November 14, 2013 On the Shelf Conversing with Brodsky, and Other News By Sadie Stein Amazon has launched a juggernaut of a Kindle store in Australia. The Joseph Brodsky reading list for facilitating intelligent conversation. Alison Bechdel on heading to Broadway. Writing for good health
November 13, 2013 Quote Unquote Nail Art By Sadie Stein Artificial nails, patented on this day in 1954. “There was nothing to being a lawyer except a certain amount of common sense, and relatively clean fingernails.” —John Mortimer, the Art of Fiction No. 106.
November 13, 2013 First Person This Is the Way We Wash Our Clothes By Sadie Stein Photography credit Florian Köhler, cheatha.de. It was not until I went away to college that I realized how much laundry my mother did. I don’t mean that my family of four generated an unusual amount—none of us changed more than once a day, or had especially extensive wardrobes—or that she stood around an industrial-sized cauldron like Mrs. Buckets in “Cheer Up, Charlie.” Rather, at any given moment, some step of laundry-washing was in process. If the washer or dryer wasn’t running, clothes were being sorted. Large piles of lights and darks littered the hall floor. There was a wicker hamper of some description, in a nook under the linen closet, but things either didn’t make it there or were sorted with such dispatch that they never reached its limbo. And always, always, there was the folding. My parents’ bed was generally covered with a large pile of clean clothes; anyone who happened to be sitting on the bed watching TV would either fold a few napkins in the course of a show (me) or sit atop a mound, occasionally knocking clothes onto the floor (my brother.) Then there was the hand-washing, or those pieces my mother had deemed too delicate for the dryer: there were usually a few of these hanging damply in the bathroom. She did not work full-time back then; one wonders how all the laundry might have gotten done if she had. It’s not that she was compulsively clean in other ways; if anything, the house was fairly chaotic. Indeed, when we did have guests over, the door to the master bedroom had to be kept rigorously shut because there was so much laundry on the floor. We always had plenty of clean clothes, which is of course nice, but in retrospect I think she washed things too much: towels got frayed and faded long before their times, the knees of our jeans seemed to have unusually short lifespans. She used utilitarian detergents; there was some vague but distinct taboo against fabric softener that made the first sheet I borrowed in the college laundry room feel deliciously illicit. Her constant laundry-doing was a running joke in the family, as well as something of a mystery. How was there always so much laundry? The mystery only deepened when I moved out on my own and realized that one load a week was sufficient to keep me in clean clothes and sheets, and that the whole process only took a couple of hours. Read More
November 13, 2013 Look Page Views By Sadie Stein On the wonderful blog Retronaut, this intriguing image is twinned with a caption vague to the point of inscrutability. To wit, c. 1940s:Man with books The whole thing is rendered even more mysterious by the fact that the individual in question is obviously a woman. Or at the very least a man in tweedy drag. But more to the point, WHAT ARE ALL THESE ENORMOUS BOOKS? In the grand tradition of the Tootsie pop, the world may never know.
November 13, 2013 On the Shelf Writers Sell Out, and Other News By Sadie Stein A pretty amazing slideshow of authors shilling for products through the ages. Jonathan Franzen loves Harriet the Spy. Now really want to know his views on the even odder The Long Secret and frankly bizarre Sport. Herewith: a scratch and sniff wine book. “The very foundation of Judaeo-Christian ethics is presented as a list.” On listicles.
November 12, 2013 Arts & Culture “I Would Like to Write a Beautiful Prayer” By Katherine Faw Morris Credit: Martha Sprieser, Flannery O’Connor’s roommate at the University of Iowa (Flannery O’Connor Collection, Special Collections, Georgia College Library, Milledgeville, Georgia). Flannery O’Connor was a believer. It was at the end of every story: the appearance of holy ghosts, fiery furnaces, judgment day. It was in the twist of her knife. The way she would jam it in a character’s gut, turn it, then rip it up. To make sure she got all the vital organs. The end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”—“‘Shut up, Bobby Lee,’ The Misfit said. ‘It’s no real pleasure in life’”—is the most Catholic thing ever. While she was writing what would become Wise Blood, she was also writing A Prayer Journal. Literally, journal entries written during her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, addressed to the Lord and asking for his help getting published. “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate,” she wrote. Also she kind of thought of God as a crazy lover. From November 23, 1947: “Dear Lord, please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss. Not just to want You when I think about You but to want You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the Fulfillment.” I am also from the South. I am also a writer. God was never anyone special. No one in my family took religion seriously. Read More