February 8, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Zora Neale Hurston, 1938. Photographer: Carl Van Vechten. A cultural news roundup. RIP, John Christopher. Brighten your day! The world’s most beautiful bookstores. Book (review) clubs. The Rings of Saturn, coming to a theater near you. Their Eyes Were Watching God, coming to a radio near you. Amazon.com, coming to a store near you? R. Crumb (among others) turns the Western canon into graphic novels. David Foster Wallace’s keeper shelf. Mona Lisa’s double. Pirates of Lexicon Valley. Bloomsbury Group antics: expensive. “If you come, so what? If you don’t come, so what? Will Turkey lose prestige?” Auster v. Erdogan. The museum of human gullibility. “12 Globe-Shaped Foods. Top 10 Famous Buses. 40 Culturally Relevant Birds. 13 High-Tech Steampunk USB Flash Drives.” Why we like lists.
February 7, 2012 Arts & Culture Happy Hour with Gian By Giancarlo DiTrapano John Haskell. Photo by Ryan Field. John Haskell, Dec. 13, 2011. Sparks Steak House, East Forty-sixth Street. John and I met for dinner at Sparks Steak House on East Forty-sixth Street. He was writing a piece on city restaurants where mobsters have been gunned down. Sparks has fine steaks but an even finer history of murder under its front awning. (Mob boss Paul Castellano and his guard were shot out front by mobsters wearing white trench coats and black Russian ushanka hats.) I live on West Forty-sixth, so I walked through Times cytotec mexico Square and crossed a few more avenues to the restaurant. I passed through the thirty-year-old murder scene out front, came inside, and a rambunctious party filled the reception area. John was already there, in the middle of the party. He waved me his way and we were shown to our table. John Haskell: I was walking down the street, singing some Christmas carol, like a Nat King Cole thing … Gian: Out loud? JH: Yeah, kind of singing, people walking around. The weather’s nice, it’s Christmas time, and I was feeling happy. Happiness is appreciation. I think appreciation has something to do with the fact that you’re going to die. It’s like, “This is life, and it’s going to be over, but this is the moment now.” Talking around the idea of happiness is holy stuff. Its definition and how to attain it is what Aristotle would ask of Plato in a dusty Athenian salon thousands of years ago. But today, happiness is rarely a topic of discussion outside of a therapist’s office or a sorority dorm room. To be happy, we have learned, we must also be naive. Read More
February 3, 2012 Windows on the World Xi Chuan, Beijing By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. This is one of three windows in my study. The study is a one-bedroom apartment on the fifteenth floor. I don’t know how many stories this building has—probably twenty-five or more—but I have never been above the seventeenth floor. During the day, if I don’t need to be at school, I stay in my study. It is crowded with books and old objects I collected from flea markets. I don’t have many friends visit me. I used to have a neighbor who was the manager of a small company that installed central heating. He occasionally came to talk with me, and I discovered that he had been a lover of poetry when he was young. I am sure he didn’t know who I was, though, so I told him that I was a teacher of literature, which is true. The window faces east. When I sit at my desk in front of a wall of books, writing, the window is to my left. When I bought this apartment, which is a fifteen-minute walk from my home, in the late nineties, the building standing in front of my window was already there, as was the bridge, but the building behind the bridge was not, so there was a vast view across the city. But the whole city of Beijing was a giant construction site in the nineties and 2000s, and the view couldn’t last. Once I got used to the buildings in the window, I seldom looked out of it. No trees can reach the fifteenth floor, so no birds perch at my window. When I look out, I see cars running on the bridge. Nothing else. —Xi Chuan
February 2, 2012 Arts & Culture Document: Happy Birthday, James Joyce By Sarah Funke Butler Image courtesy Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc.; document now part of a private Joyce collection in New York. There’s so much to celebrate today, February 2, the birthday of James Joyce. On January 1 of this year the published works of Joyce came into the public domain. What does this mean? It means that scholars no longer need to go to his grandson Stephen Joyce, bowl in hand, begging for a ladle full of text. It means that I can translate for you the above illegible bit of manuscript from Ulysses in Joyce’s hand: By Bachelor’s walk jogjinglejaunted Blazes Boylan, bachelor.In sun, in heat, warmseated,sprawled, mare’s glossy rumpatrot. Horn, Have you the ?Horn. Have you the ? Hawhaw horn. Clearer? Good. Even better, it also means that I can quote you the slightly different published version of this passage: By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot with a flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the ? Horn. Have you the ? Haw haw horn. You see the improvement? Excellent. The irony of Stephen Joyce’s virtual censorship of the work of a man continually at odds with the censors himself has not gone unnoted—especially because Joyce reveled in the thought of perplexing scholars for generations to come. (The censorship that afflicted—if not made—Joyce’s career is also tinged with irony: who among the hormonal pubescent lads you know would have the patience and determination to locate, let alone reread, the dirty bits?) You may recognize this snatch of text from the eleventh chapter of Ulysses, the Sirens episode. Read More
February 1, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Despite protests, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s book comes out. Louisa May Alcott, in love and war. The hatchet job of the year. Shirley MacLaine’s next life: Downton Abbey. Get your master’s in thriller writing. Chaplin, the musical. Adaptationpalooza! The hills are alive with … The Rebel Nun? And other titles that almost were. The art of letter writing. The lost language of stamps. B&N vs. Amazon. Librarians fight back. Shit agents and editors say.
January 25, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Who threatened Rushdie? The author takes his critics to Twitter. A victory for publishers. “It was only when I read his article on wallpaper that I realised a hitherto unappreciated aspect of Charles Dickens: his interest in interior décor.” Broadway will return to Manderley … next year. “People who read poetry are the unsung customer base for independent bookstores.” The poetry of Craigslist. Ten reasons not to sleep with a poet. Cormac McCarthy did not, in fact, have a 140-character affair with Margaret Atwood. A sad Sunday for Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Internet as an image of gluttony: “A great groaning table, creaking under bottomless platters of food and pitchers of drink, and we in our chairs, too exhausted to stand, mouths too numb to taste much, but with just enough energy to reach for more.”