January 8, 2013 Arts & Culture Teen Tour By Sadie Stein People who make it their business to classify such things call them “malt shop books”—the numerous young-adult series written in the 1950s and 1960s. I inherited a few of my mother’s Betty Cavannas in elementary school, and by age twelve I was hooked, scanning library sales and thrift stores for the tiny patch of tartan that denoted a vintage Scholastic paperback or the telltale words that suggested a title targeted at the teenage reader. I learned how varied the genre was: the serious and introspective Betty Cavanna books; Janet Lambert’s series, which take place in military families; the more frivolous Rosamond du Jardins; the slightly odd Lenora Mattingly Webers, which center around the independent-minded Malone family. Many of these books deal with “issues”—teen drinking, peer pressure, fast crowds. But the overall picture of teen life is wholesome and comforting. Parents tend to be supportive and families functional; the occasional sibling rivalry generally gives way to mutual understanding. I was an awkward teenager. And my New York City school—full of sophisticated teenagers whom I found terrifying—was a far cry from the suburban utopia of the malt shop books. A late bloomer, painfully shy and painfully aware of not looking right in the clothes my mom bought me, I dreamed of a world in which virtue was rewarded; boys fell for the smart, quiet girls and were happy with wholesome dates; and everyone knew exactly how to dress for every occasion. I recognized that the books were idealized, but my interest was more than ironic or curious: I found the fictional universe of my collection a true refuge. (More contemporary YA titles took on drugs and sex; frankly, these weren’t my concerns.) I enjoyed all the series, from Candy Kane (a precocious singer on an Army base) to Marty Smith (a gutsy journalism undergrad), but one became my favorite: Anne Emery’s Dinny Gordon books. Emery (not to be confused with the mystery writer of the same name) is perhaps better known for other series—the Sally and Jean Burnaby books, the 4-H centric Jane Ellisons, the Pat Marlowe stories, the Sue Morgan series. But Dinny Gordon was, and remains, my favorite. Read More
January 7, 2013 Arts & Culture CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Preface By George Saunders We loved Joel Lovell’s profile of George Saunders in yesterday’s Times Magazine. Lovell quotes generously from Saunders’s preface to the new edition of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. By special arrangement with the publisher, we bring you the preface in full. 1. This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 1989 and 1996, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take to see that what was on the screen was not a technical report about groundwater contamination but a short story. I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived. We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): “Thanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.” And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager’s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book. This book. Read More
January 4, 2013 Windows on the World Harris Khalique, Islamabad, Pakistan By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. In the afternoon when the sun is blazing and in early evening when its orange hue allows me to stare into the horizon, I look out of this window in my office that opens into a terrace but offers a wider view. I see the palatial houses and imagine the few who live there in luxury. Then I think of the many who serve them—who hurl rolls of newspapers onto their porches, bring groceries, drive cars, sweep floors, toil in the sizzling kitchens. They dwell in shanty settlements ensconced within the affluent neighborhoods or live in crammed quarters in the backyards of these houses. Before dusk I can look beyond the trees and catch a clear glimpse of the thin-looking white minarets of the Faisal Mosque, one elegant and expansive structure on the slopes of the Margalla Hills. These minarets remind me of the worst dictator we have had. He lies buried in the gardens of this mosque while we still struggle to rein in the beasts of ignorance and bigotry he unleashed. Last week when it stopped raining after several hours, I decided to go beyond the window and walk across the terrace to look over the street from above. I saw a young girl squatting by a small puddle and folding paper into boats. An odd mix of intense sorrow and great hope enveloped my heart. —Harris Khalique
January 2, 2013 Arts & Culture Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Modernists Go Off-Menu By Jacob Leland The opening scenes of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times demonstrate the indignities mechanized factory production perpetrates upon the bodies of its workers. The first shot, of sheep herded into a pen, dissolves into one of men leaving the subway. They’re bound, the viewer assumes, for the kind of job in which the next cut finds Chaplin’s Little Tramp: working on an assembly line, his motions so repetitive that they become reflexive. He can’t stop twisting his wrists, as if to tighten bolts, even when he leaves the station where he tightens bolts all day. His body is so bound to the line and to the factory that the same boss who controls the conveyor belt’s speed also controls the movements of the Tramp’s body. Finally, the factory extends its control to the Tramp’s last autonomous function: eating his lunch. A salesman so committed to mechanization that he lets a machine speak for him has brought to the factory boss’s office a prototype of “the Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work.” He asks the boss to pick one of his workers for a demonstration, and of course Chaplin’s Tramp is volunteered. Strapped into the machine, hands incapacitated, the helpless Tramp watches the machine rotate plates before him: soup, air-cooled between spoonfuls; corn, spinning on its cob; cubes of meat, pushed by a mechanical arm from the plate into his mouth; and finally cake for dessert. The machine promises to “eliminate the lunch hour.” Even before the machine goes predictably haywire—speeding up, spilling soup on the Tramp’s shirt and cake in his face (always pausing, hilariously, to wipe his mouth)—it’s clear to the viewer that some kind of line has been crossed. Read More
January 2, 2013 Arts & Culture Lucky Thirteen By Sadie Stein My apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is of the standard prewar varietal, with the faint chicken-soup-in-the-stairwell smell familiar to any New Yorker and an elevator that goes up to fourteen. And by fourteen, I mean, of course, thirteen. In this respect it is standard too; the elevator, made by Otis (I paused to double-check as I was writing this), indulges our collective superstition and forces those on the top floor to live a peculiar quotidian fiction. In taller buildings, of course, everyone above twelve is technically living a lie, albeit of the white sort. This is a bit of magical thinking that never fails to delight me on even the darkest day. Read More
December 28, 2012 Arts & Culture Book Shopping with the Best-Read Man in America By John Lingan We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! I was dragging my five-year-old daughter through the musty stacks of my favorite used bookstore last spring when a middle-aged man, squatting in the Sci-Fi section next to a brimming cardboard box, caught my eye and reminded me of someone. “Excuse me,” I asked, “are you a writer?” “I am,” he said, standing up and straightening his glasses. His eyes were deep set and hard to read. He was bashful. “Are you Michael Dirda?” I asked. “I am.” It was him: the book critic and author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, known apocryphally as the best-read man in America, whose essays had enticed me to read everything from Little, Big to Three Men in a Boat—and here he was, squinting his way through the lowest shelves in the same crusty bargain dungeon I came to all the time. “Amazing. Nina, this is the man who wrote that little letter that we have in your George and Martha,” I told my daughter. Nina was nonplussed. “When I was eight, in 1992,” I explained, “I wrote a letter to the Washington Post when James Marshall died and you printed it in the Book World section and even wrote a sweet little response. And her grandpa put a photocopy of that letter in The Complete George and Martha for her.” Read More