October 4, 2013 Arts & Culture Frost Papers Recovered, and Other News By Sadie Stein New York’s Center for Jewish History is opening the David Berg Rare Book Room, which will feature, amongst others, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, and Emma Lazarus. A Vermont man has pleaded guilty to stealing (and selling) a number of Robert Frost’s personal papers, which he ran across when a desk containing the papers was donated to the nonprofit where he works. The fine is a whopping one hundred dollars. The French government approved a law yesterday that will prevent Amazon from shipping discounted books for free. The measure is designed to protect embattled independent bookstores. How to draw a hare.
September 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Fall Sweeps By Alexander Aciman Something is gnawing at the nape of your skull: on the one hand, your favorite fall shows are coming back. But you just read an article about synaptic pruning, the process by which your brain eliminates neurons that don’t get any exercise. And whether or not there’s any truth to this neurological use-it-or-lose-it theory, you’ve nonetheless come to the conclusion that your brain is on the brink of self-destruction. Which is to say: it will get rid of every neuron that hasn’t got anything to do with watching Netflix, looking at Buzzfeed, or eating food that’s terrible for you past 3 A.M. You want to watch Boardwalk Empire—what will happen to Nucky Thompson, or Richard Harrow? You want to catch up on The Walking Dead, but then you remember that synaptic pruning, and a frightening question about the difference between you and an actual zombie floats through your head. The convenience of hour-long shows is that they often air on Sunday night, when you have nothing to do. We have a compromise. Don’t spend an hour on the latest would-be cable sensation; instead, tune in for the first season of The Divine Comedy, the hot, new (relatively speaking) series by Dante. Every week, ideally on Sunday at 9 P.M., read one canto—often less than 140 lines!—of what may be the best poem ever written. Season 1 is called the Inferno—think of it as your new Home Box Office. Unfortunately, there isn’t a teaser with fast cuts and a voice over about one man’s trip through hell that can be embedded into this post, but here are some positive early reviews: “Dante’s masterpiece is one of the supreme works of art that the ages have witnessed.” —Theodore Roosevelt “I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.” —James Joyce “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.” —T. S. Eliot And just as every landmark show requires a thorough recap (had you really seen an episode of Mad Men until a a blogger pointed out all the “themes”?), so too will we bring you Dante recaps every week. Go to Barnes & Noble, or BookCourt, or use your parents’ Amazon Prime membership, and pick up the Inferno. We prefer the Hollander translation. The premiere is this Sunday. To catch up on our Dante series, click here. Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.
September 27, 2013 Arts & Culture One Ring to Rule Them All By Ted Scheinman Amid the bustle of this year’s Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), where many attendees sport Regency garb from dawn to dusk, one curious piece of material history is provoking sustained, triumphal glee. Last year, Kelly Clarkson, winner of the first American Idol, in 2002, bought a turquoise-and-gold ring that Austen had bequeathed to her sister, Cassandra. Clarkson is a devotee of the novelist and, by virtue of her fortune, a serious collector who already keeps a first edition of Persuasion in her personal library. Sotheby’s had placed the ring’s reserve price at £30,000; Clarkson paid £152,450. Original Austen totems are hard to come by. Slivers of her library have survived, as have a few likenesses by Cassandra, various small items of jewelry (including a topaz cross that Paula Byrne is especially fond of), and whatever portion of the novelist’s letters Cassandra didn’t burn. The scarcity of such items, and the national importance of the writer Rudyard Kipling once called “England’s Jane,” prompted furrowed brows on at least two continents over the prospect that this ring—perhaps she wore it as she wrote Persuasion!—might find an unceremonious home in southern California. Austen blogs and listservs lit up, as did the Republic of Pemberley. The Jane Austen’s House Museum, in the Hampshire village where Austen spent the last eight years of her life, marshaled this general unease into a pledge-drive campaign. Meanwhile, England’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, enforced a rare “temporary export bar” that kept the ring in the U.K. and gave the museum until the end of December 2013 to match the Clarkson bid. Vaizey’s statement was simple: “Jane Austen’s modest lifestyle and her early death mean that objects associated with her of any kind are extremely rare, so I hope that a UK buyer comes forward so this simple but elegant ring can be saved for the nation.” Read More
September 26, 2013 Arts & Culture Doctored By Casey N. Cep During the bedtime-story portion of his twenty-one-hours-and-nineteen-minutes-long speech on the floor of Congress, Senator Ted Cruz, in an episode that has already achieved notoriety, read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham as his two daughters watched at home in their pajamas. “I will credit my father,” Senator Cruz said. “He invented green eggs and ham.” Cruz’s father, the senator remembered, would add food coloring to eggs or mix spinach into them to get the green color. But not even Dr. Seuss would say that he invented green eggs and ham. It was a bet with his publisher that led Theodor Seuss Geisel to write the book. Bennett Cerf wagered $50 that Geisel could not write a book with only fifty words. And yet by repeating forty-nine monosyllabic words and a single polysyllabic word (anywhere), Geisel assembled a book with 681 words total that would become his most popular book ever, selling tens of millions of copies. Geisel claimed that Cerf never paid him the $50, but Green Eggs and Ham was one of the many Beginner Books that made the author and his publishing house millions of dollars. Part of Dr. Seuss’s midcentury success came from federal education reform that dedicated money to stocking school libraries and promoting early education. “Children’s lit,” according to critic Louis Menand, “was a Cold War growth industry, right alongside Boeing, Northrop, and Dow Chemical.” Dr. Seuss, in particular, was very much of his time, and Menand offers a convincing read of The Cat in the Hat as an allegory for the problems of feminism, communism, and juvenile delinquency. Read More
September 26, 2013 Arts & Culture Swag By Sadie Stein Those with an appetite for funeral baked meats and a few mil burning the proverbial hole, NB: Elmore Leonard’s Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, estate can be yours. “His jeans are all lined up, his shoes are all perfect … I’ve never seen a closet so organized,” says the real estate agent, oddly. If this is not temptation enough, consider this description: “The home is a French Regency stunner with five bedrooms, four full baths, and three half baths. Set on over an acre, the graceful 4,733 square foot mansion is part of a secluded little suburban escape with its own private pool and tennis court.” All the mod cons (one presumes) and within easy distance of Detroit hot spots.
September 25, 2013 Arts & Culture A Lively, Unfinished Manuscript By Abigail Walthausen Illustration from Reading the Landscape of America (Nature Study Guild Publishers) by May Theilgaard Watts. Many of the illustrations to this essay feature a variation on this blunted trapezoid, representing the boundaries of her passenger-side window. A number of years ago, on a plane returning to the United States from Mexico, I sat next to a garrulous doctor who was also the head of New York’s cactus and succulent society. He told me about plant sales, about the traditional Bajan candy that was a great threat to one-hundred-year-old cacti, and about an earlier plane trip on which he smuggled an uprooted barrel cactus back to America wrapped in a ball of dirty T-shirts. But cacti were not the reason for this trip, he explained as he showed me a medal he had just won in a long-distance race up a Guatemalan volcano, running alongside other men in his age group, forty and older. He had been busy conquering a different harsh element of the Central American landscape. After landing, as we parted ways on the elevator up to ground transportation, to myself I thought, This is a character for a short story. But even though the stories that Ivan told me revolved around botany, geology, man’s will to bend nature, it never once occurred to me until reading May Theilgaard Watts’s essay “Looking Down on Improved Property (or an Airplane View of Man and Land)” that Ivan and his chatter might be just as suited to a short ecology study as to fiction. May Theilgaard Watts. Courtesy of Bridget Watts. In this essay from Reading the Landscape of America, Watts begins her narrative with a conversation overheard between businessmen about the evergreen plantings they had been collecting for their yards; she then reflects on the great landing strip on an orchid pinned on a fellow passenger’s lapel. Once she has sensed the small presences of nature, even in the vacuum of the airport, we find her looking out the plane window at the passing city grids and farm grids and reporting that “under this net, Nature is squirming and resisting.” At every margin, every mark on the human neatness of borders, she reels off the names “dandelion, cottonwood, ailanthus,” like a refrain announcing the little victories of hardy wilderness. In another essay from the same collection, “Prairie Plowing Match,” the concern with finding pockets of “native” flora among the “foreign” plantings imported by humans is the same, but this study finds a different refrain. She refers back to seventy-five years of local literature for text suggesting the original Illinois landscape she seeks, and she uses fragments of these historical tractor-pull programs to punctuate her description of a walk around the prairie. When she finds her “natives,” she finds them along a fence rail, on the grounds of a churchyard, and inside an abandoned school house. Read More