Katherine Sharpe | a pilgrim’s blogress

Alison found a gem in the New York Times obituary for Elaine Kaufman, owner of Elaine’s restaurant in New York:

After an argument with her, Norman Mailer vowed never to return and wrote her an unflattering letter. She scribbled “Boring” across the top and sent it back to him. A day or two later, he was back.

I have nothing against Norman Mailer, but I think that now I revere Elaine.

Earlier this week I sent off two chapter drafts, and since then I’ve been taking a little elusive ‘me-time.’

Actually, I was supposed to get back to work this morning, but I’ve been feeling an itch lately to blog. I don’t know why. Is it an itch to remember how to write something that is more casual and conversational than an article or a book chapter? A wish for a minute or two away from My Topic? Whatever it is, I’m going to go with it. The freelance life has its detractions, and I may as well compensate by taking advantage of the biggest benefit (which is sometimes also a detraction)—there being no one to look over my shoulder when I goof off.

I’ve been in Charlottesville for three weeks, meaning that I’m halfway through what I had decided would be a Jane Austen-esque length of time to visit. Although, perhaps sadly(!), I didn’t come here to chase around soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars. I came here to work on the book, far away from the vast/vulgar/meretricious distractions of the city where I usually live.

So here’s the halftime report.

[Read more →]

Happy December! We all have a month of office holiday parties, etc., to look forward to before starting to think about New Year’s, but in case you’re already eager to put 2010 to bed, I do have a little “How Did You Get That F&%*ing Awesome Job” interview with Lori Raimondo of the Times Square Alliance, who helps to produce the world’s best-known New Year’s Eve extravaganza, in the current issue of ReadyMade.

The rest of the issue has more pre-holiday appropriate fare, including the inevitable gift guide (except, where are the prices? Perhaps they’re in the print magazine, which I haven’t opened yet?) Online, I discovered and enjoyed this slideshow of variations on the pipe shelving unit. Is there nothing that can’t be built with plumbing pipe? I went over to my brother-in-law’s sister’s house the other day—she and her husband are both architects—and noticed that the suspended open shelving in her kitchen is made of galvanized plumbing pipe, and looks picture-perfect. And I am still quite happy with my desk.

I’ve also been slowly adding stories and projects from ReadyMade‘s ten-year archive to the website. It’s fun to return to the early issues, especially when I notice the names of people who wrote for ReadyMade in the early 2000s and have gone on to publish widely elsewhere (shout-outs to Jacob Ward, Ethan Watters—whose new book about the exportation of American concepts of mental illness to the rest of the world is near the top of my to-read stack at the moment—and Lisa Selin Davis, among others). It’s also been fun to re-stumble across items that I loved the first time around. Here’s a sampling of personal favorites.

COMPLETELY SUBJECTIVE HIGHLIGHTS FROM READYMADES 1 THROUGH 15:

+ the Meat Cart Bed from issue 1 was aspirational for me, circa my last year in college—a symbol of the bohemian NorCal loft life that I wanted to track down and make my own.

+ I still want to make a Sweater Blanket someday

+ This short story of sorts, to my knowledge the only fiction that RM ever published, still read as sweetly as I remembered it. (Who’s MJ Deery, and where is she now?!)

+ Speaking of the loft life, I liked and like this place from issue 2. It’s stunning, but the furnishings truly don’t look expensive. I imagine it gets chilly and drafty in there on cold San Francisco nights, but I guess that’s why we have design magazines. I still covet the sub-flooring coffee table.

+ I’ve been fascinated by the Rural Studio in Alabama ever since reading about it in RM 4.

+ Still cute: the Scrabble bulletin board.

[Read more →]

As some of you already know, I’m working on a book about antidepressants. Specifically, it’s about growing up on antidepressants—the intersection between antidepressants and young-person-ness.

I’m looking for people who have taken antidepressants during their teens or twenties and are willing to share their stories. (Everyone who makes it into the book will be anonymous.) I’m interested in all kinds of experiences: long, short, positive, negative, mixed.

If you’ve got a story to tell, I’d be so grateful if you would drop me a line by email with the basics—your name, your age, a few lines about you. We can take it from there. I am happy to share a little more about the book if you like, too.

Please feel free to forward this link far and wide. Thank you!

For the past year and several months, I’ve been working at ReadyMade, editing stories about DIY projects and cruising the internets in search of things that other people made.

One of the projects that I liked enough to want to attempt myself someday was the black pipe furniture that Mike Perry and his office-mates built for their new workspace in the Monti building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

(Building A Desk from Michael Perry on Vimeo.)

In a cheaply ironic fashion, my year of covering the DIY world left me with little time to make things on my own. But I’m changing gears now, getting ready to shove off on an almost year-long writing and research project—and getting back into the swing of working in my own space, too.

In the course of rearranging home to make room for this mental project, I finally took on a physical one: I designed and built my own desk from ¾-inch black plumbing pipe and a section of Ikea Numerar countertop (solid oak version).

Part of the inspiration was the need for a desk that would fit into an odd space that was constrained by a radiator. Done!

In the final tally, it took five trips to hardware and plumbing stores, one trek to Ikea, ample opportunities to remember how ridiculously heavy solid oak is, several anxious moments with a wrench, and more money than I would have guessed in the beginning, but this is it. It’s done. It’s sturdy. I love it. And I’m already planning design updates. (Made the center bar too high. It could have been an ideal footrest.)