Gotham glory days
Once upon a time, a super-cool New York-y little bookshop had to close and everyone was wistful and sad about it. No, we’re not talking about our favorite movie, You’ve Got Mail–NYC literary landmark Gotham Book Mart shut its doors in 2007. The Inquirer and the New York Times are now reporting that the store’s enviable book collection has been donated to Penn. Highlights of the collection include Truman Capote’s and Anais Nin’s personal libraries; Allen Ginsburg worked there and Jackie O. shopped there. Which is to say, it sounds like it was a very cool little shop.
The donation was anonymous, but the collection is reportedly valued at several million dollars. The NYT seems to think the gift came from Leonard A. Lauder, Penn alum and Gotham fairy godmother. Whoever it came from, the collection will fit in nicely with our library’s existing rareties, which include two of Shakespeare’s First Folios and several volumes bound in human skin.
Happy new year! We’re either about 20 hours late on this, or we opted to hold off calling the new year until the majority of precincts were reporting, CNN-style. Either way, a happy and a healthy to you and yours. Instead of looking backwards, we’re looking ahead to Spring ‘09, which begins in just two short weeks! Or less than that, actually. But still way later than the Obama girls, who report to Sidwell Friends on Monday. (Suckers.)
We’ve made the following resolutions on behalf of Penn:
*Trumpet sounds* UTB continues our celebration of winter break with the return of our intermittent book club! Today’s selection is College Girl by Patricia Weitz.
As bona fide college students, we simply can’t ignore a novel that heralds itself as “a sharply observed portrait of campus life and all the many pressures–economic, academic, social–that are funneled into its culture.” A college-centric novel promises to be either really juicy or really lame, Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons being the gold standard for lameness. Wolfe’s book (which, ooooh, was partially based on research completed at Penn’s very own St. A’s) fell flat because each page couldn’t help but reveal how scandalized Wolfe was by “kids these days,” with their sex and drugs and loose morals (all of which provided the author with an excuse to seriously overuse the word “insouciant”). While the main character of Weitz’s book is, regrettably, a tad reminiscent of Charlotte Simmons, College Girl proves itself to be unsentimental, thought-provoking, and really compelling.
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Snow blanketed the eastern seaboard yesterday, and despite the picturesque quality it lent to our homecoming, today we find ourselves still snowed in and thus unable to partake in our favorite winter break activities: visiting the mall. Luckily, our internet connection is working and amazon.com is almost as good as the real thing. What follows is a last-minute holiday gift guide, conveniently featuring items that can be purchased online and shipped to you by December 24th. (We’re leaving out the gift suggestions that have already been posted about. And if you’re wondering whether “holiday gift guide” is a label that’s being used to mask the fact that this is really just a list of stuff your editor wants, well…so be it.)
1. For the sister, female cousin or Michael Gold in your life: Everyone forgets that before Chuck was awesome, he was an attempted date rapist. Relive the simpler times with Gossip Girl - The Complete First Season on DVD.
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Someone forwarded us this message from a Penn undergrad who shall remain nameless:
Greetings,
This is an automatic reply being sent because I am currently studying for Final Exams at the University of Pennsylvania. The end of this semester is Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008. I will be unable to reply to any e-mails until after that date.
Thanks for your understanding,
-[Redacted]
Totally unacceptable virtual impression management, kid–you seem to have missed several important memos re: appropriate usage of Microsoft Outlook. Heh. We almost didn’t post this, but then a voice of reason reminded us: “He’s out of his office for a while, so he probably wouldn’t notice.”
A friendly tipster e-mailed us the other day with a note about the male restrooms in Rosengarten. Most Street editors are female, so it was news to us that Penn’s fundraising efforts even extend to sponsoring individual urinals. Yep, some of the urinals have plaques above them–one reads “The relief you are now experiencing is made possible by a gift from Michael Zinman.”
Another picture, and some speculation, after the jump.
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Our admiration for New York Magazine is well-documented, and when that fondness combines with a topic we are also have a keen interest in (binge drinking), we sit up and take notice. This week’s magazine contains a thought-provoking feature on women, especially young women, and their drinking habits. Its thesis certainly gels with what we observe on campus on a regular basis: ladies love their drinks. And we don’t necessarily begrudge social drinking, but on the other hand, we do worry about the larger implications of it. To wit:
For many women, heavy drinking might be only a blip on the radar, a youthful folly, if it weren’t for higher education. The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life. “College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.” And these days, the gender gap on campus is reversed: Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.
Several more illuminating quotes, and our take, after the jump.
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Big ups to everyone else who’s traded daylight for fluorescent library light this weekend. Somewhere among those throngs is your UTB editor! As we we sit here pitying ourselves, it occurred to us that we have transgressed some sort of finals line of demarcation and found ourselves behaving in ways that, in our day-to-day lives, we would consider heinous. Here’s a little cheat sheet for recalibrating your personal code of ethics:
You have no idea how thankful we are for this
Saving a seat by leaving all your crap there unattended for hours at a time
Normal level of offensiveness: High
Finals level of offensiveness: Low. Completely permissible.
Not turning off your cell phone in the library
Normal level of offensiveness: Low
Finals level of offensiveness: Medium (But completely acceptable when we’re the ones with the ringing phone)
Wanting to hug the person who brought in a surge protector
Normal level of offensiveness: High. Never hug a rando.
Finals level of offensiveness: Nonexistent. You would be nothing without a place to plug in your laptop!
Have you always wanted to be one of those girls who yells “Vagina!” on Locust Walk? Well, you can do that of your own accord regardless of your gender or extracurricular affiliation, but if you’re a girl and you become part of Penn V-Day, you’ll be yelling about vaginas in good company.
Ah yes, this weekend brings auditions for V-Day/Vagina Monologues 2009. V-Day is always one of the biggest events of the spring semester, and this year’s show benefits Women and Girls of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Participants usually end up being a mix of performing arts/a capella people,senior extracurricularmongers, and everyday exhibitionists, so joining has the added benefit of making you cool by association.
Auditions/registration for crew will be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons in Houston Hall and Platt Performing Arts House. Get all the deets on this event page, and while you’re there, take note that the mother of the show’s producer (senior Rachel Garber) has adorably posted a comment on the page’s wall. How heart-warming…or perhaps vagina-warming.
We are saddened to report that today’s issue of Street (the joke issue!) is the last one of the semester. But luckily it’s a good one! Contrary to what some people with poor reading comprehension skills think, Street is not a joke every week — it is funny, yes, but our interviews, reviews, and features are all REAL. Except for this week. Ahem. So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, feast your eyes on Street U., our state school alter ego.
Inside, you’ll find the eagerly anticipated Cultural Elite ‘08, a list of seniors whose reputations precede them…a fashion guide to get you through the big game…an interview with our hero Dave Matthews…a guide to Street U. for prospective students…a class registration tip sheet…and much more!
Tonight’s “writers’ meeting” will be held at Smoke’s — meet at the Street office (4015 Walnut) at 6:30 and we’ll head there together. And don’t worry, we’ll still be blogging off and on through finals.
Your campus media critic returns, this time with a thoughtful rumination on the fall issue of Penn’s food magazine, Penn Appetit.
Well look who’s all fancy-schmancy with their glossy paper! Too good for newsprint, are ya? We see how it is. Looking beyond the cover, however, a bit of background: Penn Appetit is based at the Writers House, and you can pick it up there or on the walk, where people have been distributing the latest issue (the magazine’s third) over the past few days.
Let’s move on to the magazine’s first page, a letter from the editors, where we are impressed to learn that the Penn Appetit-ers have nearly perfect signatures. (Your media critic is a sucker for good penmanship.) The first feature in the magazine is a little point-counterpoint of raw vs. cooked food, and we’re skipping it, because hello? Cooked. Next to it in a nifty chart about how to cure everyday ailments with the stuff you already have in your kitchen: servicey, we like it, bring on the fatty fish. The photographs throughout the issue are not only professional-looking but pleasing to the eye. We’re all about the pizza on page 7.
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You may or may not have noticed that your UTB editor has been slightly less, well, around lately. We apologize–it’s the last week of classes and we have been forced to redirect our ADD away from this blog and towards our coursework. It effing sucks. But you know what else sucks? The fact that, no matter whether we’re in an advanced 20th century poetry seminar or some crappy intro course to fulfill the society requirement, our classmates never fail to pepper our professors with the exact same series of inane questions about final papers. Herewith, a field guide:
Is it ok if we write in the first person?
Welcome to college! Now that high school is over, you really need to look beyond the whole first person/third person dichotomy, because it’s actually more or less irrelevant. Your papers should be formal and should (in most cases) not contain personal anecdotes about your good times at summer camp, nor should they contain that superfluous little phrase “I think” (or the more pernicious “I feel like,” which, much to our consternation, is sweeping the Penn community). Ergo, you probably never need to use “I,” and if you think you do, you can probably get around it by saying something like “the author.” However, if you’re really struggling with how to cut the “I”’s out of your paper, just stop. Because it doesn’t matter. Too many “I”s may be a symptom of unsophisticated writing, but not the cause. Unless your professor is a complete idiot, he or she will care much more about the bigger picture than the occasional slip into third person. And while we’ve had a few annoying profs here at Penn, we’ve found that “complete idiots” are way more likely to be found at the high school level.
Should our papers be double spaced?
Yes. And you should also number the pages. And put your name on the first one. This is Mickey Mouse stuff, guys.
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Thanksgiving break is almost here, and all we want to do right now is eat candy and watch Love Actually. But while we’re feeling sentimental, we might as well tell you what (or, more accurately, who) we’re thankful for this year.
Kerry, Julia, and Sarah Beth: Because you make it happen.
Hillary: Because all the “Overheard at Penn” quotes ARE REAL.
Lauren: Because you spearheaded our doomed guerilla marketing scheme.
Raya: Because you’re a British person who wears scarves.
Eliza and Kristen: Because at the office your taste buds settle for DP pizza and FroGro birthday cakes.
Johann and Grace: Because the hipster music editor is our favorite meme of all.
Inna and Laura: Because Jebediah Street founded our great magazine.
Julie and Jessica S.: Because you’re the closest thing Street has to a vaudeville comedy act.
Jessica G.: Because we’re all in this together.
Ben: Because he’s got it like that.
Danyal: Because he wins Street’s “Spicy Curry Award.”
Jen and Pam: Because we secretly take pride in being Jackefman’ed.
Julie and Frances: Because this blog’s typos are not lucky enough to be fixed by you.
Sarah and David: Because without you, we’d have to rely solely on WikiCommons images.
We must now return to spazzing out about the end of the semester–posts may be sporadic over the next few days.
Dear Daniel,
We need to talk.
Things have been a little rocky with us ever since you landed Casino Royale. I probably shouldn’t have said that Pierce Brosnan will always be my favorite Bond, but I bet you’re glad that I talked you down from that bottle of L’Oreal Feria Espresso #47 now.
Since you’ve been dropping hints about it all month, I guess I’ll see Quantum of Solace sooner or later (a little needy, Dan, but whatever). I still think you’re trying to tell me something with that title. In fact, we probably both need some space. Your jokes about literally piercing people with your blue eyes have gotten old. They’re not lasers.
Anyway, I left a box of your things by the front door: CDs, t-shirts, Mr. Tinkles, soda, purple stuff, Sunny-D. Pick it up next time you’re in town. Oh, and I’m keeping the Aston Martin.
–Victoria T. Mazgalev
In case you’re lucky enough not to know anyone in a frat and thus haven’t been forwarded this news item by a million different listservs already, here’s the scoop: a Penn girl’s picture has landed on Playboy’s web site. This is a family blog, so we won’t post the saucier pictures, but here’s a link to the bikini shot.
Girlfriend looks good, but we don’t think this will score her any points in her apparent quest for that elusive law degree. Trying to take a page from Elle Woods, perhaps? We hear the more scandalous pics require a $20 membership on Playboy’s site.
