12 Comments

sad to ponder how much Prokofiev could have loved Chicago, if only he had tried giardiniera and Malort

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it's honestly hard to grasp a 26/27 year old not having the time of their life there regardless of time period

there's a great aside in one of my favorite novels New Grub Street by George Gissing which is mostly set in London during the late 1880s but one of the guys in it, having not experienced a ton of success, briefly moves to Chicago for six months and is like "I had the time of my life, I lived in an apartment with 12 actors, all we did is drink and chill, and then I ran out of money" and keeps threatening to write his Chicago novel... real af!!!

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fran have you ever read simone de beauvoir's novel the mandarins… chicago features!! positively, as i recall

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i also recommend the mandarins, incredible book!! yeah she really liked chicago, she writes lovingly about the Schlitz beer signs all over town — at one point i lived a few steps away from the apartment where simone stayed with nelson algren :))

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omg no I haven't.... ADDING TO LIST!

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I am the target audience for "Beethoven goes to Boston and has a bad time"

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I actually think this book sounds cool but your critique makes me wonder all the more what Pynchon would have done with this premise, could totally see lil Ludwig wandering through a slapstick episode in Mason & Dixon

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For every cool chapter or form-breaking thing he does, there's a whole aside about how Beethoven has a great time seeing fireworks on the Fourth of July. But the general conceit of imagining if a prolific artist lived ten years longer during a huge shift in artistic movements does largely compel as a premise!

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Wolfie get ipad

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THIS

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Fran,

I was most displeased to find my inbox empty this Sunday, save for a few moths that flew out and a Sweetgreens promotion. Please send me a refund check via first class mail in the amount of $0.48 USD, or alternately provide a list of the most recent birds you have seen.

P.S. I am not a crackpot

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the days grow shorter, the weather cools, NYFF season approaches and with it, my inevitable re-downloading of the Sweetgreen app for the three weeks I have to be on the UWS and can't justify a chicken parm sandwich every day

I saw approx 200 seagulls at the beach while scanning the coastline for a WHALE that my friends saw and I never spotted :(

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