July 16, 2013 Listen Donna Stonecipher’s “Model City” By Nikkitha Bakshani I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical device that offsets the blatant generalization being made. The best of such sentences are aware of their blatant generalizations but strive for truth anyway, recklessly. That’s the last line of this recording. Stonecipher’s syntactical attempt to polarize the past and future sinks as it tries to swim, for she—or the general truth of life—has already convinced us that the past, present, and future are in flux. Read the full poem in our Summer 2013 issue.
July 8, 2013 Listen “I Ducked Behind My Paris Review…” By Sadie Stein This song, “Dear Joseph,” comes courtesy of Australian group t:dy t:wns. As they explain it, “My friend and I wrote a song about an airplane trip I took where I was distracted from reading my Paris Review by my seat mate, a guy named Joseph, who was very chatty and DEMONSTRATIVELY scared of flying. He was really something.”
July 2, 2013 Listen Henri Cole’s “Self-Portrait with Rifle” By Clare Fentress Abraham Hondius, The Deer Hunt (detail), ca. 1650–95. Henri Cole contributed two poems to our Summer issue, “Self-Portrait with Rifle” and “Free Dirt.” They pair well; both wrestle with the baseness humanity is capable of, and particularly with the surprise we feel when we find such baseness in ourselves. “Self-Portrait with Rifle” illustrates this shock with a jarring scene: a man holding a gun, indignant at his victims—innocent deer—for yielding their lives to his misplaced violence.
June 25, 2013 Listen Ben Lerner’s “False Spring” By Justin Alvarez “Would I be thought of as the biological father, just a donor, not at all?” “What is the effect of sildenafil citrate on stout-bodied passerines?” “What was the annual per capita gross national income of China at the time of ejaculation?” Ben Lerner’s “False Spring” is full of many questions, but not many answers. Blame it on his being a poet; he prefers ambiguity to resolution. “False Spring,” just like his novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, can be read as a Künstlerroman of sorts. Who knew a visit to the Park Slope Food Coop could be so transformative?
June 11, 2013 Listen Lydia Davis’s “Local Obits” By Sadie Stein In seventh grade, I was teased mercilessly about my funny speaking voice, and I’ve been self-conscious about it ever since. It took some persuading to get me to make this recording, and it’s a testament to the story that I was game: while I love many things in issue 205, “Local Obits” was what I wanted to share. Anyone familiar with Lydia Davis’s work knows that she can do a lot with a little, and this piece—composed of elliptical snatches of lives, or, rather, someone else’s distillation thereof—turns the quotidian incantatory, funny, bittersweet, strange. A master class in the minimal (if not in performance).
May 22, 2013 Listen Our Detective So Supreme By Sadie Stein Today marks the anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s birth. While his creation Sherlock Holmes has inspired hundreds of adaptations in many media (in several of which no one finds it weird that a modern man is named Sherlock Holmes), I think we can all agree that these tributes achieved their apex in the following theme song. Warning: this is strangely catchy, oddly stirring, and will stay in your head for the rest of your life.