Gr.

The minmialist is gone.

Come back, Bittman.

A few people have told me that Albert Ellis’s 1975 bestseller on depression, A Guide to Rational Living, gives some of the clearest, most practical help on improving your life. 

I learned a good word today: moast, a mix of a moan and a boast.  Apparently, the word was born from the age of twitter, as tweeting is a good venue for moasts: short complaint that are veiled ways of showing off.  A prototypical moast: “I’ve got to give a stupid speech at the event tonight.”

We all acquire a style, in how we talk, write letters, draw, or make friends, by around age 30, and the style is hard to lose. 

For the new year, I’m taking inspiration from Lauren Redniss, author of the recent

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout.  The book is an illustrated biography of Marie and Pierre Curie, and Redniss made her images through a process called cyanotype. It involves exposing chemically-treated paper to sunlight, which turns the backgrounds a fantastic blue. 

If a good psychologist is good because she builds realistic, extended theories about your reactions to the world, good novelists are often good psychologists in shorter bursts. 

One fun thing about Steve Martin’s recent novel An Object of Beauty is the chance at voyeurism: He seems to be reporting his own history in romance and sex.  He overflows with ardor in routine references to actual spots in Manhattan: dinner at Boulud; the West Side Highway, where women biking turn him on; the Carlyle hotel (that’s a coda through the book: “expensive and impeccable, the Carlyle Hotel was art central” (130)).  His excitement over these spots feels a bit like confession. 

There’s something mesmerizing about Patti Smith’s narrative style in her memoir, Just Kids, which won the National Book Award this year.  I’m caught, I think, by her silence. 

Something fast and controlled about running in lower Manhattan.  I was doing my runs in the West Village around 2000, when The Hours came out, and I loved the book, so I hoped to see Michael Cunningham, the author, on my run.

I was numb and silent skating behind L. and her friend, both 11 years old.  They were giggling, their sequined skating skirts flapping.  I felt too heavy to smile, and I wasn’t thinking a thing—just lost in the rhythm, the concrete whizzing under my skates.