February 22, 2013 Arts & Culture The Joys of Yiddish Dictionaries By Ezra Glinter One of the best things I’ve ordered on the Internet recently is a Yiddish translation of The Hobbit. After getting lost in the mail in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, it finally arrived: a medium-sized white-on-black paperback titled Der Hobit, with a dedication to the “workers and residents of the Newtonville Starbucks (my office).” The translator, Barry Goldstein, is a retired computer programmer, and reworking The Hobbit is only one of his hobbies. He is an arctic traveler who has taken several trips to Greenland, and he has rendered accounts of Shackleton’s voyages into Yiddish. He is also on the editorial team of a more momentous, if not quite as whimsical, project: the new Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, released in January by Indiana University Press. Now, thanks to Goldstein, I have the Yiddish Hobbit, and the means to read it. A dictionary is meant to be a reflection of a language (or a prescription for it, depending on your view), but the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary reflects an entire culture. (In the interest of full disclosure, the dictionary received a grant from the Forward Association, which publishes the newspaper for which I work.) Unlike previous dictionaries, its audience is mainly English speakers, not Yiddish. It is aimed at readers of Yiddish literature (or Yiddish translations of children’s fantasy novels), rather than people who want to speak or write the language, though an English-Yiddish dictionary is also on the way. In the battle between descriptivism and prescriptivism it takes a middle path, erring on the side of the descriptive. Taken with its predecessors, it tells the story of Yiddish in America. Read More
February 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Weirdest Titles of the Year By Sadie Stein Forget the Oscars: what we’re interested in is the Diagram Prize, which rewards the oddest title of the year. The shortlist follows; vote for your favorite before March 22 at We Love This Book. Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop, by Reginald Bakeley God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis, by Tom Hickman How Tea Cosies Changed the World, by Loani Prior How to Sharpen Pencils, by David Rees Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts, by Jerry Gagne Was Hitler Ill?, by Hans-Joachim Neumann and Henrik Eberle
February 20, 2013 Arts & Culture Golden Books By Sadie Stein While we can’t pretend to have actually asked the question, “What if best-selling albums had been books instead?”, we can all agree that the answer, from British designer Christophe Gowans, is brilliant. (We’d suggest The White Album, but, well.)
February 19, 2013 Arts & Culture The Worst Poet in the World By Sadie Stein The handwritten manuscript of a poem by the man considered the worst poet in the English language, William Topaz McGonagall, is expected to fetch up to £3,000 at auction. While the doggerel-esque verse, “In Praise of the Royal Marriage,” is certainly no threat to Tennyson, it doesn’t seem worthy of the dead-fish and rotten-egg tributes the Scottish bard’s performances regularly elicited on the music hall stage. His most infamous work is probably “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” commemorating an 1879 bridge collapse in which numerous train passengers were killed; it is either a masterpiece of outsider art or of insensitivity. Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
February 19, 2013 Arts & Culture Hear That Lonesome Gasket Blow, Part 4: Tonight the Sea Is Douce By Evan James On the Saturday closest to my thirtieth birthday, I went out on the town with Andrew and Izzy, two of my Highbury flatmates. With my time in dreamy Wellington drawing to a close—to say nothing of my waning metabolic rate—the need to run a little wild at the end of an afternoon spent contemplating fiction felt realer than ever. To this end our trio wound up, at three in the morning, after hours of dancing, walking toward a Burger King on the corner of Cuba and Manners. This Burger King occupies the ground floor of a heritage building with an Edwardian Baroque façade. Once home to the first Te Aro branch of the Bank of New Zealand, the building now shoulders what the local government describes as “considerable townscape significance.” “My uncle used to be the president of Burger King,” said Andrew, sitting across from me and eating fries. The Burger King before us teemed with loud, drunken revelers. “I can one-up you,” said Izzy. “My grandfather used to be the chairman of the National Front.” “What’s the National Front?” I asked. “You don’t know what the National Front is?” said Izzy. “Are you kidding me? Fucking Americans!” “Look,” I said. “I know about a lot of things outside of America. I can’t know about all of them.” “You know what the Klu Klux Klan is,” said Izzy. “Well, of course.” “It’s like the Klan, but in the UK.” Read More
February 14, 2013 Arts & Culture Read Your Flowers By Sadie Stein You’ll view that bouquet with new eyes! See more here.