In Manhattan (1979), for about one minute, the characters played by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sit in front of the Queensboro bridge at dawn after an all night date — both strenuous and romantic it seems, as I’ve never been, though I can imagine the slow light creeping onto someone’s lovely face as bakers and newspaper boys wake up, and cats return to porches with heads. Keaton concludes the scene by saying she has lunch with a friend. In a lesser first attempt, in front of the Brooklyn bridge in Annie Hall (1977), Woody tells Diane in response to if he loves her, “Love is too weak a word. I lurv you, I loave you, I luff you,” the middle sentiment which I always hear as “loathe” because I’m a Nietzsche kind of bro; I appreciate more “The most beautiful words in the English language are not I love you, but It’s benign,” which he says in Deconstructing Harry regarding a tumor. Much of Manhattan is drawn in silhouette, black shapes eclipsing grey backdrops as moons before a muted sun. Artists are always going to a city for the low and high rent and culture, respectively, until that get’s flipped, and they move. Never say “gentrification” at a dinner party, it’s dumb. Paris may in the past, but their bakers’ butter still wafts in the air. In Les Misérables (1862), Jean once passes an “l’invalide du pont” (the invalid of the bridge, here Pont d’Austerlitz), a disabled war veteran given a job collecting toll. Georges Seurat’s, L’invalide (Conté crayon on paper, c. 1881) does not have such a task, but merely gazes across the waters. Most known for his laborious pointillist paintings, I’ve always preferred his studies for them, the brief encounter with form from a meandering hand, as if only loosely attached to the eye. It’s so sad how both the artist and his subject’s aloneless are contingencies for their very collision. I will take anyone who jumps off a bridge seriously. I bet Diane has a salad with a French word in it. I bet Woody had some pills, imagining them as almonds for her salad. If only time could yellow a .jpeg the way it does a drawing. This post should be $2.50, but I’ll let you pass.

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11. Lucy Corin goes:

So when people call books bad for being masturbatory what they are saying I think is that they hate the culture/community/ personality type they associate with where that creative product comes from.  They don’t want to hang out with those people, or those people make them feel bad about themselves or the world in a ‘what has become of us’ sort of way.  Because if you LIKE someone, you probably LIKE watching them masturbate, after all.

2. Turgenev Hunter’s Sketches online. Oh hell yes. Grab me some black bread and vodka and I’m holing up like an elevator.

2. Sci fi Aimee Bender story online, you Star Cheeks.

3. And Stanley Fish goes,

The essence of all this is contained in an aphorism I formulated in 1964 as I watched my colleagues at Berkeley turn from abasing themselves before deans and boards of trustees to abasing themselves before students. Here is the aphorism: Academics like to eat shit, and in a pinch they don’t care whose shit they eat. Of course, had I known enough at the time, I could have saved myself the trouble and simply quoted Freud. For the masochist, Freud explains, “it is the suffering itself that matters; whether the sentence is cast by a loved one or by an indifferent person is of no importance … but the true masochist always holds out his cheek whenever he sees a chance of receiving a blow.” Whatever else they are, academics are resourceful, and when they set their minds to it, there are no limits to the varieties of pain they can inflict on one another and on themselves.

14. Word is AWP registration is sold out. 9300 registrants! First thought: Damn, that’s a lot of colorful skinny eyeglasses. Latte, anyone? OMG aging writer with a ponytail. (Let it go, Sean! Only if you let go your scarf matching your Converse sneakers.) Next thought: Time to put Book Fair pass on eBay.

–from Gabrielle de Vietri

That The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922) was posthumously made into a film (2008) may be ironic — to brave a word perhaps deplete of any meaning by now — given the author’s self-perceived degradation of writing for Hollywood as he grew older and financially more dependent in his maintenance of a vapid lifestyle. His last lover was a gossip columnist, proof that blogging has always existed. They say a writer’s best work is in his late twenties, before the soft middle-age limpy interval, but that only a great writer will make his best work near his death, alluding so some moral component and/or mortal imperative of great writing. It is sad to think of a drunk Fitzgerald, a loopy sentimental Hemingway, or a blind ass jibbering Joyce; we look towards Tolstoy, Shakespeare, as examples of work whose maturity lies in correlation with their age. We may see Benjamin Button as an inadvertent commentary on the mediocre artist, the fated infant. In 1935, at the age of 68, Pierre Bonnard painted “Self Portrait in a Shaving Mirror,” two eye socket holes hidden in the shadow of his own face, perhaps seared by the southern France sun of younger days before locking himself in the bathroom — something he may have learned from his wife Marthe, an obsessive compulsive bather (hence, the bathing series), on whom he cheated with one Renée Monchaty, of sunnier disposition. In his paintings of the former, the latter is often hidden at the edge of the canvas, camouflaged in the quivering aggregate of floral brush marks which consumed him. Bonnard didn’t name it “Self Portrait in a Shaving Mirror” — an art historian came along later to distinguish it from the all the other ones, to make discourse when discourse was not intended easier. But it’s hard to comment when you’re dead, and other perilous times as well.

2. Let’s gossip. Sinead lasted 16 days and that’s pretty good because if your man is on an iPad during the ceremonies you are fucked. (Then again he stalked her online to set up the matrimonies, so…) He’s a drug counselor (dork alert) and they of course went and got some crack and weed for the wedding night shenanigans. Sinead had to leave, OK? She said she was “living in a coffin.” (Actually, marriage is not a coffin, per say, but rather another walled habitat, an institution.) A few years ago a company in Massachusetts would sell you a “living coffin.” Here’s the deal: You buy your coffin but keep it in the house, like in the living room (groan at the pun, sorry). They even had shelves for books and a wine rack. The lid of the coffin was hinged to the back so you could push it up against the wall. Once you die, the lid could be attached with maple pins before burial. You sit there in your room staring at your own coffin daily and you are sure to finally recognize the macabre miracle of your daily existence as one of the living beings today on this planet. I think.

1. You have two days to enter the Frank Hinton/ xTx chapbook contest. I Vouch for it.

11. “Barefoot on the Pulpit” is a mighty fine poem for you today.

4. Here is a little pick-me-up. Dickens finds his baby daughter dead and must now write his wife about the situation (she is away). He does so, in this letter, but he fudges the truth a bit, in a very caring (maybe?) way, to prepare his wife for a situation, a concept naturally impossible, this preparation. But he tries.

7. In the UK, if you harass a badger and are caught in the act, your name will be added to the United Kingdom National DNA Database. I shit you not. For life, man! So don’t do that. Don’t harass badgers.