August 9, 2013 Windows on the World Andri Snær Magnason, Reykjavik, Iceland By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. This is my window. Or my windows—the view from my living room, where I sit and write. Might not seem very inspiring. I wish I could offer green mossy lava, roaring waves, a glacier mountain top. I do have other spaces—in an abandoned powerstation, a favorite fisherman’s cafe by the harbor, a summer house on the arctic circle—but this is my honest view, what I really see most of the days. This house was built in the 1960s when people were fed up with lava and mountains; they were migrating to the growing suburbs to create a new view for themselves. The young couple who dug the foundation with their own hands dreamed of a proper garden on this barren, rocky strip of land. They dreamed of trees, flowers, shelter from the cold northern breeze. What is special depends on where you are, and here, the trees are actually special. They were planted fifty years ago like summer flowers, not expected to live or grow more than a meter. The rhododendron was considered a miracle, not something that could survive a winter. It looks tropical, with Hawaiian-looking pink flowers; Skúli, the man who built the house and sold it to me half a century later, took special pride in it. I am not a great gardener. We are thinking of buying an apple tree, though they don’t really thrive in this climate. I would plant it like a flower, not really expect it to grow, and hope for a miracle. —Andri Snær Magnason
August 8, 2013 Arts & Culture The Joke About Chickens By Wyatt Williams At dinner a couple of years ago, I told the restaurant critic that I should write a story about chickens. That’s exactly what I said: “I think I should write a story about chickens.” We were dining on roasted bone marrow and ribeyes and rye Manhattans at a steakhouse that neither of us could afford. The newspaper was footing the bill. This was a joke. At least it should have been, because prior to stating my intentions to write a story about chickens, I had been trying and failing to write a story about chickens for four years without realizing it. I should have laughed and laughed and laughed because miserable failure is funny, especially when you’re unaware that you’re repeating the same mistakes. The problem with jokes about chickens is that they aren’t funny. Read More
August 7, 2013 Arts & Culture The Edible Woman By Sadie Stein Jane Austen’s ascendency to the rank of currency has inspired our friends at AbeBooks to suggest a series of literary bills. Perhaps our favorite is this Margaret Atwood $20 note—not least because it is she who once wrote, in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, that “the primary wealth is food, not money.” JK Rowling on the UK’s £20 Hunter S. Thompson on the US $100 note
August 5, 2013 Arts & Culture Sex on the Beach By M.J. Moore Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures. On August 5, 1953, the film version of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity opened at the Capitol Theater in New York City. A heat wave suffocated Manhattan. The theater was not air-conditioned. Nobody cared. Lines formed around the block beginning on that torrid Wednesday night. Quickly, it was decided to add a one A.M. screening to accommodate the overflow crowds. It was a smash hit throughout the world, and the film’s beach scene became instantly iconic. Did the film version of From Here to Eternity so enthrall the masses merely because of that famous beach scene (in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, playing adulterous lovers, passionately kiss as the waves wash over them)? Or because it was tailored to the ex-G.I. generation, thriving amid America’s victorious postwar abundance? Winning eight Academy Awards didn’t hurt. But there’s more to it than that. By the time the film debuted, James Jones’s debut novel had won for itself not just the 1952 National Book Award for Fiction, but also a vast international readership. It would sell a half million copies in hardcover and then three million in paperback. Timing was key. From Here to Eternity was published between the release of the controversial first Kinsey Report (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” in 1948) and its scandalously received sequel, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” which induced a critical firestorm when it appeared in 1953. Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s methodologies and conclusions still inspire debate. But there’s no disputing the public’s reaction then to the two statistically top-heavy books that he and his colleagues issued. Shock, dismay, denial, and disgust were in the air, as the Kinsey Reports’ charts about extramarital sex, masturbation, homosexual and bisexual orientations, and other data contradicted American society’s self-image. Read More
August 2, 2013 Arts & Culture Museum Hours By Drew Bratcher The city is our best shot at escaping the city. Within the big, frantic city, we find places to breathe. Twice in the last month, dozens of times in the past year, I have taken refuge in the National Gallery of Art. Washington has beer joints. Washington has baseball. But when money is tight and the stress intolerable, there are few luxuries like strolling along a wall of Modiglianis for free. Often the museum has been a family retreat. My wife goes for Whistler’s Symphony in White, a rather suggestive portrait of the artist’s redheaded mistress perched at the end of a corridor that has the feel of a wedding aisle. Beckett, our three-year-old, digs the dragon figurines in the gift shop. Of the galleries, the eighteenth century British, flush with gundogs and lapdogs, are the ones he hates least. Beckett wants a dog, preferably a beagle, for Christmas. A dog or a razor scooter, of which there are no paintings on view. Read More
August 1, 2013 Arts & Culture Big Box By Sadie Stein An abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, is now the largest single-floor public library in America. The 124,500 square foot space contains sixty-four computer labs—three for teenagers, ten for children, two specifically devoted to genealogy—an art gallery, a used bookstore, and a café. (Oh, and an “acoustically separated” lounge for teens. The planners either love or hate teenagers, perhaps both.) Check out the whole space here.