November 10, 2011 Bulletin John Jeremiah Sullivan on ‘Soundcheck’ By The Paris Review Photograph by John Taylor. Readers of the Daily are familiar with the musical musings of our Southern editor John Jeremiah Sullivan. This afternoon, Sullivan spoke with John Schaefer on NPR’s Soundcheck about Michael Jackson’s genealogy, Christian rock, deciphering Geeshie Wiley lyrics with John Fahey—and finding historical depths in everything, even the impossibly shallow. Listen to their conversation here. Sullivan also reads tonight at 8 P.M. at BAM.
November 9, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. George Orwell, on food. Frederick Seidel, on motorcycles. Teenage Bronte, on the block. New classics? Overrated hacks? Pippi, a racist? The cult of Betsy-Tacy. The Art of Protein Bars. The Lego Bible. The Jeopardy! Pyramid of Greatness. The letters of Wodehouse: “Found in both his fiction and his letters, terms such as “posish,” “eggs and b,” and “f i h s” (“fiend in human shape”) create a clubby feeling of intimacy between writer and reader.” Journalism booms in Libya. “I’m scared of dying in the middle of a book. I leave notes out in my room so that if I die people know how to finish it.”
November 3, 2011 Bulletin St. Mark’s Saved By Lorin Stein Great news in this morning’s Observer: Cooper Union has agreed to give St. Mark’s Bookshop a break on the rent, and the store will remain open. Many thanks to our readers who helped save St. Mark’s, whether by signing the petition or just by picking up a copy of the Review. (The save–St. Mark’s discount will remain in effect until our winter issue appears.) And three cheers for Cooper Union!
November 2, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. The International literary community rallies around an imprisoned Turkish publisher and activist. Steve Jobs tops the best-seller list. Rebecca … the musical! Heart of Darkness … the opera! Blue Nights … the movie! Lisbeth Salander … the clothing line? Salman Rushdie on Kim Kardashian. On Twitter. In limerick. Speaking of strange bedfellows: Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot. J. K. Rowling considered killing off Ron “out of sheer spite.” Speaking of spite, Didion vs. Kael. Awesome people reading.
October 26, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Whiting winners have been announced. A Shakespeare organization defends the Bard’s honor against the slander of Anonymous. After all, “With its portrayal of William Shakespeare as a drunken buffoon who could hardly read, let alone write some of the finest poetry in the English language, Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous was unlikely to be popular with the Stratford set.” Ditto Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. We imagine Melville fans will be wary of Moby-Dick in space, too. Speaking of Moby-Dick … Here’s one for purists: Tolkien’s original Hobbit illustrations. A Harold Pinter sketch has been rediscovered. Ditto a forgotten O’Neill one-act. Protest for tots. Archimedes’s brain. Tintin’s long shadow. Authors’ heavy beards. “From the moment Ron Shaoul took it upon himself to investigate the practice of reading on the toilet, scouring medical literature and turning up nothing of note as to its public health consequences, the situation became clear that here, on his hands, was a big job.” Writers for the 99 percent. Booksellers, spies … two sides of the same coin!
October 20, 2011 Bulletin More From Our Southern Editor: House of Horrors By Lorin Stein Peyton Sawyer's House on One Tree Hill— and John Jeremiah Sullivan's in life. Last spring our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, came up to New York to give a little reading here on White Street. The surprising but true story he read, about living on the set of One Tree Hill—because it was his family’s house—just appeared in the new issue of GQ: My wife was eight months pregnant, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that’s how he put it, “Y’er a rich man, ain’t ye?”—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, “shoot him below the knee,” he said, “that way they cain’t get you with intent to kill.” Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tattoos but told us he’d lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he’d saved a drowning black boy’s life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience “came to love some blacks.” He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones. A fascinating man, but not the sort I wanted my daughter having unlimited exposure to in her formative years. Not my angel. We entered nesting panic. We wanted big and solid. We wanted Greatest Generation, but their parents, even greater. We found it. It had a sleeping porch, and a shiplike attic where I in my dotage would pull objects from a trunk and tell their histories to little ones. We asked for the money, and in some office somebody’s boss came forward with the Stamp. We commend the essay to your attention, the video version too.