Lunch numbers

Maira Kalman meets Ruth Bader Ginsberg at the Supreme Court, sees cherry blossoms.

It's almost summertime

If a stop-motion video of Morocco doesn't make you ready for summer vacation, try Stuart Gibson's photos of the ocean. (via NotCom)

Peter Kaplan

Sorry to hear that Peter Kaplan is stepping down from The New York Observer. I liked him enormously when he lectured last summer at the CPC. Hope the paper will survive without his guidance.

On keeping things separate

Image via ThomasMoronic.

I had with me a copy of Le Rouge et le noir. He riffled the pages. Do you like this?

Yes. I read it first in Arabic. Now I'm rereading it in French. And I added: Julien's family life is like my own in some ways. One thing in particular is almost identical: Monsieur Sorel bound out his son Julien to the mayor of the town for three hundred francs a year, and my father rented me for thirty pesetas a month to a hashish-smoker who ran a cafe in the quarter of Ain Khabbaz where we lived in Tetuan.

I see your trouble. And you're not the only one. You'll never find beauty in literature that way. You shouldn't read with that sort of thing in mind, with the idea that the life of one or another protagonist has something to do with your own life. You have to keep things separate. Your life is nobody else's life.

-Jean Genet in Tangier by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Paul Bowles (page 7)

Collective Yawn

Peter Funch takes photos on New York street corners and pastes them into single photographs. (via Kottke)

Exercise

by ReadingWritingLiving.

Advice for surviving your 20s from Catherine Bohne

WHY did I start working in the bookstore? When I discovered the bookstore, in my early 20's, it was the sole (it seems to me now) haven from the terrors of trying to figure out how to live and be a grownup—life was hard and scary, expensive and confusing, and I seemed to find myself in one situation after another that I'd thought I wanted but didn't really suit me at all…the bookstore was simply the one place that felt calm and sane, peaceful and welcoming. I applied for the weekend job on a whim, got it, and just never left. Whenever other opportunities would come up I'd find that if I was honest, I'd really rather live in the world of the bookstore, and so although it sometimes seemed irresponsible (or at least quixotic) I just stayed and stayed—moving into positions of increasing authority seemed to happen naturally. And now I own it!

Interview on Bookslut with the owner of the Park Slope Community Bookstore (one of my favorite bookstores in the world), Catherine Bohne. (via Three Percent)

You know how I feel about alphabets

Tangled Alphabets at the MOMA. (via Silliman's blog)

Holi!

It's Holi, the festival of color!

L.A. Weekly on golden anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death

Judith Freeman on the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death:

Chandler understood how loneliness would become our new modern disease, the condition of a whole culture. It’s the source of much of the controlled, half-poetical emotion that lies at the heart of Marlowe and of every Chandler story.

Thanks, Kaelin

Obama depressed, distant since 'Battlestar Galactica' series finale.

Latin-1

Thank god for this chart.

Homemade fonts

Totally into these homemade fonts.

Choire Sicha is writing a book!

Thank you, publishing world, for this gift. I told you you'd have my money the day you found a way for me to give back to Choire Sicha. Now I have something to daydream about during my night job.

"It used to be, you came to New York and you got a job as an assistant, and sooner or later you got to have part of your boss’s job and you moved up," Mr. Sicha said. "There was sort of a continuum. There was a thing called a career in New York."

Not anymore.

If it sticks to the walls, it's done

Dying to see this exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum - it's made out of tape!

More 20 x 200 love

Secret Language 3 by Valerie Roybal.

Just look

Via FFFFOUND.

Pi Day and a weekend of baking

They are sold out of buttermilk in my section of Brooklyn, so that meant no soda bread baking today. Instead of buttermilk scones (another thought), I tried cream scones, which are lackluster but taste very nice with strawberry rhubarb jam.

I've now made three chocolate bourbon truffle-turtle tortes in approximately two days. I don't recommend the recipe unless you own a candy thermometer. It's clearly an excellent pie, it's just difficult to get the caramel to the right consistency when you're unsure of its temperature. (A friend also told me that you're not supposed to stir it at all, which is not what this recipe says.) I tried cooking it for some hours on Friday night, but it never held together. Tonight it again took an hour, but it was much closer to real caramel. I think it is only supposed to boil for about eight minutes, but the recipe is not specific. I tried a new baker's chocolate for the top layer tonight and it didn't turn out so smoothly as chocolate chips did on Friday.

I also tried the Darn Good Chocolate Cake recipe from the Cake Doctor, which seems to have come out well. I suspect I would trust this cookbook to care for my firstborn, had I a firstborn. So darn good.

Beard alphabet

Hooray, I made you a beard!

Check it out

30 emerging photographers selected by PDN. (via Kottke)