November 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Mudville By Sadie Stein I have friends who rhapsodize about their new relationships with unabashed stars in their eyes. “How’s it going?” you ask a few weeks later, only to be told, “Oh—he was a sociopath!” Then you listen as your friend eviscerates this former paragon with the same enthusiasm she once brought to his glorification. I always marvel, half horrified, half admiring, at the full commitment to poor judgment, the anger unmitigated by any self-reproach or, indeed, self-consciousness. To be so free! To think not “it’s amazing that we came this far” but merely “they have let us down.” I’ve never really understood the rage that comes after a tough sports loss. Frustration, sure. Disappointment, of course. Even some heartbreak. But if sports are like war—and we’re constantly told they are—it’s an odd thing to turn on our proxies with such venom. It’s as though they go off to fight in World War II and return in the Vietnam era, heroism transformed into cynicism. AMAZIN’ DISGRACE! shrieked the New York Post. “Of course it will be hard to feel anything but anger and fury and devastation for now, and for a good long while,” wrote that paper’s Mike Vaccaro. Read More
October 30, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Ringing the Changes By Sadie Stein There’s always the temptation, when recommending anything, to go only for the deep cuts. It’s true that Robert Aickman wrote several volumes’ worth of “strange stories,” many of them very good. It’s also true that “Ringing the Changes,” from 1964’s Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories, is probably the best known, or the “most anthologized,” or however people like to subtly dismiss anything with a certain profile. Read More
October 29, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Seeking Soul Cakes By Sadie Stein Before there was trick-or-treating, there was souling. The UK version of the practice—in which beggars and children went door-to-door seeking alms and soul cakes in exchange for prayers—likely evolved from the pagan mumming rites of Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of harvest season. The Celts believed that on this night—Hallowe’en—the souls of the dead walked the earth, and many of their rituals, such as those involving fire and ghost costumes, persisted in Christian form into the twentieth century. Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) chronicles the regional variations in some detail, although even then the practice was archaic. When a folklorist transcribed the following traditional rhyme in 1891, it was in the knowledge that souling was headed for obsolescence. Read More
October 28, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Gay Lothario By Sadie Stein A caricature of Coates as Lothario. Strange as it seems now, there was a time when I was responsible for writing a best- and worst-dressed list. I had no qualifications, I felt uncomfortable doing it, and I admired extravagantly those celebrities who had the gall to flout convention and throw themselves squarely into the “bad” category like early Christian martyrs among lions. I was reminded of this unlikely interlude in my career while looking at the fashions from this weekend’s MTV Europe Music Awards, many extravagantly ludicrous. Visible underwear! Macramé! Polychrome! Monochrome! Bieber! The mind boggled, the soul leaped. A pilloried celeb is usually defiant, and understandably. There are varying degrees of ingenuousness often correlated to the degree of celebrity involved, but the gist is usually: haters be damned. The best of all sartorial retorts, though, belongs to the celebrated London macaroni and amateur of drama, Mr. Robert “Romeo” Coates, whose early nineteenth-century exploits are chronicled in Edith Sitwell’s peerless English Eccentrics. Read More
October 27, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Brick and Mortar By Sadie Stein Gwydir Castle. Photo: Patrick Gruban The British call it Brick Lit: that genre of travel literature in which a sophisticatedly jaded man, woman, or couple falls in love with a crumbling farmhouse in some exotic, rural locale and in the comic struggle to restore said farmhouse, and via encounters with the native populace, gleans profound lessons about life, love, and local color. —Jonathan Miles, Garden and Gun By any standard, Judy Corbett’s 2005 memoir, Castles in the Air, falls under the Brick Lit rubric. And its subtitle—“The Restoration Adventures of Two Young Optimists and a Crumbling Old Mansion”—may not inspire confidence in its novelty. And yet, I recommend it without reservation. I came across the book in a British catalog when I was an editorial assistant and put in an order for this title and several others. I’ve never cared much about renovation stories—This Old House always left me cross-eyed with boredom—but it looked fun. It was, but it was much more than that. Read More
October 26, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Existentially, I’m Getting a Hamburger By Sadie Stein I watched the 1972 film adaptation of Play It As It Lays the other day; the whole movie is streaming on YouTube for free now. I wanted to reject it outright because its mood was not exactly the same as the novel’s—the quality of the bleakness was different. But, I mean, when you think about it, what would you want a movie of Play It As It Lays to look like? Read More