Being a poet might mean you die young. In fact, writing in general is not good for your lifespan, James Kaufman writes in his study of 1,987 authors from different cultures. Published in 2003, it's titled, "The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young." It isn't the first study to make such claims! The Education Guardian reports, "a 1975 study found that poets tended to die younger than fiction writers."
So this Bear Stearns thing is awkward. I know there's a bailout from the Feds and J.P. Morgan bought up all of Bear Stearns at $2 a share, which seems bad. But the way I really know it's bad is that the New York Times put it above the fold on A1 with an all-caps headline. But how bad is this crisis, in relative headline terms? I went to the archives to find out.
The Lower East Side, a Manhattan quarter now overrun by bars for hipsters and drunken yuppies from Murray Hill, was once an authentic working-class neighborhood. And it had even more lager dens and other drinking establishments than it does now, as demonstrated by this 1882 map of New York's "liquordom". So shut up already about the ruin of the Lower East Side. [via Time Out]
"As I have mentioned, the Bear and I were introduced through Sam, perhaps as a means to get me off his (Sam's) back, but I suspect more as a goodwill gesture toward Bear, whom even Sam kissed up to.
Why does Diane Keaton have to kill our trend story? Adderall was looking good as the pill of choice of a new creative generation. And then the 62-year-old actress, who made her name opposite Woody Allen in moves such as Manhattan, spoils it all. On the Letterman show, on CBS, on Friday, she was reminiscing about the debut of her acting career, as part of the original cast of the musical, Hair, in 1968. Keaton, who was supposed to be promoting her new movie, Mad Money, blurted out that forty years ago she and her fellow actors received injections of a methamphetamine drug, much like Adderall. And we so hoped there was something new in the creative pharmacopeia. (In another of Allen's movies in which Keaton starred, Sleeper, at least the future had some medical advances, such as the orgasmatron.) After the jump, the clip from the Letterman show.
The best nugget from Norman Mailer's personal correspondence: Tina Brown, the English editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, asked him to provide a reference for her green card bid. (It couldn't have hurt to have an endorsement from America's best writer, or someone who considered himself that.) For someone with such a reputation for pugilism, Mailer's letters are masterpieces of flattery. The writer, who died last year, produced the requisitely over-the-top letter to include in Tina Brown's immigration application, and appended an even more cloying cover note: "Don't believe a word of this. You are too attractive ever to let your head swell."
Talk about noticing things tardily—but look how gorgeous the Esquire page design and illustration was in 1960! Holy mackerel. I would buy the holy hell out of that magazine. (Except the Gawker 1960 version would probably be all like, "Oh my God, who is this tired James Baldwin, selling out Harlem to the gentrifiers? And what is with all this white space? OMG, 'white space,' get it?" Sigh.) [Esquire.com]
