Category Archives: readin’ and writin’

Adventure Time with Kat and Kam: The New York Public Library’s Main Branch

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Posted by katie ett on May 9, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under adventure time, just pictures, living in new york is neat, readin' and writin'
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Adventure Time

The Main Library of the New York Public Library system is located approximately 3.5 steps from Kamran’s front door. A door that he has lived behind for approximately six years. And yet up until a couple of weeks ago, he’d never been there. Truth be told, I’d only been there once to pick something up, was confounded by the long empty marble hallways, ended up in the children’s section in the basement somewhere, ran away, and decided to go back to being illiterate.

But with Kamran in tow, I tried again, because I needed to renew my library card in order to be allowed to download ebooks from the library website so that I can not only continue being cheap and not buying books but also so I can continue being lazy and doing everything from my computer.

In short, Kamran was astounded at how beautiful and interesting the place was, and I was astounded that I don’t own a piece of artwork with a pooping donkey on it.

NYC Main Library
one of the long, empty, echoing, marble hallways

NYC Main Library
the map room, haunted by the reflection from my camera’s UV filter

NYC Main Library

NYC Main Library
eerily glowing LEGO lion

NYC Main Library
Kamran, the bronzed glamour boy

NYC Main Library

NYC Main Library

NYC Main Library
NERDS!

NYC Main Library
reminds me of something out of “Boardwalk Empire”

NYC Main Library
pooping donkey artwork!

NYC Main Library
Kamran, thinking he was really cheesing it up for the camera but basically looking like normal person

NYC Main Library
Kamran’s usual facial expression

Summers in NYC are so stifling (I know it’s bad wherever you are, but we don’t have air-conditioned cars, so can it) that we sometimes find ourselves just wanting to stay indoors for five solid months. Now that we know we love the library, we’re going to spend all of August with our cheeks pressed to the cold marble floor, copies of Don Juan and Dandelion Wine splayed out beside us.

Que Sera, Sera?

Posted by katie ett on April 4, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under readin' and writin'
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You know how there are those blogs you keep reading and commenting on because, you know, they read and comment on yours? Like, it’s a relationship blog and you can’t imagine how they get anyone to sleep with them, or it’s a fashion blog and all of their clothes are out of the bad part of the 80s, or it’s a humor blog and all of their jokes are about PMS. And you’re like, “OMG, how can you not realize that your blog is so much worse than everyone else’s? How can you read other blogs and not think, ‘I’m doing it wrong’?”

What if you (meaning I) are that blog for other people?

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Dumb

Posted by katie ett on March 14, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, readin' and writin', there's a difference between films and movies, why i'm better than everyone else
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Isn’t it funny when you’re so close to something that other people’s lack of knowledge about it seems preposterous?

Like when your co-worker comes up to your desk in the year 2010 and asks, “Have you heard of this band Radiohead?”

Or when you overhear a guy dining at the finest restaurant in the city ask the waiter if the oysters can be left off of their signature dish.

Or when you read a blog post in which a woman goes to see the movie version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, one of your favourite books of all time, and writes:

I was tearing like a silly woman at some point whereas my hubby was holding up his chin and trying hard to keep himself awake with the pop corn. The story about a boy who lost his father in 911 is sentimental but rather slow moving. I think it’s probably not a movie for men who usually enjoy comedies and action.

Have you ever seen someone so entirely miss the point?

Yes, I have a superiority complex.

Pretty Good Writin’

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 16, 2011 – 12:00 pm
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“I grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, where I hated every­body and everything. I couldn’t wait to leave. But Oak Park always struck me as my own ‘princedom by the sea.’ The reason: its architecture. I’d pass as many as twenty Frank Lloyd Wright homes on my way to school—scores of Prairie School buildings, breathtaking moments of America’s architectural coming-of-age. I once knew someone who lived in one of those homes. A certain Linda. Imagining this house now, I turn into Humbert Humbert catching glimpses of Lolita’s ‘lovely indrawn abdomen.’ I see the house’s natural woods, stone surfaces, and graceful symmetries. I’m back there, on that long, beautiful built-in ledge in her dimly lit, low-ceilinged, hazel-painted living room, sitting on golden-yellow Japanese cushions, with cinnamon-color pillows, finally being allowed to kiss wispy Linda, thinking, This is the best place that I have ever been.”

- Jerry Saltz, art critic, in New York magazine

Extremely Loud & Incredibly, Incredibly Close

Posted by plumpdumpling on May 18, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, narcissism, readin' and writin', stuff i like, there's a difference between films and movies
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I got to Kamran’s apartment after work yesterday to find these signs taped in front of his building:

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Filming

I know it really steps on a lot of people’s toes to say things like this, but I really feel like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close means more to me than it does to anyone else.

Okay, maybe it means more to one other person. And maybe it means just as much to you. But it means a lot–a lot–to me.

I read it just after I started working at Barnes & Noble in December of 2005. I had lived here for just over five months and was, as I’ve previously embarrassingly admitted–crying all over the damned city. And of course the book is about walking all over the damned city. I missed my dead mom, and Oscar was trying to find a piece of his dead dad. I knew I was being manipulated by cutesy phrases like heavy boots, but I felt like my own boots were dragging me into the concrete, so I didn’t care.

My then-boyfriend kept asking me why I was reading this book that would make me cry two minutes after I sat down with it, but it was too beautiful to put aside. Ability to produce continual, pathetic tears or not, a well-written book still eases my mind. I haven’t been able to touch it since, and my copy sits on my bookshelf still tabbed with sticky notes on every other page to mark my favourite spots. And I’ll never forget the way the pages leading up to the end just fly by, building up to the climax so much that I felt like I could actually hear a trumpet fanfare in my head. Apparently this is something that happens to me with books I really, really love, because I remember it with my very favourite book, Dandelion Wine, and one of my other Top Fives, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

So it seems really meaningful somehow that the movie version of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is taping right outside of Kamran’s apartment tomorrow. I feel like I should take off work to watch. I feel like I should have desperately tried to become an extra. I feel like I should rush the set and try to talk about the book with Tom Hanks.

But I doubt it means as much to him as it does to me.

In your FACE, Hanks.