Montana Wojczuk

The New York Public Library is my Mecca and Medina, it’s the most gorgeous temple to literature I’ve ever seen (unless you count Nature, though would literature be a temple then to nature…hmm).  So to be reading there is a huge, huge thrill.  The reading series is called “Periodically Speaking” and it’s hosted by CLMP (Council for Literary Magazines and Presses) who asks editors from literary magazines to introduce emerging writers from their pages.  I’ll be reading from a piece upcoming in Tin House (Fall Issue, on the shelves Oct 1st). Come!

I recently profiled emerging writer Carolina De Robertis for Paste Magazine’s new issue (October, ‘09). Carolina was an amazing interview, talking about wide-ranging topics from the bastardization of the term “magic realism” to the intersections between life and storytelling.  I can’t recommend her debut novel Invisible Mountain highly enough. She recently graced NY with her presence, reading from the novel at the Brooklyn Book Festival.

New article about filmmaker Jem Cohen on my In Sight column at the BOMBlog.

Keep an eye on The Faster Times for nonfiction books coverage.  Mostly I’ll be covering what strikes my fancy, but would like to focus on stories that go underreported.  Yesterday’s post featured recommendations on books about Iran by Alternative Radio founder David Barsamian.

The Faster Times is a brand spankin’ new news/culture site, whose mission is as follows:

The crisis of American journalism is, instead, a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive. So, the question is not whether there is a way to keep up with the constant appetite for news, but whether there is a way to keep up without foregoing great writing and reporting.

There will be many different answers to the questions facing the journalism industry in the coming years. Our answer is The Faster Times, a new type of newspaper for a new type of world.

The Faster Times is a collective of great journalists who have come together to try something new. As we launch this July, we will have more than a hundred correspondents in over 20 countries. We have someone on the ground in Kenya and someone else reporting from Lebanon. Our arts section will cover not just film and books, but also theater and dance and photography. We will launch with seven writers on books alone. These writers are not “citizen journalists” but among the most accomplished and recognized names in their respective fields.

New: my podcast interview with “Liveability” author Jon Raymond here.

This is the most hilarious and gorgeous site.  Every piece of clothing is a story, every story is part gothic humor (a la lemony snicket), part twisted fairy tale.  (I especially love the one about the turquoise necklace.)

In some recent news, I’ll be writing a regular “column” on film at Bomb Magazine’s beautiful new blog. The best part is that now I have an excuse to indulge my film obsession.  The column will be called “In-sight” (though I make no promises on it being necessarily insightful).

Paul Newman has died at age 83

I remember the first time I saw “Cool Hand Luke.”  It was late at night on a weekend, my parents had gone to bed and I stayed up to see what old movies I could find on AMC.  I was probably around 10 or 11, just entering that age when boy’s faces started to loom large in my head at night.  As I switched the station from Star Trek, which I always watched with my dad at 11pm, to the old movie channel, I was struck by the most beautiful face I’d ever seen.  Paul Newman’s wry smile, his naughty, drunkard’s dance around a parking meter, his long lanky body, shocked me right out of adolescence.

As the movie went on I must have catalogued every Cool Hand quality, because I still use them as the measure of a man.  Careless but not cruel, wicked but helplessly so, sensitive but stubborn (remember the fight where he keeps getting hit and keeps getting up again, until even the bloodthirsty onlookers are begging him to just lie down…?). There was something infinitely sexy about Luke’s passivity, he took things like a Buddhist monk (a very HOT Buddhist monk) bending but never breaking.  It was the kind of supreme confidence that a shy, bullied girl would find enormously attractive.

In life, I saw no reason to separate Cool Hand Luke from Newman himself.  He was reckless, taking up race-car driving at 60, but not arrogantly so.  He was a philanthropist, founding non-profit company Newman’s Own, but he didn’t proselytise for a cause.  It’s strange to be sad about the death of someone you’ve never met, whose last movie I saw was The Color of Money, but knowing I’ll never accidentally run into Paul Newman on the street (or at an Indy 500 rally) makes me want to stay up late.

Its hard to be funny, it really is, but oh what a boon Sarah Palin is to the satirists….First Tina Fey’s dead-on impression of her on SNL which seemed so real I’ll bet afterward Fey had to take a long, hot shower with scrubbing bubbles. Now George Saunders takes up the tongs for a pig-roast. Check out his Shouts and Murmurs piece My Gal in this month’s New Yorker.