Monthly Archives: June 2010

Ben Greenman Reads in Brooklyn on Monday 6/21 and It Will be Awesome

Martin Schneider writes:
Get on over to Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore at 686 Fulton Street (at S. Portland, in Fort Greene) this coming Monday, June 21, at 7:30 pm, when Ben Greenman will read from his new epistolatory story collection What He’s Poised To Do, published by Harper Perennial. It’s a Facebook event, too, which makes it even easier to remember to move it to the top of your queue. We’re just about to launch a fun giveaway for Greenman’s book later this afternoon, so watch for that!
From the Facebook description:
The author Ben Greenman celebrates the publication of his new collection of stories, “What He’s Poised To Do” (Harper Perennial) and its sister blog, Letters With Character. There will also be brief readings by Jonny Diamond (of The L Magazine); the actress and performance artist Okwui Okpokwasili (representing Significant Objects); Nicki Pombier Berger (representing Underwater New York); and Todd Zuniga (representing Opium Magazine, and appearing via Transatlantic technology).
I don’t know the witty New Yorker writer and editor personally, but I’ve had the pleasure of attending a few New Yorker Festival events that he moderated (one was with Ian Hunter and Graham Parker, another was with Yo La Tengo; there were others), and he always made an extremely positive impression on me—intelligent, funny, generous, self-deprecating, all the good things. Emily tells me that based on her having gotten to meet him in person at a recent Happy Ending event, my impressions are rock-solid.
I’m in the wrong city (Cleveland) at the moment to attend this event, but New Yorkers should get right on this.

Cheese or Font: A Delicious Trivia Game

_Pollux writes_:
Is Arvore a cheese or a font? What about Balaton?
You can test your caseic and typographical knowledge with this “game!”:http://cheeseorfont.mogrify.org/ It’s an old (in web time, anyway) favorite and great for anyone bored at work, especially for those who work at type foundries and creameries.
It was made by “@mogrify”:http://twitter.com/mogrify from an idea by “@dickchiclets.”:http://twitter.com/dickchiclets You can follow “Cheese or Font”:http://twitter.com/cheeseorfont on Twitter.

The Font Monologue: Mike Lacher’s “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole”

Comicsans-monologue-pollux.PNG
_Pollux writes_:
If you want a laugh, read this short imagined “monologue”:http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/monologues/15comicsans.html by designer and writer “Mike Lacher”:http://mikelacher.com/, which appears in _McSweeney’s_.
The imagined monologist? The font that everyone loves to hate, Comic Sans. This unloved font, deliciously defiant in Lacher’s monologue, lashes out angrily at all critics and comers.
See? Comic Sans is a fun font.

Found Poetry at the World Cup

Martin Schneider writes:
The New Republic, as it did in 2006, is running an eclectic World Cup blog by a large group of admitted enthusiasts, non-experts. Most of the posts are personal, idiosyncratic, confessional. It’s been a fun read.
After today’s 2-1 defeat of North Korea by Brazil, Luke Dempsey posted a poem “written” by Martin Tyler and Ally McCoist, the commentators who called the game on ESPN, featuring exclusively phrases uttered during the broadcast, in chronological order.
I’m no expert in poetry, but I just adore this work of structured whimsy. My favorite line is “A voracious appetite for silverware,” a line that struck me at the time as being bizarre and kind of great (it was a reference to the Brazilians’ habit of winning a lot of trophies).
It also reminds me that I should pick up a used copy of O Holy Cow, a similar project involving the delirious ramblings of Phil Rizzuto, whose Yankee broadcasts I grew up on. My memory is hazy, but I believe Hart Seely and Tom Peyer’s project of curating Rizzuto’s “poems” started in The Village Voice about twenty years ago.