Under a makeshift metal-and-bamboo arch at Zuccotti Park this week, The Transom spotted a sign proclaiming “The People’s Library” tacked onto a bulletin board below a table fashioned from plastic book bins. Written in sloppy, black Sharpie another pushpin note read: “Jonathan Lethem 11/7 3:30.” Read More
Sustainable Energy for the Rock Show
Today the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon announced his plan to enact a new “Sustainable Energy for All Initiative” at the UN Headquarters. The proposal naturally included the two-time Grammy-winning rock band Linkin Park. (Yes, that’s right. Linkin Park)
A cynical eye might dismiss the group’s philanthropy as another jump onto the “celebrities save Haiti” bandwagon. However, the band’s foundation, Music for Relief, has had its hand in a vast array of humanitarian efforts since its formation in 2004. (We suppose we can set aside any notions of the band capitalizing on altruism for notoriety.) After all do you even know what any of these guys look like? The band has sold over 50 million records, but largely remain out of the public eye. Read More
Helen Dewitt’s new novel, Lightning Rods (New Directions, 192 pages, $24.95), takes place in an America outside time. This America is in some ways aggressively contemporary, a lawsuit-plagued land of the horny and the litigious. But it is also backward-looking, insofar as it’s a landscape roamed by door-to-door salesmen, a breed whose numbers have, in reality, probably dwindled to bison levels but who, in Ms. Dewitt’s novel, are as ready as ever to offer encyclopedias and Electrolux vacuum cleaners to the unsuspecting housewives of the Midwest. They receive home-baked pie, these salesmen. Read More
