August 26, 2013 Arts & Culture Lessons from an Eleven-City Book Tour By Toby Barlow I learned that ravens are multicolored, like cockatoos, only their plumage radiates out far beyond what our spectrum can see. I learned that the waxing moon sliver comes in the shape of a comma, hinting at more to come. I learned Lou Reed has an incredibly firm handshake. Read More
August 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Reader’s Block By Diane Mehta For a year and a half I read Helen Lowe-Porter’s sauntering, elegant translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain at the rate of about one paragraph a day. For months I envisioned Hans Castorp lighting up his Maria Mancinis or gazing at Frau Chauchat’s creamy white arm curving along the back of a dinner chair. The sentences were amplified with a key transitive verb or with a subtle detail of winter in Davos and then slowly unfurled. Inevitably, several sentences in, I would put the book down and polish some sentences of my own. This happened nightly. I made it through three-quarters of the book, to the point just after (spoiler alert) Joachim dies, and I cried again, just as I had a decade earlier when I first read the entire novel. During the day, I’d go to the writers’ space I belonged to in Brooklyn, a gloomy place filled with dark cubicles, and write all day. Never once did I flip open a book. That was for nighttime reading and always Thomas Mann. He, or rather Lowe-Porter, had the right tone for the book I was writing. Nearly two years later, dozens of books lie scattered on the floor beneath my bookshelves. Some are piled on top. These are the books I mean to read. Many I ordered in one fell swoop from Open Letter Books. Others are offbeat wonders from the NYRB Classics. A handful are poetry books that I’ve read and re-read for decades. But you don’t read poems as much as you hear them in your head. They go on and on, with no end and no beginning, as T. S. Eliot might have said. But you can, of course, read fiction. My neglected authors are an eclectic mix: César Aira, Willa Cather, Roberto Bolaño, Tanizaki, Sholem Aleichem, Thirty Umrigar, Mercè Rodoreda, Jean Genet, Natalie Sarraute, Jennifer Egan, Tessa Hadley, Christina Stead, Don DeLillo, and a dozen or so books by friends, which I promised I’d get to “immediately.” I envy my multi-tasking friends who read voraciously while they write. It started to worry me a little. I picked up books I knew I loved—like The Magic Mountain or The Master and Margarita—and put them down again after lingering over select pages. I made it part of the way through infuriatingly opaque books, including Gombrowicz’s Cosmos and emotionally compelling ones, such as Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, a beautifully composed and moving book told in the alternating voices of a 100-year-old woman and her therapist in the asylum where she lived out most of her adult life. It takes place in Sligo, a word that makes me swoon. Sligo County in Ireland is the setting for W. B. Yeats’ famous poem, “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” where he hoped to put his clay- and wattles-made cabin “and live alone in the bee loud glade.” Still, I put the book down. Read More
August 21, 2013 Arts & Culture Little House on Avon By Laura C. Mallonee A couple of years after I graduated college, my mother gave me a present: her old set of Portuguese Little House on the Prairie books, which she first read at the age of twelve in Brazil. Uma Casa na Campina—the familiar story of a family leaving the safe realm of the Wisconsin woods for the unknown American West—had awakened her to wanderlust: reading itself became her own covered wagon plowing through uncharted prairies. Such yearning quickly blossomed into a passion for the English language, the channel through which a whole literary world came to life. And decades later on hot summer days, we would lie out in the yard as she labored, in her delicate accent, to bring the iconic figures of the literary canon to life. She guided my sister and me through glorious readings of many authors—from Charlotte Brontë to Nathaniel Hawthorne—but the one I mostly vividly remember to this day is Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was in the third grade when we started the Little House books together, fully immersing ourselves in Wilder’s world. If Ma made flap-jacks, we topped our Saturday morning pancakes with old-fashioned maple syrup; when the Ingalls family ate sourdough biscuits, we cultured yeast for our own bread. My sister and I stripped the tender, green sheaths from store-bought cobs, soaked them, dried them, and made our own cornhusk dolls. In lieu of a gingerbread house, we gathered twigs and pebbles from the yard, constructing miniature log cabins inside halved cardboard boxes. My mother even made us calico sunbonnets using a costume pattern she found at the fabric store. Nothing about this seemed unusual to me; it was all part of the great narrative we had entered. Read More
August 21, 2013 Arts & Culture Ah, Underpants! By Sadie Stein In the words of my colleague Justin Alvarez, “Holy Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill’s underpants finally for sale!” Well, for a cool $1,750. The shop’s owner captioned the shorts “longjohn’s journey into night.” Seriously, we can do this all day.
August 20, 2013 Arts & Culture Take a Shot Now By Kaya Genc I have a friend who visits the Sour Times Web site three times a day. She says it’s like watching other people masturbate. “The difference is that they are masturbating on your image,” she says. Here “image” refers to the Sour Times article written about her, while “masturbate” refers to anonymous users’ attempts at describing her. She calls the resultant articles “juices.” “You can’t help but look at their juices,” she says. When asked about why she is so obsessed with other people’s juices and this Web site, she replied: “Because I fucking CARE for my reputation, Kaya. Sour Times is where your reputation is made, where your name can get destroyed. For many people out there it is the only source of information about me. Don’t you care about what people say about you? I do!” Sour Times (in Turkish, Ekşi Sözlük) is a big deal in Turkey. A combination of Urban Dictionary (likewise “a veritable cornucopia of streetwise lingo, posted and defined by its readers”), the Meaning of Liff (it is somewhat similar to Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s 1983 dictionary of undefined or undefinable things) and Wikipedia, Sour Times may be the most exciting Web site created by a Turkish citizen, ever. Sour Times users start articles with mesmerizing speed during the day; their creations, thousands of them, appear on the left frame of the Sour Times homepage, where they are listed in chronological order. Here are some recent examples: “The monkey who doesn’t believe in evolution.” “The nickname Ataturk would use if he was a Sour Times user.” “Girls who are good at finding torrent files on the web.” And my favorite: “Men who get their socks off as soon as they get home.” Read More
August 15, 2013 Arts & Culture Mudbone, Sinbad, and the Typhoon Kid: A Pirate’s Life for Me By Ted Scheinman “The Capture of Blackbeard” by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris “Here was an end of that courageous brute, who might have passed in the world or a hero had he been employed in a good cause.” —Charles Johnson on Blackbeard, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, 1724 BEAUFORT, NC—Mudbone’s wife encounters the same dilemma each August when she visits Beaufort. “Back in Greensboro, at least I can pick him out of a crowd,” she says. “But this weekend? Forget about it.” “Well, I don’t always wear it,” Mudbone adds quietly. “Not when I’m working on windows, for example. But otherwise, yes. All the time.” Mudbone, for the permanent record, should be easy to pick out of any crowd. His default wardrobe is a many-layered 1740s pirate outfit, much of his own making or else his wife’s. His commitment to detail and historical fidelity is remarkable. One of his pistols, each of which he carved and welded himself, has a retractable mini-bayonet that looks like a grilling skewer. He has blades of varying sizes, a musket slung over his back, and a leather tricorn hat plumed with a three-foot feather. He has hewn several of his blade-handles out of elk antler. He is, to understate the case, a spectacle. One weekend each August, however, Mudbone blends as though camouflaged into the hundred-plus temporally displaced privateers and scallywags who invade the two main strips in downtown Beaufort for the town’s annual Pirate Invasion. Two things strike you immediately as you enter Beaufort. The first is that anyone under twelve or over forty is dressed, quite convincingly, as a pirate. The other is that all the women insist that you call them “wenches,” an epithet they bestow with lip-smacking pleasure on one another, as often and publicly as possible. Mudbone does not refer to his wife as a “wench.” In fact, he speaks very little, allowing his weathered face (as though baked by the sun and salt water!) to answer whatever questions his voluble wife does not. “We got started at a Ron Paul convention, actually,” Mrs. Mudbone tells me. “Mudbone used to dress like Davey Crockett, head-to-toe, as a sort of statement, you know? And then I bought him that gorgeous leather tricorn—which isn’t a sailor’s hat really, or wasn’t at the time, in that century—and people would approach him on the street and ask, ‘Are you a pirate?’” Mudbone laughs. “Eventually, it started to sound like a great idea.” “He’s incredibly shy when he isn’t in costume,” his wife confides. “Good luck getting two words out of him. But in the costume, he just transforms. He becomes just a total ham.” Read More