DOORR

Espresso, oysters, pistachios, hunger.  I think I’ve tried all of these snacks before writing and have found that pistachios are definitely my favorite to munch on.  Hunger and espresso are a close second for that Parisian-author-chic feel.  Oysters are too celebratory for me. 

Walt Whitman began the day with oysters and meat, while Gustave Flaubert started off with what passed for a light breakfast in his day: eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. The novelist Vendela Vida told me she swears by pistachios, and Mark Kurlansky, the author of “Salt” and “Cod,” likes to write under the influence of espresso, “as black as possible.” For some writers, less is more. Lord Byron, a pioneer in fad diets as well as poetry, sipped vinegar to keep his weight down. Julia Scheeres, the author of the memoir “Jesus Land,” aims for more temporary deprivation. “When in the thick of writing I minimize food intake as much as possible,” she told me. “I find I work better when I’m a little starved.”

Source: NYTimes

The post comes a year or so late but this book would make a great gift for someone moving to or leaving New York City.  A word about the photos:

“Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York” [is] a photographic survey by James and Karla Murray documenting disappearing mom-and-pop stores …

The project, ten years in the making, captures the unique and idiosyncratic storefronts that define the streetscapes of New York City. Bars, bakeries, restaurants, butchers, discount shops, etc., are all being slowly pushed out to make way for chains. Indeed, it’s a crisis of identity: since the start the project, over one third of the stores have closed. See more on James and Karla Murray’s Flickr Store Front photo set.

In case I needed any more of a reason to read Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, here is a fantastic review of her novel in the third issue of Matchbook Magazine (the best magazine ever).  She is much more accomplished than I am for a mid-twenty something.

Maybe it’s that finals are around the corner, or maybe it’s that I am just anxious for summer to arrive, but I cannot stop thinking about the beach reads lined up in my Amazon shopping cart.  At the top of my list is Emily Giffin’s Heart of the Matter because I love a good 48-hour-read.  I plan on reading these books not on my ipad (if only I were so lucky) but instead with a cold iced americano and a little Lissie in the background.  Cheers to summer!

Image 1: Bits of Beauty

1. Matchbook, 2. Canelle et Vanille, 3. Bright Bazaar via From The Right Bank

Can I just stay in bed with my oatmeal, milk, and brown sugar + American Wife?

Study here…

or here…

I would choose the second!  Sources: LaDolceVita and Apartment Therapy

I know I post pictures and write about Italy on this blog fairly often but the slideshow of screenshots from the movie Eat, Pray, Love posted on Elle Decor are just too good not to highlight.  As someone who’s read the book and seen the movie (yes, I’m a little ashamed to admit that) both have their highs and lows.  The book struck me as a little repetitive and immature but relatable and interesting (particularly the tidbits on meditation and the history of yoga), and the movie was slightly too long and a little slow-paced but very beautiful and well done.  Bill Groom, the production designer hits the nail on the head when he says:

Eat, Pray, Love was shot on location in four countries, with palettes inspired by earth, air, fire, and water. “We scouted Bali first,” says production designer Bill Groom. “It became clear that you’d never get away from the sense of water.” After that, the other settings came vividly to life: a bohemian New York filled with an earthy sense of style; an Italy of open windows and curtains billowing in the breeze; and an India rich in smoldering reds and orange.

The movie truly allowed the countries to play as big of a role as the characters in the film and that made it all so much more enjoyable.  Of course Bali was my favorite and now I cannot wait to take my own mandatory twenty-something backpacking trip through Southeast Asia.

A few days ago, when I was looking through my friend Katherine’s Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces I came upon a page featuring a small kitchen with a series of chalkboards above the sink.  Needless to say, I fell in love with the look and now want my own chalkboards.  I found a website that sells peel-able chalkboards for $10 – huzzuh!  If you’re more hands on than I am, and you’re looking to make your own hanging chalkboard, see this blogger’s amazing DIY chalkboard project.

Sources: JuliaKayWeber, Shelter,

Here are three new books that I’ve added to my reading list:

Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker (which I loved and recommend) and author of The Blind Side (really?) just came out with a book on what went wrong in the credit markets.

Amazingly, despite the fact that the book is so one-sided, it also functions as a peerless guide to exactly what went so very wrong in the credit markets generally, and the mortgage markets in particular, over the course of the last decade. It’s not easy to explain synthetic subprime-backed collateralized debt obligations, but Lewis does an excellent job on both the micro level — what these thing are, and how they worked — and the macro level — how the market in such exotica helped to destabilize the entire financial system.

Read the rest of the review for The Big Short at Crooks and Liars

Paloma at La Dolce Vita writes, “[l]ast month, I read The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I absolutely loved. ..I thought it was a touching story about courage and compassion. It shows the human spirit in so many ways and tells of the tumultuous South in the 1960s through various points of view. It is both endearing and at times, infuriating, but it is an amazing novel that  I would highly, highly recommend.”

Little Billy’s Letters: An Incorrigible Inner Child’s Correspondence with the Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Bewildered by Bill Geerhart caught my eye this morning as I scrolled through Boing Boing.  The letters were penned by a grown-up Billy in 1993 under the guise of a young, curious boy. I read a few leaked letters from little Billy to murderer Susan Atkins, the Archbishop of the Catholic Church of California, and to one of O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” lawyers.   Take a sneak peak here to read how funny and moving they are for yourself.

“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.” – Dyer

Now that I consider myself a (very amateur) blogger, I am constantly worrying about how my writing looks to my readers (you know who you 6 people are) and how I will view my writing when I come back to it in a few months.  So naturally I was drawn to the NYMag post which showcased The Best Writing Advice of the Best Writing Advice.   I’m not writing fiction but I think the advice is still applicable to dilettantes like me.  Without further ado, here are some of my favorites from the Guardian’s piece:

1. Diana Athill: Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no ­inessential words can every essential word be made to count.
2. Elmore Leonard: Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.
3. Margaret Atwood: Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
4. Roddy Doyle: Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5. Helen Dunmore: Learn poems by heart.
6. Geoff Dyer: Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.
7. Will Self: Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

And so on. I highly encourage reading them all.  What else do you have to do on a snowy day?