TONIGHT: Adam Gopnik at the 92Y!

Get your double dose of Gopnik today! If you haven’t read it already, check out Gopnik’s article in this week’s New Yorker, “The Information: How the Internet gets inside us.” Internet opinion pieces may be overdone, but this one provides a fresh and fascinating look at it. Are you a Never-Better, a Better-Never, or an Ever-Waser?

After reading that, why don’t you head over to the 92Y at 8:00 pm? In an event titled “Music and the Brain—Music and the Mind: From Neurons to Nirvana,” Gopnik will be chatting with Daniel J. Levitin. Tickets are $27-$35 and can be purchased here.

& here’s the first paragraph of the New Yorker piece:

When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?”

nycultureaddict:

A Celebration of Tennessee Williams with Alec Baldwin, Zoe Caldwell, Olympia Dukakis, John Guare, Zoe Kazan, Tony Kushner, Marian Seldes, Angelica Torn and Eli Wallach An evening of readings and remembrances in honor of playwright Tennessee Williams, whose centenary is celebrated in 2011….

coverspy:

We interrupt our regular voyeurism to announce CoverSpy is hosting our first event! I Like Your Glasses, a lit-nerd party at Housing Works!

I Like Your Glasses: Connections Missed and Made with CoverSpy and Alikewise

Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 7:00 PM
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, New York, NY 10012, 212-334-3324 (Map/Directions)

A mixer for those who totally judge you by your book cover (glasses not required). Open to all — single, taken, confused, it’s complicated. Come out and meet other readers. Featuring readings of internet misunderstandings, inter-train romance, and other missed connections — real and imagined — from Simon Van Booy, author of Love Begins in Winter and The Secret Lives of People in Love; Brett Fletcher Lauer and Gretchen Scott with Hesper Desloovere, Ships that Pass; and Sarah Lynn Knowles, Storychord editor and Slice spotlight author. Plus $3 pints of Sixpoint Sweet Action, free drinks for the first thirty to arrive, and giveaways from Harper Perennial and Slice magazine. Hosted by Alikewise, Internet dating by the book, and CoverSpy.
RSVP on Facebook http://on.fb.me/ILikeYourGlasses

Poster design by Justin David Cox.

Jonathan Safran Foer + Nicole Krauss

New York writers Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and Nicole Krauss (Great House, The History of Love) have the relationship we here at GL dream of having. (Apparently, there’s also a Facebook group dedicated to them.) As two prominent members of the literary world, these authors live a beautiful life in Park Slope, in a home that we have heard is “crazy cool,” with two children who we no doubt know will grow up to be sensitive, creative intellectuals just like their parents. Foer and Krauss met through a publisher in the early stages of their writing careers, and their combined power has made them a power couple in Gotham. Of course, we can name about twenty friends who are huge Foer fanatics and are incredibly jealous of Nicole Krauss, but really, can anyone picture him with anyone else? That’s why we idolize them, they’re our real-life Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big, Rachel and Ross. Sometimes we like to think that Krauss and Foer spend their Saturday evenings sitting face-to-face in front of a roaring fire in Brooklyn, entertaining each other by spinning love stories that allude to their own lives.

peterwknox:

World’s Most Literary Rent Party Ever

A description from the NY Times.

From all of us: Happy New Year!

In the current issue of L Magazine, The Envy Issue, three of the “young New Yorkers who are better than you” are people we think you should know about!

1.) Lena Dunham: This 24-year-old author has smartly created a name for herself the not-so-old-fashioned-but-totally-millennial way: through an amusing Twitter feed. Her “self-pitying wit” morphed into a screenplay, which led to a profile in the New Yorker, and now, a pilot on HBO with Judd Apatow. We. Are. Jealous.

2.) Scott Lindenbaum: At 26 years old, Lindenbaum helped create Electric Literature, a quarterly literary journal that is refreshingly looking at the bright side of new media, creatively utilizing it as a tool to jolt short fiction back to life. Electric Lit is a prime model for lit journals that are floundering beneath the fluorescent glare of technology. You know who you are.

3.) Tommy Pico: Poet and publisher Tommy Pico is at the helm of the Birdsong Collective, a motley crew of artists, musicians, and writers. This Brooklyn-based group produces zines, promotes DIY culture, and will make you long for all those art movements that swayed the city last century. Ah, nostalgia.

So there you have it. Thou should use thy wit, embrace thy technology, and be unafraid to do things thyself! We don’t know about you, but these three New Yorkers have inspired us to shift our New Year resolutions a bit, to go harder in 2011 to promote the power of language, to keep that burning light of Gotham’s literary culture alive. That’s what we’ll be thinking about when we wake up hungover tomorrow morning. Happy New Year’s Eve everyone!