November 22, 2013 Bulletin Have You Seen This Desk? By Sadie Stein Today, George Eliot’s birthday, let us pay tribute to the sad chapter in our collective history when, in 2012, someone stole the author’s portable writing desk from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in Warwickshire. Having seen no updates in the ensuing year, we are left to assume that both thief and papier-mâché secretaire are still at large, and that some greedy literary mogul is gazing upon it as we speak. But as Miss Evans herself might have said, “It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.” May it bring inspiration.
November 22, 2013 On the Shelf The Book Thieves, and Other News By Sadie Stein Herewith, one million dollars worth of comic books. A new Russian app seeks to prevent e-book piracy. After years of risible purple prose, a call to celebrate good sex writing in fiction. While we’re at it, why not get some more illustrated adult books?
November 21, 2013 The Poem Stuck in My Head Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick” By Stephanie LaCava Collage via Flickr. I am a miner. The light burns blue.Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tears I am writing this while pregnant with my first son, just as Sylvia Plath was when she wrote “Nick and the Candlestick” in 1962. I wanted him: he was no surprise or trouble at all; he was passion and biology. But I am not happy. No one in smiley U.S.A. is supposed to say this at the news of a baby. An expectant mother is supposed to be ecstatic, full of promise and life. It is true, I marvel; the last thing I ever expected to be good at was creating a small person, that my body could nourish him both inside itself and within the world. He’s evidence that something inside me might work, even if other, less visible things do not. Remembering, even in sleep,Your crossed position.The blood blooms clean Before him, I would read Plath quotes from one of those ubiquitous Twitter feeds, feel recognition—and feel like a cliché. I do genuinely love her work, but it’s so expected, so reductive—even if, with him, it feels newly vital for me. We all know the narrative: marry a handsome, destructive man, go from one to two, three then four, and then kill yourself at thirty. Like so many girl-readers, I worshipped her and selfishly romanticized the tragedy. As a young woman, Plath sought the whirl and illusion of enchanted, swift New York, painfully unprepared for adulthood, and like so many others, I recognized all those standard youthful Manhattan dreams, darker when you feel everything twenty-fold, when you’re unsure of having any talent or worth, paralyzed by sensitivity, maybe a little weak, easy to dismantle. A cliché, yes, but the mythology, and the work, remain captivating and solid. As a writer and a reader and a human being with dark tendencies, I have great empathy for everything Plath. There is a reason she has endured. We may all fail miserably at love, family, and living, but we can try to be brave, especially in our work. As Plath says of her own womb, my stomach was always crawling with white newts and calcification, a gut that betrayed me, even when I tried to convince it of happy otherwise. Read More
November 21, 2013 Video & Multimedia It Involves Breaking Stuff By Sadie Stein Scott McClanahan’s readings are always highly memorable. As he wrote me about this, the video of his avowed final such reading ever, “I’m quitting. Yep, I’m just straight up quitting. It’s in Ohio which will make you want to quit anything—including LIFE. It involves breaking stuff.” Apologies to Buckeye readers.
November 21, 2013 Look The Literary World By Sadie Stein We love this map of the modern writer’s mind, by artist Joe Dunthorne. Check out his whole interactive site here. Click to enlarge. Via the Independent.
November 21, 2013 On the Shelf Let the Memory Live Again, and Other News By Sadie Stein The NBAs (you know, the book ones) have come and gone for another year. And the winners are … Meanwhile, E. L. Doctorow, who was awarded the 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contributors to American Letters, called the Internet “ubiquitous and loomingly present in everything we do.” Peter Rabbit, Jay Gatsby, and eleven other characters you wish would snap out of it. Following the 2012 death of T. S. Eliot’s widow, Eliot’s estate is going on the block. (At the end of the day, it seems nothing is as valuable as Cats!)