A NameDrop RetroSpective

August 26, 2008 by Svetlana  Send to a Friend

We used to have this book column that I swear was the best thing in the world (wide web).
It was called “Namedrop” and was written by Sarah Steinberg, who was as sharp as she was pretty and cool, all the way up until she was scooped up from under our wings by VICE magazine and taken away to be their Canadian editor.
This is the kind of fame and fortune you can expect from writing for BYT.
True story.
Some of you read it (religiously) and some of you probably did not (these things happen, I know, I know) but after I tried to explain to the genius of it to Libby last night (she had not seen it before) I realized: it may be time to make a little anthology of it.

So, in a series of links that click very easily I bring you (and you should read them all):

How to Namedrop Books at Cocktail Parties like a Jerk

For my first column here at BYT, I’m going to outline several of the bazillions of fine authors that you could use to sound like a jerk the next time you go to a cocktail party. I didn’t realize that some people actually go to the kinds of parties where you’re not expected to arrive wearing a pair of four-year-old chucks with shitstains on the bottom and then proceed to surreptitiously fill a plastic cup with the first bottle of hard liquor you see because you “forgot” to bring any of your own. I wouldn’t know, because I don’t get invited to parties.
feat: Milan Kundera, Judith Butler and more

Namedrop: Books That Will Get You Laid

Or: BOOKS MY SLUTTY FRIEND JONATHAN NAMEDROPS TO GET LAID
My slutty friend Jonathan’s romantic entanglements are governed by the credo “Give the pretty ones a book and the smart ones a hat.”
This works for him, if you consider having sex with lots and lots (and lots) of people important. This is a brief selection of the books that have worked best for him.*

(BTW, the above quote is from Up At the Villa by William Somerset Maugham: a novella that my slutty friend Jonathan for some reason expects me to have read. I haven’t read it, but I DID read the spoiler article about it on Wikipedia - which is where I get the bulk of my information - and from that, I gathered that it was a kind of suspense/thriller about sexual politics in the 1940s. It sounds, at least from the Wiki article, like a romping good time: sex, murder, intrigue, scandal and etcetera. Like Melrose Place, but more words.)

feat: Lawrence Durrell, Martin Amis and more

Books I NameDropped in 5th Grade

By the fifth grade, at age eleven, I already knew that I desperately wanted to be cool. My father, an absent New Yorker with a thick accent and a serious swagger, was exactly what I considered “cool” to be and this led me to think, in my eleven-year old mind, that I too was intrinsically cool. Never mind all the evidence to the contrary: I didn’t have any friends except for one really bossy girl who was always staring into her underwear, I was deeply and passionately in love with Doogie Howser MD (Oh how I wanted to hug him, hug him, and hug him good) and I was so oblivious to rock ‘n roll (the only tape I had was Cats and I knew every single lyric) that when my friends older brother asked me whether I liked Genesis, I told him -with that kinda slow nod I see hipsters doing all the time - that I “preferred Nintendo.”

feat: Anne of Green Gables, Deenie and more

Playwrights to NameDrop Next Time You’re Wearing a Turtleneck

Starting in the 9th grade I attended a performing arts school where I majored in Drama. I spent a lot of my time painting sets while wearing turtlenecks and singing the songbook from HAIR, which was actually cool at my school. The rest of my time was spent talking shit about art with my adolescent friends and flunking out of math. So it was sort of like “Fame” - complete with boys and girls running around the hallways in leotards - except that we never got a spin-off TV show. I can’t say that my years studying drama helped me all that much in my life but what I can tell you is that I’m fully equipped to deal with melodramatic emotional meltdowns, and that cast parties are fun because theater actors are never self-conscious about how poorly they dance. Below is a brief list of some of the plays I read during those years of trust games and improv and seriously awful dancing.

feat: Albert Jarry, Edward Albee and more

How to Namedrop Montreal Poets (You’ve Never Heard Of)

Are all poetry scenes exactly alike everywhere? An elitist group of individuals, some with genuine talent and some totally bereft, who meet in dark basement bars for weekly readings, drink too much, spend the bulk of their time looking around at who they might like to fuck and the rest of it wondering who’s better than them, all the while slapping each other on the back or face, depending on the answer?

I had a poetry professor who used to compare poets to traveling vacuum cleaner salesmen. I don’t remember what he was getting at (sucking debris into a vortex?) but the mental image of a bunch of guys in ill-fitting brown suits, a little bored, tired, drunk, nibbling on munchies at conventions - that’s just how I like to think of poetry scenes. And I don’t think that’s unkind. I happen to love (good) poetry, and I support those scenes. As flawed as they may be, poets need them, just as the traveling vacuum cleaner salesmen needs an annual convention: a place to connect and commiserate with others who participate in your trade in what is otherwise a lonely and penurious world.

feat: John Paul Fiorentino, Robert Allen and more

Books You Don’t Want To Namedrop On a 6 Hour Flight

Personally, I don’t take that many long flights anymore. When I was a huge movie star in Moldova it was back and forth from Chisinau to L.A. every week, but now that I’m a pathological liar in Northeast DC, I kind of kick it local. Anyway, next week I’ll have the pleasure of flying to the exotic locale of Toronto, Canada and I plan on not having any of the following four books with me

feat: Hannah Montana, Story of The Eye AND MORE

Hipster Authors to Namedrop When You’re a Hipster, Too

My first thought was to compile a list of books to cover the field: a vegan cookbook, the VICE Do’s and Dont’s Guide, a DIY guide to bike repair, maybe a Bret Easton Ellis novel like Less Than Zero or something that NPR’s put out. But the only thing I could find from NPR was called This I Believe and besides not having read it, it sounded way too earnest. So I did a little research.
I found The Hipster Handbook by Robert Lanham (he’s from Williamsburg!) and what I discovered is that A) the word “cool” is out (as is the word “out”) and has been replaced by “deck” and B) I’m not a hipster, even though I could be mistaken for one (skinny jeans) in the wrong part of town (the suburbs). My politics don’t jive. I don’t eat meat, so I only semi-score there (since I eat fish and eggs and cheese and other things to keep me alive) and I do have an arts degree (total score) but I don’t cut my own hair (bad!) or have my parents pay my rent (bad! bad!) and I don’t own any vintage sweatshirts with cats on them or, at the very least, a keffiyah (bad! bad! bad!)

So instead I’ll have to talk about a particular subgenre of the hipster, the lit-hipster.

feat: Rick Moody, Miranda July and more.

NameDropping Children’s Books? How Snob!

I don’t like children. Too judgmental.

Feat: Shel Silverstein and more

Rockstars Stab At Literature, Namedrop Stabs Them

Dear readers of Namedrop - all six of you (I see Jayce! and Jason! and Michael! And Svetlana!) what lengths I go to for you. What investigative journalism. I don’t know what that means.

But do you know what I did for you, dear readers? I read Jewel’s A Night Without Armour in public for you. That was kind of embarrassing. I slogged through a whole three pages of Nick Cave’s And The Ass Saw The Angel, but I didn’t know what in the hell he was talking about. At Barnes & Noble, with the clandestine stealth of a spy, I transcribed some of Jill Scott’s poetry for you.

I even purchased Billy Corgan’s book of poetry, David Berman’s book of poetry, and Steve Earle’s book of short stories, and I read almost all of them! I love you, too.

We love you as well, an miss you Sarah. Come back for a visit sometime. In the meantime we’ll pray for a book column even approximately this clever.
THE END

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