April is the cruelest month, I’ve heard a poet say
But not for me because there’s Poem in Your Pocket Day
Each year, I get to publish my new verse – it’s quite a perk
Too bad reporters always ask me to describe my work
Not quite a TARDIS, but close enough to entice New Yorkers.
My experience of narrative — particularly in New York City, where every approaching train cuts off every approaching thought, where the constant abrasion of the unknown with the insane desensitizes, so that I’m often left with white noise, and jagged notes from the digital world seep further into reality — is piecemeal. I had a friend who assured me that it was impossible to read certain books in the 21st-century city. Henry James, for instance. You need a quiet nook, she said. Otherwise, ‘before you’ve even finished one sentence’ — but she was cut off. I became fascinated with this idea of a patchwork approach. Certainly, it’s nothing new, but who did it well?
The ladies are currently outnumbering the gentlemen for our speed dating event, so we are recruiting you, bookish dudes (glasses not required).
You know how you always walk into a bookstore and are like “Dang, these girls are so cool and well-read, oh look she’s reading Zadie Smith, I wish I could talk to her.” Or “… she’s reading Don DeLillo, I wish I could talk to her.” Well, now your dreams are coming true. We’re matching people by their literary tastes. Plus a free drink to get things going! Buy a ticket now.
Hey, men! Did you hear that? They have too many women signed up for this literary speed dating event. What the heck are you waiting for??? There’s even a DISCOUNT CODE for reduced-price tickets!
Yes, tonight The Rumpus (& snotty-nosed kid-sister The Rumblr) descend on Williamsburg to tear shit up.
8PM + PUBLIC ASSEMBLY
(70 North 6th Street Brooklyn NY 11211)
Co-sponsored by The Millions, HTMLGIANT, Bomb Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gigantic, The New Inquiry, and Madame Clairevoyant.
Featuring!
- Comedy by Eugene Mirman
- A live rendition of Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me featuring Sari Botton and Melissa Febos
- Readings by Jami Attenberg, Rick Moody, and Jenny Zhang
- Music by Mike Doughty
- A screening of “Mr. Gracie,” a five minute movie based on Happy Baby
- A one hour DJ set by K.Flay
- Dancing
- Dancing
- Dancing
Get your favorite writers’ autographs! Give your humble Rumblrers a hug! (Or a hearty handshake.) Drink a drank! Start a dance party!
RSVP at the Facebook page and get your butts over there! (Price of entry is a sliding scale donation to Happy Baby, whether on the Kickstarter or at the door.)
Tonight, y’all!
Michael Joseph Gross remembers life in the blackout zone.
And high above the lights of Manhattan, in the Rainbow Room, on the sixty-sixth floor of the RCA Building, the rich and gorgeous splendor of a Joan Crawford supper club makes itself real to the merry merry merry and so beautifully well-dressed boys and girls, from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Syracuse, Vassar, Smith, Adelphi, Woodmere Academy, that the swift gilted elevators carry up sixty-five floors from the amazing subtle richness of a Rockefeller Center, up to hear immaculate aesthetic Ray Noble arrange his orchestra through “Moon Over Miami.” And rich and happy, jolly wise guys home from school and happy happy happy sweet smelling daughters, all laughing laughing at nothing, at something, when it hurts, when it doesn’t, till it hurts; nibbling costly pretty food, spoiling wondrous, gorgeous, expensive concoctions of sickening painful fluids.
New Yorkers, come here today and help us throw money at it!
“It is summer in New York, which, for those New Yorkers occupying that ever-growing demographic where hipster and child-friendly meet, means that it’s time to hit the High Line. For the uninitiated, the High Line is a city park built atop an abandoned elevated railway that winds through the southwestern side of Manhattan 30 feet above street level. A little more than a decade ago, in the waning days of the Giuliani Administration, the crumbling railway line was slated for demolition; today, just three years after the first section of the park opened to the public, it is one of the city’s most popular parks, drawing millions of visitors and spawning acres of new upscale retail outlets and residential high-rises in the former post-industrial badlands of Far West Chelsea.
My wife and I would almost certainly land in the bottom decile on the hipster scale, but we have a five year old who is very, very into trains, and the High Line has become the default family outing on summer weekends when the weather is nice and we don’t have anywhere else to be. “
Michael Bourne on NYC’s High Line.
Source: themillions.com
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