David Rakoff: Half Empty

Half empty or half full?

“Is the glass half empty or half full?” is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full) or pessimism (half empty); or as a general litmus test to simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble. This idiom is used to explain how people perceive events and objects. Perception is unique to every individual and is simply one's interpretation of reality. The phrase "Is the glass half empty or half full" can be referred to as a philosophical question.

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“I do tend to be an anxious fellow and I do tend to see the world as a little darker than perhaps it genuinely is, but I also do appreciate much more than a rosy scenario, I appreciate straight news. I appreciate honesty. I appreciate confronting something head on and being given all the details first — and then responding to them in whatever way I might. At best, it simply confirmed who I am to myself. It helps me. For me, it works.”

- David Rakoff, author of the book: Half Empty

In September 2010, Bill Scheft wrote “Nabob of Negativism” for The New York Times. The book jacket of “Half Empty,” David Rakoff’s third essay collection, contains not only the warning “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found in These Pages,” but the guarantee that the author will have you “positively reveling in the power of negativity.” It’s never clear whether the pessimism alluded to is Rakoff’s philosophy, Rakoff’s device or Rakoff’s publicist clearing his throat. Luckily, we don’t have to judge this book by its cover. The inherent problem with most collections is that the reader can’t help comparing entries, like a track handicapper setting the morning line. In his ambitious opening essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.

“Writer Melissa Bank said it best: 'The only proper answer to 'Why me?' is 'Why not you?' The universe is anarchic and doesn't care about us and unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask. And in so many other ways, I'm so far ahead of the game. I have access to great medical care. My general baseline health, aside from the general unpleasantness of the cancer, is great. And it's great because I'm privileged to have great health. And I live in a country where I'm not making sneakers for a living and I don't live near a toxic waste dump. You can't win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say 'Why am I not winning this contest as well?' It's random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren't me? Absolutely. I still can't make that logistic jump to thinking there's a reason why it shouldn't be me.”

- David Rakoff, author of the book: Half Empty

Nora Ephron: I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections

From NPR's Morning Edition: You might say Nora Ephron — raised in Beverly Hills, the daughter of New York playwrights who moved west to write screenplays for the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy — was born to tell stories. As an adult, Ephron worked as a journalist. Later she made her own name in the movies, writing When Harry Met Sally and directing scripts of her own — including Sleepless in Seattle and Julie & Julia. More recently, the 69-year-old Ephron has been sharing reflections on aging, first in her book I Feel Bad About My Neck and now in a new collection called I Remember Nothing. In the latter, Nora Ephron spins stories on a potpourri of subjects: divorce, disdain for egg-white omelets, and most especially memory loss. "I have been forgetting things for years – at least since I was in my 30s," Ephron writes in the book's opening paragraph. "I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to."



From Publishers Weekly: Reading these succinct, razor-sharp essays by veteran humorist (I Feel Bad About My Neck), novelist, and screenwriter-director Ephron is to be reminded that she cut her teeth as a New York Post writer in the 1960s, as she recounts in the most substantial selection here, "Journalism: A Love Story." Forthright, frequently wickedly backhanded, these essays cover the gamut of later-life observations (she is 69), from the dourly hilarious title essay about losing her memory, which asserts that her ubiquitous senior moment has now become the requisite Google moment, to several flimsy lists, such as "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again," e.g., "Movies have no political effect whatsoever." Shorts such as the several "I Just Want to Say" pieces feature Ephron's trademark prickly contrariness and are stylistically digestible for the tabloids. Other essays delve into memories of fascinating people she knew, such as the Lillian Hellman of Pentimento, whom she adored until the older woman's egomania rubbed her the wrong way. Most winning, however, are her priceless reflections on her early life, such as growing up in Beverly Hills with her movie-people parents, and how being divorced shaped the bulk of her life, in "The D Word." There's an elegiac quality to many of these pieces, handled with wit and tenderness.



From The New York Times: Nora Ephron worries about a failing memory in the title piece of “I Remember Nothing,” her inviting new collection of essays. But even her most amnesiac readers still remember “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” the 2006 collection that this new book closely resembles. That resemblance is helpful in some ways and alarming in others. Each of these books is 137 pages long. Their covers are similarly formatted, with the same font used for the author’s name. One of Nora Ephron's back-cover portraits was taken by someone named Elena, the other by someone named Ilona; either way, Ms. Ephron looks attractive, accessible and well worth listening to. Her repackaged aperçus are now $3 more expensive than they were four years ago. She is now 69, not 65, and her sense of creeping mortality has changed accordingly. But the most salient comparisons are those between the lengths and origins of each book’s articles. “I Feel Bad About My Neck” had 15 entries, most of them tight, beguiling, exemplary essays written for print magazines (O, Vogue, The New Yorker) and The New York Times. “I Remember Nothing” has 23 pieces, and most of them are much shorter and less shapely. Some sound like the hurried Huffington Post blog entries that they seemingly were. The single strangest inclusion is a one-paragraph item titled “I Just Want to Say: Chicken Soup” and asks whether chicken soup creates colds instead of curing them. This is the inexplicably truncated lead paragraph of a much longer Op-Ed article from The Times headlined “The Chicken Soup Chronicles.” And all it amounts to is the wry, five-sentence version of a one-liner.



Nora Ephron (born May 19, 1941) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. She is best known for her romantic comedies and is a triple nominee for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay; for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally... and Sleepless in Seattle. She sometimes writes with her sister Delia Ephron. Her most recent film is Julie & Julia. Ephron graduated from Wellesley College in 1962 and worked briefly as an intern in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.



After a satire Nora Ephron wrote lampooning the Post caught the editor's eye, the author landed a job at the New York Post, where she stayed as a reporter for five years. In 1966, Ephron broke the news in the Post that Bob Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a private ceremony three and a half months before. Upon becoming a successful writer, she wrote a column on women's issues for Esquire. In this position, Ephron made a name for herself by taking on subjects as wide-ranging as Dorothy Schiff, her former boss and owner of the Post; Betty Friedan, whom she chastised for pursuing a feud with Gloria Steinem; and her alma mater Wellesley, which she said had turned out a generation of "docile" women." A 1968 send-up of Women's Wear Daily in Cosmopolitan resulted in threats of a lawsuit from WWD. While married to Bernstein in the mid-1970s, at her husband and Bob Woodward's request, she helped Bernstein re-write William Goldman's script for All the President's Men, because the two journalists were not happy with it. The Ephron-Bernstein script was not used in the end, but was seen by someone who offered Ephron her first screenwriting job, for a television movie. Ephron's 2002 play Imaginary Friends explores the rivalry between writers Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.

Justin Halpern: Sh*t My Dad Says

From Time Magazine: For Justin Halpern, going home was his lucky break. A year ago, Halpern was a 28-year-old writer who after splitting up with his girlfriend swallowed his pride and moved back in with Mom and Dad. Now he has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter, a best-selling book and a TV series in the works with CBS, all thanks to his now 74-year-old hilariously blunt dad. It all started with this tweet on Aug. 3, 2009: "I didn't live to be 73-years-old so I could eat kale. Don't fix me your breakfast and pretend you're fixing mine." Halpern took his ridiculously popular Twitter feed and turned it into a book by the same name, which debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times best-seller list. Halpern, author of the crudely titled Sh*t My Dad Says, spoke to TIME about William Shatner playing his father on TV, his whirlwind year and, of course, dear old Dad.



Justin Samuel Halpern (born September 3, 1980) is the American author of the Twitter feed and best-selling book Shit My Dad Says. He is also the co-writer and co-executive producer of a CBS television situation comedy series based on the book. Justin Halpern grew up in the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego, California. His father is Jewish and his Italian American mother is Catholic. His father, Samuel Halpern, M.D., is a radiologist, now retired, who practiced at the University of California San Diego. A blunt-spoken man, he gave memorable, expletive-laden advice and comments to young Justin from childhood on. Samuel Halpern has been described as "a profane comic genius," "Lenny Bruce with a stethoscope," "a scatological Socrates showering rough wisdom on his son."



Justin Halpern graduated from San Diego State University in 2003. He then headed for Hollywood looking for work as a writer. He wrote screenplays and waited tables, but success as a screenwriter eluded him. By 2009 he was a full-time writer for Maxim Magazine's online site and no longer needed to live in Los Angeles. He moved back to San Diego and wound up living with his parents. Justin Halpern had always kept a record of his father’s salty comments. Some, repeated to him by brothers, cousins and other relatives, go back to when he was 4 or 5 years old. When he started living with his parents, his record of his father’s remarks became a daily journal. On August 3, 2009, he started a Twitter feed, @shitmydadsays, just to have a place to store his father’s rhetorical gems. He thought he might use some of them someday in a script. On the Twitter site he explains, "I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says." To his surprise he quickly gathered a large following on Twitter. A friend posted a link to his feed, then Rob Corddry tweeted it, and "that really jump-started it" according to Halpern. By mid-August he had more than 100,000 followers. By October he had a book deal with Harper Collins, and by November he had a television deal with Warner Bros. As of November 2010 his Twitter feed had more than 1.8 million followers.

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Pulitzer Prize winning author, Michael Chabon, was recently elected to fill the role as chairman of the board of directors of a prominent artist colony. The Associated Press reported this in December, 2010: Michael Chabon, the novelist, screenwriter and father of four, has a new responsibility. He has been elected chairman of the board of the directors of the MacDowell Colony, the century-old artist residency program based in Peterborough, N.H. Chabon, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," replaces Robert MacNeil, author and television newsman who is retiring after serving 17 years. MacNeil turns 80 in January. Chabon, 47, has been a resident nine times at MacDowell and told The Associated Press on Monday that he was eager to contribute to an institution that had done so much for him. See that AP story here.

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

T.J. Raphael of the White Plains Patch recently reported this about the Pulitzer Prize winning author: Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the fiction novel, "The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao," visited White Plains Highlands Middle School on Dec. 15. Students in Yakira Tejada's class had written the author letters who then felt inspired to visit the school. Diaz has also written the critically acclaimed novel "Drown." His work has appeared in the New Yorker, African Voices and in Best American Short Stories. See that webpage here. The author also wrote: Drown, Negocios, and La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition). Over the years, the author's spoken at popular venues, such as the Google corporate event series, "Authors at Google" and was also a guest on The Colbert Report.

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Predictor of Financial Crisis Dispenses Bite-Sized Wisdom from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

Nassim Taleb is the philosopher and former trader who correctly predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street used to measure risk would lead to a massive financial crisis. His new book, ‘The Bed of Procrustes,’ scrutinizes the economy, as well as human knowledge and values. The book features "practical and philosophical aphorisms," and includes fortune-cookie sized sentences that attempt to "expose self-delusions you have been living with but have never recognized." Taleb is the current Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University. He is the author of 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan.'

Download the podcast here. See also: The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility", Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (Wiley Finance), Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets?, The Volatility Surface: A Practitioner's Guide (Wiley Finance), by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable 1 edition, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Hardcover)

Us And Them: The Year's Best Outsider Fiction from NPR by Danielle Evans, Reginald Dwayne Betts

When I sat down to write this list, I realized that I would need to define what "outsider fiction" was in the first place, a daunting prospect. I came up with (and then discarded) several definitions that seemed to me problematic because they posited the "inside" as fixed and unchanging, or insider status as only an accident of birth or demographics. Much of the fiction on this list recognizes that boundaries between inside and outside are fluid and always shifting, and that people can shift with them. Still, the books retain a certain sensibility of outsider status, an identity forged by characters well aware that they must define themselves in light of or in opposition to external forces that might seek to impose definitions or limit possibilities. Beyond that, these books are all great, provocative reads that I'm excited to have encountered in 2010.

This is a really good, well put together "best of" list. Check it out, here. See also: Death Is Not an Option: Stories

Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in Autumn from Lopate - Underreported by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Armistead Maupin, author of the bestselling Tales of the City series, discusses Mary Ann in Autumn, the eighth book in his series. It tells the story of Mary Ann Singleton, who left her husband and child in San Francisco to pursue her dream of a television career in New York. Twenty years later, she’s returned to the city of her youth and into the arms of her oldest friend, Michael.

Check the webpage out for this story, at this WNYC site. See also: Michael Tolliver Lives: A Novel, Tales of the City: A Novel (P.S.), Michael Tolliver Lives (P.S.), Sure of You (Tales of the City Series, V. 6)

David Rakoff: Half Empty from KQED: The Writers' Block Podcast

David Rakoff, author of FRAUD and DON'T GET TOO COMFORTABLE, reads a passage from his hilarious new book HALF EMPTY.

Download the podcast here. See also: Fraud: Essays, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, This American Life Personalities: David Rakoff, Dan Savage, David Sedaris, John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, Ira Glass, Jon Ronson, Julia Sweeney

Mosley's 'Last Days' Restores Memory, But At A Cost from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Walter Mosley is the author of more than three dozen novels, including many mysteries featuring the L.A. detective Easy Rawlins. His latest novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, is about a 91-year-old black man entering the early stages of dementia and the last years of his life. But Grey's life changes after he meets a 17-year-old teenager named Robyn, without a family of her own. Robyn cares for Ptolemy and introduces him to a local doctor, who invites him to join an experimental drug study that will help bring back his memory — but will simultaneously also shorten his life span. And Ptolemy must decide what to do.

Read the full NPR feature story here. Download the Fresh Air podcast here. Also, the LA Times had this to say about the novel:

In "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey," Mosley returns to contemporary Los Angeles with a daring, beautifully wrought story that incorporates elements of allegory, meditative reflection and the lilt of lyric tragedy. For obvious reasons, we can never know the confusion and loss of intellectual faculties that so often attend old age, but in this novel Mosley gives as convincing an evocation as you're likely to encounter in literature. The result is an unexpectedly profound novel of the subtle links between memory and identity, of the difference between forgetting and having the past stripped from you, of what it may mean to be lost, first to those around you, then to yourself. Mosley's unlikely protagonist is Ptolemy Grey, a 91-year-old African American living as a near-recluse in a filthy, rented apartment in one of South L.A.'s meaner neighborhoods. His flat is cluttered with trash and the material fragments of a life dissolving in dementia. Ptolemy's beloved second wife, Sensia, is decades dead; roaches patrol his kitchen counters; his bathroom hasn't worked for years and he sleeps under a table in the living room, perhaps because his bedroom is stuffed with a pack rat's junk, perhaps for darker reasons. Even he is no longer quite sure. His real companions are a classical music radio station and an all-news television channel that he keeps on simultaneously, day and night.

See also: Known to Evil (A Leonid McGill Mystery), The Long Fall, The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

Some Books Considered - Program 070 from TPR: Some Books Considered

Novelist Kathy Reichs talks about how her series of books about forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan inspired the television show Bones. She discusses her latest book, Virals, the first in a new series of novels for young adults featuring the Torey Brennan, the grand niece of Temperance Brennan. In addition to be great stories, Reichs hopes that young adults and girls in particular will be inspired to study science and pursue careers in science. More information is available at kathyreichs.com.

Download the podcast here. See also: Virals, Spider Bones: A Novel (Temperance Brennan Novels), Deja Dead: 10th Anniversary Edition (Temperance Brennan Novels), 206 Bones

Some Books Considered - Program 069 from TPR: Some Books Considered

W. Bruce Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose is a New York Times best seller. The novel is about a dog named Baily that finds himself reincarnated over the years as various types of dogs in a search for his reason for being. Cameron believes the book has struck a chord with readers because it strives to tell the story of what it is like to be a dog and how dogs relate to humans. Baily is not a “magic” dog with the thought process of a human, but instead he is a real dog with limited understanding of human speech and he must learn how to deal with people through physical interaction. More information is available at brucecameron.com.

Download the podcast here. See also: A Dog's Purpose, 8 Simple Rules for Marrying My Daughter: And Other Reasonable Advice from the Father of the Bride (Not that Anyone is Paying Attention), How to Remodel a Man: Tips and Techniques on Accomplishing Something You Know Is Impossible but Want to Try Anyway, 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter

Please Explain: Espionage from Please Explain from WNYC New York Public Radio Podcast

Today's Please Explain looks at spying, the organizations that do it, and how it's carried out and why. We're joined by Thomas S. Blanton, from George Washington University National Security Archives, and Joseph Weisberg, former CIA operative and author of An Ordinary Spy.

Download the podcast here. See also: White House E-Mail: The Top-Secret Messages the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy/Book and Disk, Secrecy, Biography - Blanton, Thomas S. (1955-): An article from: Contemporary Authors

"Salman Rushdie plays with video games in his new book" from PRI and WNYC's The Takeaway

Video games guide the hero in Salman Rushdie's newest book, "Luka and the Fire of Life." It might be difficult to imagine literary titan Salman Rushdie sitting down for a game of Donkey Kong, but video games play a central role in his new book, "Luka and the Fire of Life." A sequel to "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," Rushdie's new book follows Haroun's younger brother, Luka, on his quest to save their father by finding the source of life: fire. Video games may seem like an unlikely vehicle for a writer knighted by the Queen of England, but Rushdie points out that many games are retellings of classic stories. For example, the goal of Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers is to fight villainous creatures to save Princess Peach, who happens to be locked in a castle. "Let's say the best case scenario defense for video games is that they are quite closely modeled, many of them, on old classical quest narratives," Rushdie told PRI's The Takeaway. "And since at the heart of this book is maybe one of the oldest of all the quest narratives -- which is the quest for fire -- it seemed like just an enjoyable thing to do."

Download The Takeaway podcast here. Read the full PRI feature story here. The Harvard Crimson had this to say about the book and story:

Richard Avedon, one of the greatest American photographers of the last century, once took an unforgettable portrait of Salman Rushdie. The author sat for Avedon in London on September 26, 1994, five short years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran placed a fatwa on the author for his portrayal of Muhammad in “The Satanic Verses.” The subject sits centered in his frame, flush with the camera, staring directly into the lens. Under two thickly arched eyebrows his ever-drooping eyelids frame a gaze at once incredulous, subversive, and strangely hypnotic. The portrait is hard to reconcile with the exuberant wit and wordplay exemplified by so much of Rushdie’s work. The author is, first and foremost, a playful yet captivating storyteller; his ever-imaginative magical realism has often led critics to trumpet his tales as diversions for all generations. Yet dark threads weave consistently through his writing, and his best novels—most notably the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children”—contain indirect yet sharp political and religious critiques.

Read that Crimson review here. See also: Midnight's Children: A Novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Satanic Verses: A Novel, The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel

Philip Roth on Nemesis from WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth discusses his latest novel, Nemesis. It’s about a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a Newark community. It explores the emotions such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, asks questions about the kind of accidental choices that fatally shape a life, and how an individual can withstand the onslaught of circumstance.

See the show's webpage here. The podcast isn't available yet. (Usually posts the day after.) See also: Nemesis, American Pastoral, The Humbling (Vintage International), Indignation (Vintage International), Portnoy's Complaint

Nicole Krauss at Talking Volumes - Minneapolis Star Tribune (blog) - Claude Peck - ‎

Nicole Krauss signed books Oct. 28 at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. Softspoken but eloquent novelist Nicole Krauss talked about books, including her own new novel, at a Talking Volumes event at the Fitzgerald Theater Thursday night. Krauss, whose third novel "Great House," has been named a fiction finalist by the National Book Award, said that the book grew from a short story she wrote a couple of years ago. Her writing does not depend on an outline, she said, and she has little idea at the outset where the novel will end up. "I make the doorknob first, then the door, and the room," she said in describing her writing process. "Only much later do you step back and see the whole house."

Read the full Tribune story here. See also: The History of Love: A Novel, Man Walks Into a Room, The Future Dictionary of America