November 5, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Nonfiction By Sadie Stein An anonymous nineteenth-century painting. The hard truth is that not everyone has a novel in them. “I have no gift for invention,” I say to anyone who ever asks after my own ambitions—and why do people ask? For that matter, is my response even appropriate? I’m not sure what that means, “a gift for invention”: certainly I’ve never visited the Genius Bar without concocting some elaborate and gratuitous lie to explain the condition of my computer. Which is not to say I’ve never written any fiction. I have, under duress. It was a requirement for my degree. The instructor was an older lady in caftans and arty jewelry with pumpkin-colored hair who had at one point written an epic women’s best seller with a lurid, seventies-style jacket. She’d also written a book of cat poetry. I didn’t mind any of that; the problem was that every detail of the class was as lazy and clichéd as that constellation of characteristics. A few people in the class were predictably pretentious. They turned out derivative takes on macho writers and they were unnecessarily confrontational when discussing others’ submissions. One guy’s work was disturbing, but tritely disturbing. A few in the class spoke and wrote poor English. One girl was writing a fantasy novel; she was my favorite. Read More
November 4, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent William Carlos Williams’s “Election Day” By Sadie Stein An abandoned grade school in La Prairie Center, Illinois, used as a polling place in 1973. Photo: National Archive Your typical polling center seldom evokes the poetic. In my neighborhood, we’re assigned a local elementary school. There are student projects lining the walls: family trees, doggerel, pictures. (“Children only!” a volunteer yelled at me when I tried to use the girls’ room—which, fair enough. But everyone in the place was over eighteen.) Enter William Carlos Williams. His “Election Day,” from 1941, is spare and sardonic; vote before reading. Warm sun, quiet air an old man sits in the doorway of a broken house— boards for windows plaster falling from between the stones and strokes the head of a spotted dog
November 3, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Danke Schoen By Sadie Stein If I need to, I can date my periods of depression by the corresponding enthusiasms for terrible TV shows. Enthusiasms is maybe the wrong word: let’s say commitment to. Now, at the best of times, I can be sucked into watching almost any show—give me a marathon and I’m yours for the next twenty episodes, and I genuinely mourn the passing of Most Eligible Dallas—but when I think of the other times, the bad times, my devotion had a different quality: resigned, enervated, yet obsessive. It was sort of coaxing a tepid crush out of boredom; with a little care and a lot of time, you can create something that approximates a genuine interest. And I was willing to put in the time. There was my relatively respectable Upstairs Downstairs fixation after I moved into my parents’ house after college, when I’d spend my days crouching by the mail slot, waiting for the red Netflix envelopes to arrive with my fix. Even now, I see those weeks in 1970s BBC yellow. Less defensible was the obsession with the Australian soap McLeod’s Daughters, which could only be watched (a) during the day and (b) on Lifetime. This one crept up on me. Did I enter a McLeod’s Daughters contest to try to win a trip to the outback? Maybe. Let’s just say that when the booby prize, a faux-silver cowboy-boot key chain, arrived in the mail, it felt like a wake-up call. But by any measure, the nadir came in the summer of 2005. I know the date because it was the one and only season of Wayne Newton’s The Entertainer, which aired on E!. Wayne Newton’s The Entertainer was part of the spate of copycat programs that followed the early success of American Idol, and the talent-show premise was similar. Ah, but here was the twist: The Entertainer was not restricted to singers—it sought to give exposure to all kinds of Vegas-style razzle-dazzle. As such The Entertainer was composed not merely of singers, but of ventriloquists, magicians—sorry, “illusionists”—and comedians, too, all vying for the grand prize: opening for “Mr. Vegas” himself. (Apparently Wayne Newton is called that, though I’m not sure by whom.) Read More
October 31, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent If I Had a Ribbon Bow By Sadie Stein From the cover of In a Dark, Dark Room. As we all know, the world divides, evenly or otherwise, between those of us who grew up reading In a Dark, Dark Room and those who did not. Those of us who have read it (I got my copy at one of those sponsored school book sales, noteworthy for its bake sale and wealth of Klutz-brand books, one of which came with a Koosh ball) will never look at a green ribbon the same way again. Spoiler alert for “The Green Ribbon”: Girl has green ribbon around her neck. Grows up, marries, ages, dies. Ribbon is untied, head falls off. It is a perfect scary kid’s story: simple, terrifying, pleasantly idiotic. Certainly, I didn’t feel it to be in any conflict with the basic facts of anatomy. Certainly not doll anatomy. In Alvin Schwartz’s 1984 I Can Read! version, the girl—Jenny—looks sort of like Laura Nyro and rocks a really good look. If I have a beef with most modern fright-fests, it’s that they’re too complicated: over-plotted, spilling over with various malignancies and kinds of dark magic. “The Green Ribbon” is an antidote to this. Unlike, say, the Koosh ball, it has aged well. After its fashion, it is the perfect scary story. But you don’t have to take my word for it!
October 30, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Ship of Fools By Sadie Stein Hieronymus Bosch, The Ship of Fools (detail), ca. 1494-1510, oil on oak panel. There is something profoundly lonely about sitting in a movie theater, watching something you know to be bad, while people around you enjoy it. I had such an experience recently: the movie had been rhapsodically reviewed, was as full and red a tomato as I’d ever seen on the Internet, had been enthusiastically recommended by people whose tastes I trust. I bought my ticket with high hopes. We want every movie to be fantastic, to change our lives or at least our day. And how rarely we have reason for such hopes! Nevertheless, it was with such an unusually optimistic outlook that I settled into my seat and cracked open my box of Junior Mints. My first doubts crept in quickly. A joke was cracked; it wasn’t funny. Chill, I told myself. Go with it. It’ll get better. The dialogue was forced and unnatural. Everyone around me was laughing. There’s that moment in a movie when you can’t pretend anymore: when the unassailable realization sets in that, simply put, you’re not in safe hands. Maybe it’s a stupid twist or bad line; more often, it’s just the cumulative stupidity outweighing anything redeeming. You can’t trust the filmmakers anymore, and as a result, you can no longer relax. Besides everything else, it’s exhausting. This movie got worse and worse: clichéd, pretentious, clumsy, vain. I was cringing; the women next to me were laughing heartily. At the end of the movie, much of the audience rose for a spontaneous standing ovation. It did not occur to me for a moment that I was mistaken. No: they were wrong. The movie was bad. Is this sort of certainty merely arrogance or some sort of madness? Either way, it’s not fun. I’m much too old to derive any satisfaction from poking holes in other people’s pleasure. At $14.50, there are cheaper ways to feel lonely. Read More
October 29, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Raised on Promises By Sadie Stein An illustration from Cupid’s Cyclopedia, 1910. If you’re looking for a crash course in prewar hilarity—or, indeed, in American gender dynamics—get yourself to the nearest used bookstore and pick up a copy of 1910’s Cupid’s Cyclopedia, “Compiled for Daniel Cupid by Oliver Herford and John Cecil Clay.” Perhaps the infantile title and winking byline give a sense of the work’s witty tone. Clay was a popular commercial artist of his day. Herford, meanwhile, was a successful professional wit; he was actually known as the American Oscar Wilde. (One imagines those who called him that had never read much Oscar Wilde.) He wrote a good bit of doggerel, plus such urbane texts as The Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903, The Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1904, The Entirely New Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1905, The Complete Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1906, The Altogether New Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1907, The Quite New Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1908, The Perfectly Good Cynic’s Calendar, The Complete Cynic, and The Revived Cynic’s Calendar (1917). As to the Cupid’s Cyclopedia, it was not just for cynics. On the contrary! It’s a pretty book, embellished with mischievous pen-and-ink cupids and liberally illustrated with watercolor plates. Here’s the author’s note: Read More