Put Down Your #2 Pencils

So I just finished Prep. As previously noted, I liked it a lot. I actually had to stop myself from skimming down the page to find out what happens next. Sometimes, the story was so compelling that it felt like a guilty pleasure, but Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing reassured me that I wasn’t one of those women you see reading Danielle Steele on the subway. That’s for another time in my life.

At the back of the book, someone, I hope a Random House intern wrote “Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion” for the novel. This seems like a trend for literary blockbusters and to me, remarkably stupid. These kinds of questions take all the pleasure out of reading and put back the 9th grade horribleness. At this point in my leisure reading life, I’m not quite ready for Fabio covers, but I don’t want to be told how to enjoy a book either.

Forbes Article Sleeps with the Fish

Yesterday Forbes published a highly offensive piece about career women. I’d link to the article, but the magazine has taken it off line. In the Internet age, when a magazine wants to distance itself from something, it goes mafia style and makes the story disappear.

Pop Your Collars

“I don’t need a cursory explanation about class,” a friend replied when I asked him if he had ever read Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel.

Good news, friend: Prep isn’t a cursory explanation about class. Even though it’s set in a prep school and narrated by a scholarship student, the book is really about the social caste system of high school. Money is just another index, along with looks, athletic skills and brains, with which to judge people.

I’m only about half away through, so it may be too early agree with both Marie Claire and the

Going Stag

Last Thanksgiving break, I went jogging with my dad. Running on North Ave., toward the end of what he has dubbed “the course,” I asked him asked him about his life, meeting my mom, settling in New Rochelle, and you know, how it all happened. My dad, who only stays up past ten on weeknights to watch Roger Feder, answered with a shrug, but went on to paraphrase the closing line from the closing story of Interpreter of Maladies:

I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

My dad grew up in Long Island, but you know, it still resonates.

Another time when I was maybe 14, my dad and I were walking around our neighborhood. Around where he claims is the highest point in New Rochelle, but which is actually just a few small hills up from our house, we talked about books on tape. My mom listens to them, along with the Superstar Teaching series, tirelessly, but he and I think they’re a bit silly. The problem with books on tape, he said, is that there’s a moderator, but reading is really about you and the writer. When you read a book, you don’t have to press rewind to re-enjoy a moving passage.

In the past, I’ve felt frustrated reading a great book alone: Sometimes there’s nothing more lonely than sharing a passion with no one. But lately, I’ve relished the isolation of reading. For twenty minutes each way, I’m in a world separate from everything. When my friends do take a book recommendation, I find talking about fiction with them disappointing. Recreating an imaginary world with someone is just not as fun as being in it alone. Even with my sharpest friends, in fact, especially with my sharpest friends, insights about structure or characters leave me somehow let down, either with my own understanding of the book or of theirs.

Consider this my non-invitation to Jhumpa Lahiri’s reading in Fort Green this weekend. I’m really excited to see JL in action, but I have no interest in sharing my excitement with any friends. Frankly, I don’t want to hear their opinions on the way she dresses or what she reads. I want hear her read by myself, and listen to her as if I’m reading her alone.

What a Schmuck

Connecting the war on terror to the war in Iraq to woo Connecticut voters? The only excuse I can think of is a quirky Jewish sense of humor. Failing that, Lieberman is one crazy semite.

Voyeur’s Delight

I didn’t attend my camp’s reunion this June, but I did discover several pictures online from the event. I don’t know who took this picture and I don’t know who is in it, but finding this gallery was one of the highlights of my week.

I went to this camp from ages eight to 13. As a kid, I liked to run around, play sports and generally get dirty. The girls at the camp did not share this interest. Most of my bunkmates spent their summer doing Arts

))<>((

I recently mentioned that Jason, Radhika and I would have “Beta Dinners” every Thursday last summer. A few people wrote in to ask, “Why are you spending your time writing a lame blog?,” “What do you mean by ‘Beta?’,” and “Why are you inventing us for a lede-in for this entry?”

Let me answer the first question first, the third question second and the second question last.

I spend my time writing a lame blog because I like writing, and I’ll thank you not to refer to Raronauer’ed as lame.

I invented people who wrote in with questions because nobody did write in to ask what Beta meant, but it’s nice to pretend that someone would be curious.

What exactly is a Beta? The term originated in the bathroom of IFC Cinemas, where Jason, Radhika and I had gone to relieve ourselves and to see Me and You and Everyone We Know. Radhika and I went to the women’s room together, but Jason had to go to the men’s bathroom alone. I realized that Radhika and I were also somehow excluded from the group: she was the only non-Jew and I was the only one who didn’t graduate New Rochelle High School in ’02. Although we shared our own small clique, there was no commonality to our group. We were all Betas, and from that came the sophomoric idea to name our group the Betas.

Being a Beta is about more than not having two X-chromosomes, not being among the chosen people and not being born in 1984. It just happens that Jason, Radhika and I all lack those things respectively. But what we share is a sense of Beta-ness.

Beta isn’t necessarily the opposite of Alpha. A true Beta isn’t a follower or leader: a Beta is an outsider-insider. In our clique, for example, while each of us belongs, we are all somehow excluded. Being a Beta, at least to me, means fitting in but not really. This definition might feel like a Prozac commercial: Who hasn’t been down lately or felt isolated from the group? I’m sorry I can’t give a better definition. But I am, after all, only a Beta.

My Take on Tim’s Take

There was high drama on the runway last night. Keith, the favorite of the third season of Project Runway, was unceremoniously kicked off for hoarding pattern books, an official “no-no.”

His discharge came in the middle of a two-day team challenge. Before the fashion book faux pas, Keith was chosen as a team leader. With his departure, Alison and Jeffrey, his partners, had to execute his design without him.

Tim Gunn’s advice to Alison and Jeffrey: “You’re going to have carry on, and frankly make it work.”

First of all, there’s nothing particularly forthright or candid about making it work.

Second of all, Tim’s expressions, while quirky and endearing in the first and second seasons, have become commercial, literally. After reality TV stardom, Tim’s vocabulary has been reduced two catchphrases. And that doesn’t work for me.

For more language related writing, check out Seth Stevenson defense of sucks on Slate.

The Foodie Inside of Me

A lover of culture, consumption and New York City, the metropolitan dining scene would seem like an obvious interest of mine. I’ve even had mild exposure to the industry: Last summer, I worked as a copy editor and fact checker for at [REDACTED]. Along with ensuring comma agreement, I read hundreds of restaurant reviews.

This job would make anyone interested in checking out new restaurants. During that summer, Jason, Radhika and I had so-called Beta Dinners, where every Thursday the three of us would have a decadent meal at a restaurant whose hours I had confirmed earlier in the week. But ultimately, the job made a foodie out of Jason, and made me a zealous anti-foodite.

My co-worker at [REDACTED] was a 31 year-old aspiring micro-manager named Kim*. She had been doing temp fact checking for the site at $15 per hour for the past six months. As a co-worker and aspiring boss, she was awful. She talked incessantly, and once made me console her about buying a gift for her brother-in-law off of his Amazon wish list only hours before his birthday. Once when I lamely blamed my trouble with HTML coding on my weakness with computers, she responded, “You’re bad with computers? You certainly seem good with emailing.” Thanks, I am good at emailing. But HTML isn’t the same as Gmail. And besides, at a job that required about two hours of actual work a day, what else was I supposed to do with my time? Learn HTML?

This woman had few interests outside of food. From her, I came to understood foodies as people who aspired to have cultural interests, but were lazy, so pretended that eating a good meal was equivalent to reading a great book. But gluttony ain’t culture!

The class element of foodie-ism also bothered me. The whole “culture” was restricted to those who could afford it. In flaunting their knowledge of the restaurant scene, foodies are also flaunting their wealth. By saying that Per Se is overrated, in effect they are saying that they can afford to be disappointed with a $300 meal.

However, I must relent. Recently, I had dinner with old friends at a mediocre Italian restaurant of their choosing. I’ve been known to eat oatmeal for lunch and canned soup for dinner, but to eat overcooked pasta out in New York? I could have enjoyed that meal in Westchester. I still don’t believe dining is a culture equivalent to music, art or literature, but with so many restaurant options in New York, eating a bad meal in this city should be criminal.

Recently New York Magazine published its

Unironic Fun

Whenever I know about something, I assume everyone does. So everyone has been enjoying The Burg, web only TV show chronicling the lives of hipsters in Williamsburg, right?

Well, if you haven’t been, you should, because it’s really good. Ostensibly, the show mocks hipsters, but the characters on the show aren’t the headband-wearing, disenchanted chain-smokers so often found on the L. Instead, they’re twenty-somethings with limited social and professional responsibilities trying to figure out what to do with themselves. Their aesthetic sensibilities and attempts to understand coolness remind me a lot of my friends and me.

The most recent episode, “

Lindsay Lohan: Not Just a Vehicle for Regurgitation

The latest Linsday Lohan vehicle, Just My Luck, features L-Lo as a smart, sassy New Yorker. Her character has great luck, and through some sort of supernatural kiss, she receives the bad luck of the movie’s heartthrob.

The movie asks some important questions like does Karma transfer through salvia and will Lindsay Lohan ever star in a winning romantic comedy? If A.O. Scott has anything to say on the matter, the answers are no and no.

Regardless, luck occupies a strange place in my psyche. I don’t really believe in fate or mystics, but I do believe in luck. Yesterday I took the G train twice, and I never had to wait for more than a couple minutes. What luck!

Despite my recent success with NYC’s least reliable train, I generally don’t consider myself a lucky person. And I wonder why: I have a job with health care, a nice apartment and good friends. Once I found $20 on the street. Eighteen months after that find, I lost $20 in the changing room at Century 21, but with inflation, I’m doing all right.

My feelings about my luck are much like my feelings about compliments and criticism. I’ll believe any insult about me (I do say like a lot), but I can’t internalize compliments the same way. Whatever good luck I have, I disregard, but I take bad luck personally. I’ve started wearing a bicycle helmet because I don’t believe that with my bike riding skills I have the luck to avoid an accident.

On some level, I know luck doesn’t really exist. I didn’t catch the G yesterday because of something I did in a previous life; I just got there at the right time. But perhaps it’s easier to believe in luck to explain things like a job promotion or being fined for a subway infraction. Either way, if Lindsay Lohan’s life and oeuvre have taught us anything, it’s that luck is not an absolute thing.

Livingstrong

I read US Weekly. It’s a pleasure, like beer drinking or fake tanning. There’s no shame in knowing what Paris Hilton is up to.

I don’t subscribe to US Weekly; I read it in the children’s section of Astor Place Barnes

The New Geriatric-er

You may have noticed that after all these years, Eustace Tilley never got contacts, or even ditched the monocle for a full set of frames. And forget about laser eye surgery.

Like their mascot, the New Yorker isn’t one for technology. Their Web site looks like it was designed in 1999, and only a few of their articles are online. Their “Web only” features, like Daniel Raeburn’s account of the successful birth of his daughter after a devastating stillborn birth, are boring.

Occasionally, the magazine does look at this crazy thing called the Internet. But the intelligence and wit that I usually enjoy in New Yorker articles were absent in recent pieces on the Facebook and College Humor. The problem is that the New Yorker isn’t a news magazine. It’s a literary magazine that occasionally reports news. Aside from Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker doesn’t break news, it writes up old news with style. When John Cassidy decided to report on something as over-reported as the Facebook, he needed to go beyond the privacy issues and explore the way people deal with this new medium of self-representation and voyeurism. Instead, he just made the founder of Facebook seem like a prick.

Undeterred by the critics at Raronauer’ed, this week Stacy Schiff spends a few thousands words on the Internet sensation Wikipedia. Fortunately, the piece was better than Rebecca Mead’s College Humor disaster. The most interesting parts were about the community of Wikipedia writers and editors, but if you’ve read one Week In Review article about the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, you can skip the New Yorker’s version.

Stace spends most of her word allotment on the accuracy problems that plague Wikipedia. But she never interviews the typical Wikipedia user: The office rat. And since she never talks to us, she never mentions that that most Wikipedia users think of the site as a fun diversion, not a serious source of information. She doesn’t examine how people use the site, which in my case involves the reading plot summaries of books I’m in the middle of to spoil it for myself. For me, Wikipedia is an entertaining way to see how a semi-trusted source would describe This American Life or Dr. Brown’s soda. Where once encyclopedia reading was laborious, Wikipedia has made it a good distraction at work. For many, the convenience is worth the inaccuracy.

Part of the problem is that New Yorker staff writers don’t use the Internet the way as people from my generation do. John Cassidy could never understand the pleasure of looking at pictures of the girlfriend of that guy from your American Lit class. Unfortunately, the people who do probably can’t write very convincingly about it.

The End is Near

Sorry, Shamu. You’re on the endangered species list.

In a few days, you’ll become paid-content. Worse than that, your position on the MEL has fallen to seven. With the web redesign, if you’re the 11th most emailed article, you might as well not be emailed at all. No one checks the full list. (Side note: MEL articles 11 through 25 are probably the purist reflection of the public’s interest. One though ten are given prime real estate throughout the Times site, which brings more readers, hence more emailers. Since less people see 11 through 25, the second half of the list is based more on merit than the first half. If I ever wrote about two-thirds socks, I’d rather be #11 than #10.)

Anyway, I’m glad that Amy Sutherland will soon be off of the list and back to complaining about her braces.