June 29, 2011 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Philip Roth is done with reading fiction. As of this writing, there are 718 poetry apps. Coups! Cabals! Backstabbing! Drama at the Poetry Society. What is “distant reading?” “What seems to be happening is that Amazon’s platform is being overwhelmed by spammers who ‘scrape’ content from websites or, in some cases, actually lift entire texts, and republish them as ebooks.” The top 10 books of 2011? Face it: you can’t read everything. “I found myself thinking about ‘translated’ and ‘foreign’ as two separate things—sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.” Don’t even bother trying to go to this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival! And just in time for Independence Day: Plath, Hemingway, Capote and Woolf—in their bathing suits.
June 29, 2011 Arts & Culture Like Minds By Sadie Stein Photograph by Ruth Fremson. Life of Pi, Yann Martel (F, 20s, long hair, worn black T-shirt, skinny jeans, brown purse, L train) Any Man of Mine, Rachel Gibson (F, 40s, stripey tote, black pants, F train) For those of us prone to paranoia, the tumblr CoverSpy has made the New York commute infinitely more harrowing. The site (which also has a Twitter arm) enlists a “team of publishing nerds [who hit] the subways, streets, parks & bars to find out what New Yorkers are reading now.” It makes for addictively voyeuristic reading. And it’s enough to make you long for the soulless inscrutability of a Kindle. Do they know this is for work? you think, and Why are so many people on the L reading Ayn Rand?, and How old would they think I am? Judging others by their books—or, more charitably, forming relationships based on shared literary tastes—is also the guiding principle behind the online dating site Alikewise.com, which was conceived when one of the founders voiced his wish for a woman who liked The Black Swan. (One friend described it as “actually, a very convenient way to expedite the weeding process.”) As always in such situations, the question quickly becomes not whether people are lying but why and how well. In its way, it is every bit as harrowing as the roving judgments of CoverSpy. So it is perhaps natural that the two organizations should join forces and produce an event that’s either a bibliophile’s dream or a neurotic’s nightmare, depending on how you look at it. Read More
June 28, 2011 Arts & Culture Steak and Poetry from the Rooftops By Emily Witt The Academy of American Poets promised youth. “All very hip, young, cool poets,” said the invite for a recent Thursday-night reading on the rooftop of the Arsenal Building in Central Park. And it wasn’t just that night’s reading. “The entire reading series,” the e-mail emphasized, “features hip, cool poets.” On the evening of the hip, cool reading on the rooftop, the clouds hung low and threatened precipitation. The workers of Manhattan, newly released from their cubicles, surged up Fifth Avenue to Central Park, breathing in the cultivated scents of high-end retail that punctuated the doorway of each storefront. “I’m sick of hearing about Barack Obama,” said someone walking behind me on Fifth Avenue, as I, newly released from my cubicle, inhaled the spicy, luxurious air that poured out the doorway of Henri Bendel. “You know?” she said to her companion. “I’m sick of the jokes.” The skyscrapers all had trees growing from their atria or complex terraces of ferns sprouting beneath their glass panes. They looked like magazine ads for oil companies. Mr. Softee trucks lined 59th Street, which was also seething with joggers. Around the stoplights the young joggers clustered, running in place. They all wore T-shirts that read “The J. P. Morgan Corporate Challenge.” They jogged to and fro on some sort of athletic scavenger hunt; hip, young, cool corporate types on what appeared to be a fitness mission that promised team building but also possibly resulted in charitable contributions. (I looked it up later: “Forty companies celebrated fitness and camaraderie in one of the world’s greatest urban parks, while raising funds for the Central Park Conservancy.”) Read More
June 27, 2011 Arts & Culture Around Bloom in a Day By Jonathan Gharraie Exuberantly marked across the globe, Bloomsday celebrates the single day on which James Joyce set Ulysses, his epic adaptation of The Odyssey, which also happens to be the day of his first successful rendezvous with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Each chapter of the novel corresponds to an episode in the daily life of one of the book’s three protagonists as they move around Dublin in the summer of 1904: Stephen Dedalus, the frustrated artist as a young man; Leopold Bloom, the Jewish everyman; and Molly Bloom, his profoundly sensual but unfaithful wife. Immodesty on such a scale is rarely justified, but Joyce was entitled to make his claims on posterity since we don’t just remember his ambitions, we read what they achieved. In his influential book The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey argued that while “one effect of Ulysses is to show that mass man matters, that he has an inner life as complex as an intellectual’s,” the novel’s density works to “rigorously exclude people like Bloom from its readership.” I feel uncomfortable with the implication that writing sympathetically about “mass man” means writing for him, perhaps because I can’t quite banish the sense that I might have more than a little of him in me. But to properly defend Ulysses against the charge that it is deeply and treacherously unreadable, you cannot avoid calling yourself to the stand. Martin Amis baldly posed the question, “Who curls up with it?” And writing on this blog last year, Peter Terzian elected to take Ulysses on a vacation, reasoning that the book affords “the kind of pleasure to be found in difficulty.” I agree and would also subscribe to his method of consulting guides to Ulysses on a preliminary read, before trying to do without them for a second attempt immediately after. But I wanted to push things further still, to see just how much pleasure could be derived from the second most difficult novel in the language: to engage in some omphalos-gazing extreme reading. Read More
June 24, 2011 Arts & Culture Portfolio: A Moveable Feast By Yann Legendre Graphic designer Yann Legendre created these portraits of writers who lived and wrote in Paris in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Legendre’s illustrations are excerpted from the anthology Paris au pied de la lettre, by Mathilde Helleu. Ernest Hemingway. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Read More
June 23, 2011 Arts & Culture Who is Bernard Herrmann? By Brian Gittis The name Bernard Herrmann may not be as familiar as Aaron Copland or Samuel Barber, but you’d know his music instantly. Some of it—the shrieking strings from Psycho’s shower scene, for instance—is as famous as anything written in a classical idiom this century. Herrmann wrote film scores—most notably, nine for Alfred Hitchcock, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. But despite his music’s indirect fame, Herrmann (whose centenary is June 29) has yet to get his due as a serious composer. And he was one. His life had the dramatic arc of a great twentieth-century maestro: expulsion from Juilliard, works commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, major awards, an underappreciated symphony, friendship with Charles Ives, a feud with Leonard Bernstein. The word centenary usually implies fanfare—live performances, retrospective essays, new biographies competing for the cover of the New York Times Book Review. But scrolling through the News and Events section of bernardherrmann.org is underwhelming. There’s a smattering of concerts, mostly abroad (Edinburgh, Bristol, Frankfurt) and nothing from the New York Philharmonic that once performed his music. Herrmann’s estate is once again trying to sell the original score to Psycho (in 2009, it was sheepishly withdrawn from auction when it failed to garner a minimum bid). The Minnesota Opera is staging Herrmann’s forgotten opera based on Wuthering Heights. Perhaps a headline in the Twin Cities Daily best sums up the state of affairs three decades after the composer’s death: Who in the world is Bernard Herrmann? I recently bought a few Herrmann sound tracks but, after listening to them, found them disappointing. Something was conspicuously absent. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was listening to the sound track of a missing movie. Is there a way to free film scores—especially those as artistically rich as Herrmann’s—of their film-cue obligations without deflating them? Can casual listeners appreciate Herrmann without the aid of Jimmy Stewart following Kim Novak around 1950s San Francisco? Maybe scores could thrive in a different context. In honor of Herrmann, I conducted an experiment. I loaded two scores, Psycho and Vertigo, onto my iPod and tried them out as personal sound tracks for wandering around New York. Read More