A Get Together to Read all Those Unread Magazines

If readers of Ghost Word are anything like me, they have a huge stack of unread magazines towering – or toppling – somewhere in their home. 

For years, that was the condition of my extensive collection of New Yorkers. Past issues, some three or four years old, sat stacked on a table in my bedroom. I always wanted to read them. I always meant to, but I never got around to it. In desperation, I let my subscription lapse.

            In honor of all those unread magazine, The Booksmith will host the first National Magazine Day on Saturday. Starting at 1 pm, people are invited to come to the Haight Street store in San Francisco and bring their stack of unread magazines. For $5, they can hang out in the store and read for hours, drink Philz Coffee, snack, and finally conquer that paper mess. At 6 pm, Kevin Smokler (whose idea this was in the first place) will moderate a discussion with Derek Powazek (Fray),  Jen Angel (formerly of Clamor), Jeremy Smith (of the digital Shareble.net), and  Andrew Leland (managing editor of The Believer).

Once you have finished all those magazine and have vowed to only read content on the web, pick up some tickets to hear San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll interview Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon.com and the author of Say Anything, a recent book on the history of blogging. Carrol and Rosenberg will be in conversation on Monday March 1 at 7 pm at the Berkeley Rep. It is a benefit for Park Day School in Oakland.

Want to know more about the rivalry between German Jews and Eastern European Jews?

If you want to hear some stories about Jews who have had an impact in the Bay Area or a discussion about the rivalry between central European and eastern European Jews, please come by the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael Wed. Dec 2 at 7 pm. I will be having a discussion on a broad range of topics with Fred Rosenbaum, author of the recently-released Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay. Stephen Dobbs will moderate the discussion.

The New York Times, being the New York Times, is a lightning rod for criticism.  The new Bay Area section of the Times is no exception. Read a lively exchange about the strengths and weaknesses of the section in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Writer Michael Lukas isn’t all that impressed with the section, but he changes his mind slightly after hearing what Felicity Barringer, the editor of the section, has to say.

Kevin Smokler interviews Oscar Villalon, the new publishers of McSweeney’s, in The Rumpus. Surprise of the interview: Villalon doesn’t go into bookstores very often.