February 5, 2014 My Literary Hero Lobster and Vodka Chez Burroughs By George Mürer Meeting William Burroughs on his eightieth birthday. Illustration: Christian Tonnis I have this fairy godmother, a childhood friend of my mother’s who lives in Lawrence, Kansas. My mother and I call her up several times a year and she’s always turning me onto cool stuff. One day, when I was a senior in high school, it occurred to me to ask her, “Do you know William S. Burroughs?” “Oh, sure.” I should emphasize that this moment came at the feverish height of a blind obsession I had with William Burroughs and everything Burroughs related. “Personally?” “Oh, sure.” “You’re friends with him?” “Well, we certainly know each other. He’s one of our local characters.” “Do you see a lot of him?” “I see him all the time, but mostly in the cat-food aisle of the supermarket.” I went straight to my mother and demanded that we visit my godmother at the earliest opportunity. That summer, after I’d graduated high school and had had my wisdom teeth out, we went to Kansas. Read More
February 5, 2014 First Person A Downward Glissando By Clifford Chase Photo: Cory Doctorow, via Flickr Fat little dog trotting contentedly along the sidewalk, right at his master’s side, with a plastic steak in his mouth. Neil Young sounds like a lonely alley cat, I thought, most poignant when slightly out of tune. Whenever I got on the subway, I looked around for someone cute to glance at, and if there wasn’t anyone I resigned myself to boredom. Old queen in the locker room: “When you’re the prettiest one in the steam room, it’s time to go home.” At forty-three I was no longer in my heyday. The name of the medication printed in a half circle and the “100 mg” made a smiley face on my new, blue pills. On the L train, a poem called “Hunger” spoke of walking home “through a forest that covers the world.” I’d had the same part-time public-relations job since November 1985. It was now February 2001 and counting. I was drawn to Neil Young not by the specific content of the lyrics (too hetero) but by the overall tone of longing, which I defined as a kind of sadness that had hope. On the L platform, a diminutive Chinese man playing “Send in the Clowns” on a harmonica, with flowery recorded accompaniment. I write this in the hope that aphorism-like statements, when added one to another, might accrue to make some larger statement that will placate despair. Read More
February 5, 2014 On the Shelf Salty Language for Kids, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring “Auden said something disparaging about Samuel Beckett getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nikos said: ‘Who else is there?’ Auden shook his head so all the sagging wrinkles shook and said: ‘There’s me.’” The gossipy diaries of David Plante. Speaking of Beckett, “Fail better,” a quotation from his Worstward Ho, continues to be wildly misappropriated by Silicon Valley execs who refuse to pay obeisance to its pessimism. In the UK, a children’s book about a foulmouthed boy with Tourette’s syndrome prompts a debate: Should salty books for young readers come with a warning? Now in print: “Footlights,” a novella by Charlie Chaplin that inspired the screenplay for Limelight. “‘Footlights’ is 70 pages long and contains around 34,000 words,” notes the BBC. Gosh, tell me more! The New York Times’ facile editorial page is under fire from its own staff: “Largely irrelevant.” “A waste of money.” “An embarrassment.” Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter are classically conditioning us. Notifications are a “never-ending arms race of cheap con games to compete for user attention.”
February 4, 2014 Quote Unquote Turtle Thoughts (Two of Them) By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Tarek Chowdhury Russell Hoban, a Pennsylvanian who lived most of his life in London, was born in 1925 and died in 2011, leaving behind a wondrous collection of sixteen novels for adults and even more for children. Hoban’s Turtle Diary—in which two aloof, single Londoners conspire to free sea turtles from the zoo—was reissued last year and should be required reading for anyone who lives alone, feels alone, or may one day reckon with loneliness. It’s endlessly quotable, and not in the cheap, aphoristic way that people sometimes mean when they say “endlessly quotable”—Hobanisms do not belong on tea bags or T-shirts, or even necessarily in Bartlett’s. It’s more that the whole novel demands to be read aloud, ideally to an audience of one. It might be most fitting, actually, if you read it aloud to yourself. Here are two of the novel’s many delightful “turtle thoughts”: The sign said: “The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup … ” I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.
February 4, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent Self-Help By Sadie Stein Photo: Iain Cuthbertson, via Flickr For several years, I lived in a neighborhood that worried my parents. But I liked my neighbors, I could afford the rent, and, in the grand tradition of fools, I lived a blissfully oblivious existence. I never once felt unsafe. Well, that’s not strictly true. My boyfriend and I had been living in the apartment for about two years when I acquired a job that necessitated my commuting to an office, and oftentimes returning after dark. “I don’t like it,” he said grimly of the fifteen-minute walk from the subway. There had been a recent spate of rapes in the area, he pointed out. “Call me when you get on, and I’ll meet you and walk you home.” Naturally, I did no such thing. Instead, I walked home every day like a normal person and felt completely safe. Until, one especially late night, I noticed footsteps behind me. I tried to shrug it off and picked up my pace. The person behind me started walking more quickly, too. I crossed the street; the steps followed me. I made a turn; he was right behind me. Now I felt real fear. I walked as quickly as I could without breaking into a panicked run, and fished my keys out of my pocket, holding the sharp point between my fingers for use as a weapon, as we had been taught in freshman orientation. The steps behind me never faltered. My heart was hammering by the time I made it into our building and threw the deadbolt. Read More
February 4, 2014 Look Five Down: O-O-H Y-E-A-H! By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Martin Huber There are many yardsticks for fame and influence, but by my lights, you haven’t really “made it” until you’ve appeared in a clue for the Times Sunday crossword. In which case, we’ve made it. The Times may direct its complimentary jeroboam of Dom Perignon to 544 West 27th Street, New York, NY, 10001. The clue is “Contributors to The Paris Review, e.g.” The answer is eight letters. Take your best guess.