December 18, 2013 On the Shelf Lisbeth Salander Lives Again, and Other News By Sadie Stein Amazon workers in Germany have gone on strike (at what we need not say is a busy time). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lives on: using Stieg Larsson’s comprehensive outlines, a new writer will reanimate the Millennium series. The British Library has made available a million images from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century books for public use. Not shockingly, people are less than chuffed about Jason Segel as DFW: John Gallagher calls it “a terrible, terrible idea.”
December 17, 2013 On Music Jewel-Toned Insides: Talking with Throwing Muses and Tanya Donelly By Peter Terzian The debut album by Throwing Muses was released in 1986, at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. Back then I had a friend who listened almost exclusively to artists on the British independent label 4AD, and I wanted to have musical tastes as esoteric as his. He told me that Throwing Muses—who lived in Boston, like we did—was the label’s first American signing, and I bought their record without having heard a note of it, only moments after a clerk in the Harvard Square branch of Newbury Comics slipped it into the “new releases” bin. I reasoned that since the record had come from England, and Boston was the easternmost major port in the United States, I was probably the first person in America to buy it, and for a long time I went around saying this. At that time my friends and I played a lot of I-heard-them-before-you-did—I saw R.E.M. in a tiny club with only fifteen other people before they were famous—and naturally there was a little of this involved, but my proprietary feelings toward Throwing Muses were more personal. I had finally found the music that was meant for me. Read More
December 17, 2013 Video & Multimedia Updike on Free Parking By Sadie Stein Check out this nifty video, produced by Blank on Blank and PBS Digital Studios, to accompany audio from a 2002 interview with John Freeman.
December 17, 2013 Arts & Culture Thoreau and the iPad By Dannie Zarate Recently I took my iPad to a park across a lake, sat under a tree facing the water, and started reading the e-book version of Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s classic avowal of the possibility of, as well as the necessity for, simplicity amid modern life’s profusion and superfluity. Cognitive dissonance doesn’t get much more dissonant than this. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys … improved means to an unimproved end,” wrote the handyman sage in the book’s first chapter, titled “Economy.” Few toys are prettier than the iPad, and its prettiness is by no means a feat of economy. Its minimalism, for one, belies the complexity of thought that went into its design, while its ease of use obscures the intricacy of the industry behind its manufacture. That there’s nothing new and improved about its ends should be evident from the resemblance between the categories of apps in the App Store and those of stores listed on the touchscreen directory at the entrance of shopping malls—that harried shopper’s guide to the nonvirtual versions of apps for games, books, sports, lifestyle, and even social networking. Or especially social networking, come to think of it, when you consider that the din from the food court or the theater lobby is nothing more than the noise from so many short messages being broadcast on an unmetered network with unlimited bandwidth. But what does it matter if my iPad is merely a prettier means to pedestrian ends that are, in Thoreau’s words, “already but too easy to arrive at”? Does that make it one more toy to be transcended or tucked out of sight when meditating on sufficiency? I also own a paperback edition of Walden, its pages worn yellow with age and marred with the fervent notes of my much younger self. It has none of the iPad’s high-precision electronics; the letter m is smudged in several places, and yet it’s lost none of its functionality. And apart from enlightenment, it has only one other app, as a paperweight. Is this nonmultitasking relic the authentic medium for the all-in-one manifesto and proof-of-concept of the uncluttered life? Read More
December 17, 2013 Quote Unquote Many Happy Returns, Penelope Fitzgerald By Sadie Stein Image via the Guardian. “Everyone in Penelope Fitzgerald’s family called her Mops, no one ever called her Penelope unless they met her later in life. And she didn’t like the name Penelope. But it would seem very peculiar for me to call her Mops all the way through.” —Hermione Lee, the Art of Biography No. 4
December 17, 2013 On the Shelf Apollinaire on Trial, and Other News By Sadie Stein Apollinaire (or, at any rate, his Turkish publisher) is on trial in Istanbul. Sofia Coppola is set to adapt Alysia Abbott’s 1970s San Francisco-set Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. The American Library Association has named ten librarians from across the United States to be winners of the I Love My Librarian award. Each honoree will receive $5,000. Buzzfeed brings us fourteen places to talk to a stranger about books. Elevators and playgrounds feel potentially problematic, but what do we know?