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April 26, 2005
Gefilte Fish and JSF Gossip
It's Passover, and since I've never been to a seder I was glad to find The Amateur Gourmet's step-by-step Passover seder post. There's liver pate and wine and you get to play with your food -- this is definitely up my alley. That chicken soup description and photo makes me want to hit the 2nd Ave Deli tomorrow for matzoh ball soup.
On the real estate front, I'm annoyed that the NYT is all excited about Jonathan Safran Foer buying in Brooklyn because it somehow legitimizes the borough. Brooklyn is not Queens. It's been around for a while and the neighborhoods here have been at Manhattan prices -- and Manhattan people have been buying houses here -- for years. So how is JSF spending too much money on real estate here any different? Do people who live in Manhattan live in complete ignorance of our borough unless houses pass the $6 million mark? Wait, this is a Sunday Styles piece. Okay, they're usually about a year behind the rest of us. But still.
Maybe JSF's golden-author-of-the-moment status charms everything he does. I mean, he's young and somehow made it big with good-but-not-brilliant writing and now can finance a $6 million house. I'm trying not to jump on the bandwagon of people so jealous/bitter about his success (what's with the three names anyway?) that they feel they need to lash out against him. He is, after all, a funny oracle (here's the original Talk of the Town piece on that).
I heard him give a reading and field questions from a packed room full of people a few weeks ago and he's totally got the successful-young-author role down. It was on the top floor of the Union Square B&N and I could barely see him at all behind the throngs of admirers. He had short, funny answers for a lot of the questions and played the crowd pretty well. He managed to come up with a foreign policy speech that was impressive enough ("art...expresses the humanity of a culture"). It's sort of hard not to hate him just for that. Here's an interview with him. I've just started the new book -- I'll try to block out the golden-boy stuff for a while and form an independent opinion.
Posted by csageday at April 26, 2005 01:25 AM