Underground New York Public Library is a tumblr site worth following.

[Photo Credit: Walker Evans; L.A. Observed]

Coolin’ out on a grey Friday in New York. Here’s a gem: Bill Evans in Paris.

[Image Via Love Speakeasy]

“Academy Theater (Inglewood, California),” By Julius Shulman (1940)

Check out this reissue of a rare Ernie Kovacs album: “Percy Dovetonsils…thpeaks.”

[Drawing by J.R. Williams]

I’m not much of a fan of Spike Lee as a movie director though his first three movies were events in my life. Watching those movies in the theater–“She’s Got to Have It” at the Quad, “School Daze” and “Do The Right Thing” in Times Square–are experiences I’ll never forget. There was much to recommend in Lee’s early work. Those movies had vitality and humor.

But I haven’t liked one of his feature films  in years (his best work has come in the documentary form).

His new one, however, looks promising:

The other day, Glenn Stout mentioned this 2010 Paris Review Art of Non-Fiction Interview with John McPhee.

I hadn’t read the piece in a few years but was happy to revisit it:

INTERVIEWER: What were your first impressions (of New Yorker editor William Shawn)?

MCPHEE: He spoke so softly. I was awestruck: the guy’s the editor of The New Yorker and he’s this mysterious person. It was the most transforming event of my writing existence, meeting him, and you could take a hundred years to try to get to know him, and this was just the first day. But he was a really encouraging editor. Shawn always functioned as the editor of new writers, so he edited the Bradley thing. So I spent a lot of time in his office, talking commas. He explained everything with absolute patience, going through seventeen thousand words, a comma at a time, bringing in stuff from the grammarians and the readers’ proofs. He talked about each and every one of these items with the author. These were long sessions. At one point I said, Mr. Shawn, you have this whole enterprise going, a magazine is printing this weekend, and you’re the editor of it, and you sit here talking about these commas and semicolons with me—how can you possibly do it?

And he said, It takes as long as it takes. A great line, and it’s so true of writing. It takes as long as it takes.

McPhee is talking about writing here but I think can apply to anything. And it’s a wonderful, necessary reminder that nothing worth having comes fast.

MCPHEE: The thing about writers is that, with very few exceptions, they grow slowly—very slowly. A John Updike comes along, he’s an anomaly. That’s no model, that’s a phenomenon. I sent stuff to The New Yorker when I was in college and then for ten years thereafter before they accepted something. I used to paper my wall with their rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake. Writers develop slowly. That’s what I want to say to you: don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope. This is terribly important to me as a teacher of writers, of kids who want to write.

And this:

INTERVIEWER: After you’ve done your reporting, how do you proceed with a piece?

MCPHEE: First thing I do is transcribe my notes. This is not an altogether mindless process. You’re copying your notes, and you get ideas. You get ideas for structure. You get ideas for wording, phraseologies. As I’m typing, if something crosses my mind I flip it in there. When I’m done, certain ideas have accrued and have been added to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

And so now you’ve got piles of stuff on the table, unlike a fiction writer. A fiction writer doesn’t have this at all. A fiction writer is feeling her way, feeling her way—it’s much more of a trial-and-error, exploratory thing. With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read.

I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here—it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out.

[Photo Credit: Peter C. Cook; painting by Paul Cezanne]

Because of all the screwy weather this year, which has been dreadful for farmers, peaches have arrived earlier than excpected.

Dig this recipe for Peach and Creme Fraiche Pie over at Smitten Kitchen.

[Photo Credit: Annuus Naa]

It’s rare that I suggest trooping out to Williamsburg but this here Classic Album Sundays event sounds more than worth it.

[Images by Mark Weaver and The Swinging Sixties via This Isn’t Happiness]

And now, for a short musical interlude…

And then more cool grooves from a way out west…

[Photo Credit: v.a.l.e.n.]

“Still Life with Black Knife,” By Henri Matisse (1896)

Painting by Budi Satria Kwan via the most cool site, Zeroing.

Here’s Denis Johnson on the importance of Leonard Gardner’s novel, “Fat City”:

My neighbor across the road, also a young literary hopeful, felt the same. We talked about every paragraph of “Fat City” one by one and over and over, the way couples sometimes reminisce about each moment of their falling in love.

And like most youngsters in the throes, I assumed I was among the very few humans who’d ever felt this way. In the next few years, studying at the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City, I was astonished every time I met a young writer who could quote esctatically line after line of dialogue from the down-and-out souls of “Fat City,” the men and women seeking love, a bit of comfort, even glory — but never forgiveness — in the heat and dust of central California. Admirers were everywhere.

My friend across the road saw Gardner in a drugstore in California once, recognized him from his jacket photo. He was looking at a boxing magazine. “Are you Leonard Gardner?” my friend asked. “You must be a writer,” Gardner said, and went back to the magazine. I made him tell the story a thousand times.

For more on Gardner, check out this appreciation by our old pal George Kimball.

David Lebovitz gives us pickled carrots.

Hey, Babe…here’s Jimmy.

[Photo By Steven Wallace via Gas Station]

Sad news in New York this morning. Nora Ephron died yesterday. She was only 71.

Over at New York magazine–where Ephron wrote for years–Noreen Malone offers a nice tribute (also included a links to several of Ephron’s pieces).

I was no fan of Ephron’s work in the movies and don’t know enough about her writing to comment with any clarity. However, this piece, first written for the New York Times, and later featured in “Nora Ephron Collected” is worth reading:

Revision and Life

Plus, she also once said: “I don’t think any day is worth living without thinking about what you’re going to eat next at all times.”

I can dig it.

[Illustration by Simon Pemberton and Larry Roibal]

Zhao Huasen via Kottke.

Just so happens that I’ve got asparagus and mint in the house. Thanks to Serious Eats and Food 52 for this recipe.

I used to play this record when I dj’d at my friend Steven’s restaurant. It was a sure shot. So vibey, a great cool-out beat.

[Photo Credit: Matthais Franke]

Sam Adams has a wonderful interview with Bob Balaban over at the A.V. Club.

I like this part:

AVC: Speaking of great directors, your role in Close Encounters was as translator to the scientist played by François Truffaut, and the sense from your diaries is that you played a similar role offscreen.

BB: It was so much fun. You can only imagine [having] one of your favorite directors be absolutely dependent on you for eight months of shooting. I could speak fairly good French, and he really didn’t like to speak English. He would bring me scripts, I would translate them, and we would have discussions afterward. He didn’t like reading the scripts in English, so I would read them and describe to him what it was, and what was going on. It was great. Truffaut was great with kids, also. At one point—I’m sure I’ve said this in my book, and three or four thousand times already—Truffaut said for him there were literally two things that interested him in all of his movies. That was it. He said life was short—how prescient he was, because he died eight years later. But he said, “I’m never going to have enough time to make all of the movies I want. So I can only make movies about men and women and their relationships, and children and their relationships. That’s it, that’s all that interests me.” That’s everything in the world, but it also rules out a huge amount of things. It mostly rules out anything mechanical. At one point, he was asked to direct Bobby Deerfield, I think. He said, “Too much ‘vroom vroom.’” What he really meant was it wasn’t about men and women falling in love, or children.

Fascinating. To have such a firm grasp on what you want to make movies about and then to do just that.

Photographs by Frank Horvat.