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>The guy at the checkout at a Brooklyn branch of Trader Joe's, a wildly popular speciality grocery chain, had a spray of blond hair, a masters in literature and a California drawl on the words: "Hey, man." He was packing the soy chorizo into a brown bag when he glanced at the book I was carrying – a copy of Brooklyn Is, a 1939 essay by the author and journalist James Agee – and asked if I'd read it. I shook my head. "Man, it's amazing," he said. "Everyone in Brooklyn should read it."
>Reading Agee's essay later that day, I kept thinking of that young man and what Agee would have made of him, and how Agee's odyssey of Brooklyn might look if he were to undertake the assignment today. Trader Joe's itself stands in a section of Atlantic Avenue that Agee described as "vacant lots, the ghosts of floors against their walls: and the dark hard bars at street corners". Few of those dark hard bars exist now, but a few blocks west of Trader Joe's stands Montero's, which opened in 1945. Its neon sign and nautical paraphernalia embody something of the era Agee was writing in, but the bar no longer opens at 8am to serve longshoremen coming off the midnight shift. Artists and writers (in search of "authenticity") have replaced the Baltic seafarers. The same is true of Sunny's, a 120-year old bar in Red Hook – a waterfront neighbourhood of warehouses and old single-row homes that served as the inspiration for On the Waterfront.
>Today Sunny's is popular for bluegrass sessions and literary salons that attract aficionados from across the borough. There is not a night of the week when you can't attend a reading in Brooklyn, or several. Many take place at the independent bookstores that have proliferated in the last few years, or – like BookCourt in Cobble Hill, where I remember waiting in a long line of young tattooed men and women to hear Bret Easton Ellis read – doubled in size. And writers aren't just coming here to read; they are flocking here to live. Some, such as Paul Auster, have been here for decades; others, like Martin Amis (a stone's throw from BookCourt), are fresh off the boat. On Saturdays you can go Pulitzer spotting at Fort Greene's farmers' market, where both Jhumpa Lahiri and Jennifer Egan may be found perusing the vegetables. When Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love, brought a Park Slope townhouse in 2005, bloggers gasped at the $3.5m [£2.26m] price tag.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2012/jul/08/why-brooklyn-is-mecca-for-writers?CMP=share_btn_tw
How does this story make you feel /lit/?
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I don't like gentrification. I don't like either the fashion or the fashionability of artist communities. I wish Faber and FSG could've set up in hick towns so all the artists would live out in the country instead of shitting up the cities and raising rent.
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wow things change and you are so authentic because you can see the shalloweness in other people trying to have fun
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>>9589561
desu I hate people who shit on gentrification way more than actual gentrifiers. yes, it's annoying if people pretend to assume the culture of a neighborhood while actually destroying it. but living in surburbia isn't appealing for a lot of people, so "gentrifiers" are just responding to natural incentives by going back to neighborhoods built before suburbia happened.
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>>9591162
It's usually people who are inclined to hate gentrification who gentrify areas. Trendy liberal white millennials.
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>>9591187
Yeah that's true actually. I'm inclined to think that problem is actually larger than gentrification but more with wages in cities not matching the cost of living there. I don't know that much about it since I'm not actually a homeowner yet. But I intend to gentrify once I am, I like living in cities and walking places
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>>9591187
>t. Has never lived in a city
Pal, the blood-lust Jose and Raul have for tech nerds in the Bay is unrivaled.
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>>9589554
pretty sure it's product placement for trader joe's first and foremost.
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>>9589554
It seems to be written by someone completely immersed in brands, prices and their translation into merit badges, be it diplomas or tattoos. I don't think it's conscious. Of course it's also an intentional native advertising on clickbait blog.
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>>9592793
>pretty sure it's product placement for trader joe's first and foremost.
i just figured it was a story "suggested" by some real estate developer hoping to keep brooklyn seeming cool till they can sell the last of their new condos to dentists
trader joe's is dank as fuck tho i'm not hatin, i hope they roll jacked up price ass whole foods
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>>9591203
It's more just a lack of housing supply due to draconian building regulations.
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>>9594032
This
We need more houses or apartment complexes in cities as the population increases but we dont build them. So prices go up.
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>>9589554
It doesn't matter, America is a provincial dump from coast to coast
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Writers and all artists should live as close as possible to the very rich because those are the people who will get your work published and have enough free time to appreciate your shoehorned nuance mimetics. This is why NYC is good for writers and it's probably better that today you are less likely to get murdered or raped there. I guess.
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>>9594032
>draconian building regulations
They are not draconian, the lack of regulations in the past produced unsafe, shoddy buildings with inflated (relative to the real) values. Also it created unsafe conditions for the builders themselves. A huge contributing factor to high housing prices today is a work force shortage. Too many young men virtue signalling while they bag your groceries at Trader Joe's. I work in the trades and it is pretty great btw. In reality the only thing I have time or energy to write is poetry. This is probably true of any full time work, however.
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