NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

I’d like to dedicate this advert to my mother (difficult cow, 65) who is responsible for me still being single at 36. Man 36. Single. Held at home by years of subtle emotional abuse and at least 19 fake heart attacks.

7 million is good for me. Most days though I plateau at around 3 million. Any advances? Man with low sperm count (35- that’s my age) seeks woman in no hurry to see the zygotes divide.

Bald, short , fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite.

You’re a brunette, 6′, long legs, 25-30, intelligent, articulate and drop dead gorgeous. I, on the other hand, am 4′ 10", have the looks of Hervé Villechaize (Fantasy Island) and carry an odour of wheat. No returns and no refunds.

Bastard, complete and utter. Whatever you do don’t reply, you’ll only regret it.

List your ten favourite albums. I don’t want to compare notes, I just want to know if there’s anything worth keeping when we break up. Practical forward thinking male, 35.

Source: They Call me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books, edited by David Rose (Scribner, 2006).

Unbelievable the number of assholes who drive slowly in the passing lanes here in North America, especially when it allows them to block off all paths past them. This just doesn't happen on the Autobahn. Even when three lanes offer themselves up…no one bloody uses them…no, they jam themselves over on the left…either simply oblivious to how inconsiderate they are…or too 'proud' to drive on the right hand side, so that people like me who like to speed can blast past them without having to slow down.     

Nothing like the right kind of friends and beautiful surroundings to foster creativity.

Book Artist Claire Van Vliet’s cat….and their view:

Poet Galway Kinnell’s dog…

and their surroundings

Louis Menand on Mark McGurl’s much talked about “The Program Era” (Harvard):

"The nature of that [University creative writing programs] experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates—from “Show, don’t tell,” which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra “Find your voice,” which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions—about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing—and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced. “The rise of the creative-writing program,” he says, “stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history.”

I tend to agree with Menand. It’s not so much that these programs can teach you to write better, rather it ’s that being in such an environment (any educational environment) teaches you about yourself and how to live with those around you, also says Menand:

" they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make. And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other."

This photo does not do it justice. The line stretched all the way around a full New York city block…wide with excited young women. The sun was hot. The wait, for most, would be at minimum 2-3 hours. All for a chance to buy

TEAGAN GLADIATOR PUMP $375.00

Tory Burch footwear at sale prices.

I’ve gotta figure out what it is about Tory’s shoes, or shoes in general, that make them so appealing to women, and then somehow distill and meld the essence of this appeal into what I’m doing here. Seems to me there’s an essential, unfathomable truth about human nature lurking somewhere on these sidewalks…