding her way off the Calle, out of the trailer park, but there’s no “just” about it. Hassman is never going to tell you how terrible Rory’s life is, how you ought to pity her, how you shouldn’t take what you have for granted. She’s just going to show you, over and over again, how people keep moving, keep scraping by, keep surviving…” (via A Hundred Tiny Stories, Told With Fury and Compassion: Tupelo Hassman’s “Girlchild” Reviewed | Vol. 1 Brooklyn)

Calling all Photoshoppers and MS Painters! themorningnews: (by Judson Frondorf) Our cover remix contest is under way! Join us for a chance to win a copy of Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.

Calling all Photoshoppers and MS Painters!

themorningnews:

(by Judson Frondorf)

theparisreview: Something Out of Something: Talking with Etgar Keret

theparisreview:

Something Out of Something: Talking with Etgar Keret

The second installment in the FSG/GQ “Originals Series”? RSVP: Yes.

gq:

You Do Not Want To Miss This: Amelia Gray with Hospitality

Last November, on occasion of the release of his lauded essay collection, Pulphead, longtime GQ correspondent John Jeremiah Sullivan shared in conversation with host David Rees and Caveman’s Stefan Marolachakis before an audience of JJS-heads who’d turned out in reservation-only droves to fill a standing-room-only Tribeca loft wall-to-wall. Among the topics: the fate of Michael Jackson, the pursuit of Axl Rose, the uncomfortable comparisons to David Foster Wallace… Speaking of which: Sullivan’s GQ essay on Wallace, “Too Much Information,” is up for a National Magazine Award tomorrow night—and so in a nod to the achievement, here’s JJS in the first “Originals Series” event by FSG and GQ.
 

If you dig, mark your calendars for the next “Originals” go-around, featuring Amelia Gray, Hospitality, and host David Rees on May 8th at 7 p.m. at Public Assembly in Williamsburg. Please RSVP at http://originalsseries.eventbrite.com.

If formal verse can be likened to carving, free verse to modeling, then one might say that doggerel verse is like objet trouvés — the piece of driftwood that looks like a witch, the stone that has a profile. The writer of doggerel, as it were, takes any old words, rhythms and rhymes that come into his head, gives them a good shake and then throws them onto the page like dice where, lo and behold, contrary to all probability they make sense, not by law but by chance. Since the words appear to have no will of their own, but to be the puppets of chance, so will the things or persons to which they refer; hence the value of doggerel for a certain kind of satire.
W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, from the FSG Poetry blog The Best Words in Their Best Order.

Rosecrans Baldwin on Carla Bruni and Pants

Third week in December, I risked my life and rented a Vélib to ride to work. Face-smacking loveliness of a day, and while I navigated around Place de la Concorde and began climbing up the Champs-Elysées, I heard a loud rushing RRRrrriiiiiipppppppp. Whence cometh hell.

It had sounded like a scooter revving its engine. In fact, my crotch was gone. I’d pedaled too hard, and the seat had been ripped out from my jeans. So I made a diaper of my trench coat, attended a meeting, and rode the Métro home to change my pants.

Around the same time, the president became enviable. “Bling bling” Sarkozy had a new squeeze: Carla Bruni, ex-model, successful musician. And where did Sarko l’Américain take his new girlfriend for the weekend? Disneyland Paris. Sarkozy was in love—same for the newspapers, with the spectacle. Especially because Bruni was the ex of Donald Trump and Mick Jagger, and she confirmed the papers’ worst suspicions about Sarkozy’s lust for celebrity, especially non-French celebrity (never mind Bruni’s thing for powerful men).

“Power crazy, this girl,” Julie said, confirming much of what Paris thought, “but it’s true, she can sing.”

According to reports, also attending the Disneyland Paris weekend were Bruni’s mother, a concert pianist, and Bruni’s son, whom she’d had with Raphaël Enthoven, a philosopher whom The New York Times reported Ms. Bruni had stolen away from an author named Justine Levy, who was the daughter of the philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, and who’d gone on to write a novel about Bruni’s romantic poaching.

Sometimes the French were so incredibly French—so cultured, so reliably contradictory—it thrilled me. There was nothing else to say. What a wonderful place.

From Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin

“Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media dissed by cranky fifty-one-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about ‘getting down in the pit and loving somebody.’ She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person: Does this person love me? There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the technoconsumerist order: it exposes the lie.” -Jonathan Franzen, “Pain Won’t Kill You,” from Farther Away: Essays

“Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media dissed by cranky fifty-one-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about ‘getting down in the pit and loving somebody.’ She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard. The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person: Does this person love me? There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the technoconsumerist order: it exposes the lie.”

-Jonathan Franzen, “Pain Won’t Kill You,” from Farther Away: Essays

Rosecrans Baldwin on Pairing Cheeseburgers and Champagne

I refilled our cups and asked Bruno if there was any food a Parisian wouldn’t pair with champagne.

Looking back, I think, Oh, the sum of small acts …

“Cheeseburger?” I said.

Bruno turned away from his computer. “Cheeseburger, why do you always talk about cheeseburger? But it’s not bad, sure.”

“How about sushi?”

“Sushi, beer is better,” Bruno said, “but sure, champagne.”

“That works?” I said. Ça marche?

“That works,” Bruno said. Ça marche.

Ça marche was my phrase of the month.

“What about cheese?” I said. “A platter of cheeses?”

Bruno said, “Now this is tricky.” He explained that it depended on the cheeses served and the type of champagne. Perhaps a rosé? He’d have to think about it. Next I asked him what was required for a proper French Christmas dinner.

“Shellfish,” Bruno said. “Parisians eat shellfish.”

“This is also not bad with champagne,” he added.

Several times in those eighteen months, over coffee, at lunch, Bruno explained to me that native Parisians were disappointed by default. “We say pas mal before we say très bien. Look where we live. If you have Paris, what lives up to it? The strikes—you know, the fathers went on strike, so the sons follow. But it’s theater now. Everything changes.”

From Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin

“What love is really about is a bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with their struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.” -Jonathan Franzen, “Pain Won’t Kill You,” from Farther Away: Essays

“What love is really about is a bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with their struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.”

-Jonathan Franzen, “Pain Won’t Kill You,” from Farther Away: Essays

If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would not matter very much. But as money comes to buy more and more—political influence, good medical care, a home in a safe neighborhood rather than a crime-ridden one, access to elite schools rather than failing ones—the distribution of income and wealth looms larger and larger. Where all good things are bought and sold, having money makes all the difference in the world.
Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets