two bits

You might have already seen this as it has been linked on several high-profile websites: Life before Death

German photographer Walter Schels was terrified of death, but felt compelled to take these extraordinary series of portraits of people before and on the day they died. His partner Beate Lakotta recorded the poignant and revealing interviews with the subjects in their final days.

Here is the accompanying interview with the photographer: This is the End

This article in the New York Times is timely – It’s Not You, It’s Your Books. Here’s my favorite paragraph:

Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

I admit to looking at the “last read” section first on online dating profiles. It reveals so much! I wouldn’t break up with someone over their taste in books, but it’s an easy way to weed people out from the start. Does that make me shallow? The whole process is shallow!

For the record, mine currently reads “As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Bee Season by Myla Goldberg, The New Yorker, Wired.” Those are honestly the last things that I have read. What judgments did you just make about me?