Will Heinrich | The New York Observer

Gentrify or Perish

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:59:50 -0400

A Meaningful Life
By L. J. Davis
NYRB Classics, 214 pages, $14.95

A funny thing happens when you grow up in New York. For 18 or 20 years, everyone you know is growing up here, too. Then one day you walk into a party and someone tells you, “I never met anyone from New York before!” And you discover that, without actually going anywhere, you’re suddenly in someone else’s...

Saints Alive

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:50:47 -0500

The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six
By Jonathon Keats
Random House, 221 pages, $13

In 2003, the conceptual artist Jonathon Keats sold his brain. Or rather, he sold options to buy his neurons in lots of one million immediately after his death. That is, to buy not the physical bits of brain, but the information they represent. (He had previously copyrighted the totality of his...

Notable Moments in Pro- and Anti-American History

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:14:31 -0400

“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

—Sarah Palin, Oct. 16, 2008

1620: A group of English...

Scandinavian Noir

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:34:02 -0400

The Girl With the Dragon TattooBy Stieg LarssonAlfred A. Knopf, 480 pages, $24.95

My review copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, is covered with statistics about its success in Europe—it sold nearly one copy for every three Swedes; the books in the trilogy beat Harry Potter on the French charts—and the plans, likewise, for its success over here—a first printing of 150,000 copies; “outreach” to 25...

The Me.com Decade

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:26:56 -0400

On June 9, subscribers to mac.com—a service that for a $99 annual fee provides online photo storage, personal calendars and an e-mail address announcing one’s allegiance to the modish computer brand of the decade—received a missive from an entity called “The .Mac Team.”

“Today, Apple announced a new Internet service called MobileMe,” this team wrote brightly, going on to promise “a host of new features,” including the ability to...

Geography Lesson

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:35:08 -0400

Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States
By George Stewart
NYRB Classics, 544 pages, $19.95

A young man, let’s say, finds himself in the attic of his grandmother’s house in Ancram, N.Y., on a rainy afternoon in the late autumn, looking for a book to read. In a pile of dusty volumes under one window, between bound volumes of a previous generation’s women’s magazines and moldering French cookbooks,...

Zen Small Talk

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:52:53 -0400

When someone asks, “How’s it going?” answer, “As the necessary consequence of previous actions!” While they attain satori, make your escape.

If someone asks, “What’s new?” spread apart your hands and answer, “Everything!” with a creepy grin. If the creepy grin doesn’t work, try adding, “And also, nothing!” and tapping them on the nose.

If someone asks, “How’s it going?” answer, “How isn’t it...

Funny in Theory, Not in Practice

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:48:44 -0400

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes
By Jim Holt
W. W. Norton, 160 pages, $15.95

The eponymous shaggy-dog story is about a boy who enters his dog into a local "shaggy-dog contest." When the dog wins, the boy enters him into a larger regional contest, and then, when the dog wins that one, too, into still another, until finally, after a tortuously narrated series of trials and triumphs,...

New Yorker Writer Flexed His Mussels

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:53:20 -0400

THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR
By Joseph Mitchell
Pantheon, 293 pages, $23

Since almost as far back as the last World War, magazine writers in New York have been trying to sound like Joseph Mitchell, who would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of his centennial, Pantheon is releasing a new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor, a collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker pieces from the 1940s and ’50s...

Gorgeous Grotesques

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:42:28 -0400

FAREWELL NAVIGATOR
By Leni Zumas
Open City Books, 168 pages, $14

Open City Released a new book of stories last month. It’s called Farewell Navigator. It’s written by Leni Zumas. They’re not really stories. They’re also not gargoyles, but they’re more like gargoyles. They’re delicate tone poems that, however, center most often on the cruel, the disgusting or the sad.

This reviewer wonders whether that’s inevitable, whether stories (which are not stories) that are driven by...

Crossed in Translation: Besieged Bill Murray Pounds Pavement, Eats Pie with Poets

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:07:57 -0400

Poets House of Soho, founded by Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray in 1985, has long had a devoted patron in the actor Bill Murray, who played a cameo role in the Transom’s childhood: En route to nursery school one day, we met him shooting Ghostbusters at a firehouse on North Moore Street; according to the Transom’s mother, he offered to buy our Smurf lunchbox. (We declined.)

Despite or perhaps in...

Is My Ames True? Writers Flit, Flirt Through Lit-Mag Benefit

Tue, 27 May 2008 18:46:34 -0400

“I’m interrogating a minor, and then I’ll be with you,” writer and amateur pugilist Jonathan Ames told the Transom at a benefit for the literary magazine Open City on Thursday, May 22. Young, pretty lady-intellectuals were wafting through several connecting rooms in N.Y.U.’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in the Village, under the gaze of literary éminences grises captured in photographs on the walls. Mr. Ames, who’s known a few trannies in his time...

Unbearable Lives

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:17:26 -0400

THE POST-OFFICE GIRL
By Stefan Zweig
NYRB Classics, 257 pages, $14

Christine Hoflehner, beautiful and carefree before the First World War, loses her brother, is impoverished by the collapse of her father’s business and is condemned, finally, to endless monotony as a postal clerk in a forgotten little town, earning only enough to keep herself and her ailing, widowed mother. “One village post office in Austria is much like...

Slurp It Up, Folks! The Breathtaking Broth of Bo Ky

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:55:27 -0400

America’s oldest rescue mission, founded in 1872, stands across White Street from a 16-story building that is now mostly N.Y.U. dorms. Sometimes in the evening you can see a pack of young girls, tarted up for a night on the town, walking right past a line of shiftless men waiting patiently for a meal and a bed.

If you start at this intersection and walk east, under the bridge of sighs that...

More Fried Cheese, Please!

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:25:36 -0400

On a weekday morning in Sunnyside, Queens, men and women emerge from brick houses and stolid apartment buildings to stream uphill toward the elevated No. 7 train, accompanied by bird song and with Dunkin Donuts coffee cups in their hands. But if they have a few extra minutes, they may turn aside into a Colombian panaderia, or bakery, like El Buen Sabor on Queens Boulevard.

Under a faded red-and-white awning, El Buen...

Shoot the Critic—Or Confront Wolff's Representative Flaws

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:02:19 -0400

OUR STORY BEGINS: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES
By Tobias Wolff
Alfred A. Knopf, 379 pages, $26.95

Reading Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff’s new collection of stories, is like being buttonholed by a drunk with a glass jaw. At first he’ll strike you as charming, and the fluency of his anecdotes may mislead you into finding him entertaining. But very soon you’ll realize that he only talks—never listens—and that the lone subject of all...

Turning Kafka on His Head

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:06:03 -0400

A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL
By Frigyes Karinthy
New York Review Books, 288 pages, $17.95

Frigyes Karinthy, in his day a well-known Hungarian humorist and writer, was in his favorite cafe in Budapest when he heard the roaring of a train that no one else heard. On subsequent evenings his hallucination repeated itself at precisely the same time. He developed blinding headaches, and he also began to...

Manuel With a Jetpack

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:15:42 -0500

The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed “A. Hitler” that he bought at an auction in Germany.

He found colored cartoons of the characters Bashful and Doc from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven...

Paint on the Tracks

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:19:18 -0500

Marvin Franklin, an M.T.A. track worker, was killed by a train last April, after 22 years of working the night shift. For the last ten of those years, he had boarded the F train in Jamaica every morning, after getting off work at 7 a.m., and sketched other passengers all the way to the Art Students League on 57th Street, where he produced watercolors, oils and etchings based on his sketches.

Franklin’s...

Noodletown Notebook: A Four-Dollar Lunch to Herald the Year of the Prosperous Rat

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:38:02 -0500

Great N.Y. Noodletown is a long-established restaurant on Bayard and the Bowery that seats about forty and has brown glazed ducks in the windows.

Sunday, which began bright and cold after a long and rainy Saturday, seemed perfectly suited to a bowl of Seaweed Noodle Soup, so I put on my shoes and began walking east. I had forgotten it was Chinese New Year: the sidewalks of central Chinatown were packed from storefront to...

For 15 Bucks, Skip Bucket List and Check Out the Met

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 08:19:34 -0500

If you have fifteen dollars and are not afraid of heights, you can always go see an opera at the Met.

The performance will be excellent; but if it isn’t, it hardly matters—the walls are covered in velvet, the ceilings are painted gold, and there are more strange people to watch during intermission than at a medieval Silk Road bazaar.

When I met my companion in the plaza by the fountain, she had her hair up...

Art or Artifact? The Dilemma of 'Outsider Art'

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 07:47:04 -0500

Last weekend, 34 galleries from around the world set up booths in the Puck Building for Sanford Smith's 16th Annual Outsider Art Fair.

Most of the art shown was not very good, but it is instructive to see so much of it together. The viewer learns that naivete and obsession are not magic bullets: for every Bill Traylor, whose simple drawings of animals are as elegant and beautiful as the greatest cave paintings, there are...