October 31, 2013 Arts & Culture Death of a Pork Rind King By Margaret Eby Trick-or-treating is really an exercise in cartography. I wouldn’t be able to give driving directions to the Alabama suburb where I grew up except under duress, but I could draw you a map of my Halloween neighborhood route with unerring precision. Sugar lust, after all, makes tacticians of all of us. Here is the house that would only offer a few chalky rolls of Smarties for your trek up a steep, Virginia creeper–tangled front walk. There, a woman with a fake witch nose would request that put your hand in a container of peeled grape “eyeballs,” but reward you with a roll of quarters and a full-sized Snickers. Here, you’d find an empty bowl with a plaintive PLEASE JUST TAKE TWO PIECES tacked on the screen door, its contents long ago looted by a mercenary band of eleven-year-olds with pillowcases. That house, home to a diabetic child, gave out glow-in-the-dark slap bracelets, worth up to three packets of M&Ms in the candy bartering session at the end of the night. And here, the crown jewel of the cul-de-sac: the potato chip house. The potato chip house was home to Major Bashinsky, an estate lawyer and heir to the Golden Flake snack food fortune. Bashinsky’s grandfather founded the company, which produces crackers, chips, popcorn, and ten kinds of flavored pork cracklins. Read More
October 31, 2013 On the Shelf Edgar Allan Ho, and Other News By Sadie Stein This would either confuse an alien who had just set foot on Earth, or maybe explain everything: the NSA haiku generator. Along similar lines: Edgar Allan Ho, which BoingBoing has anointed Best Sexy Costume 2013. (As the creator of the admittedly theoretical Sexy Struwwelpeter, I respectfully disagree.) The Life of Frederick Douglass: A Graphic Novel comes to Kickstarter. According to the Common Core guidelines, The Hunger Games is more complex than The Grapes of Wrath. (But, plotwise, it sort of is, no?)
October 30, 2013 Arts & Culture This Is Spinal Fusion By Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza The doctor asks you to bend down, then waddle a few steps as he watches you. You might be ten but could be fourteen, at the pediatrician or in the school nurse’s office, probably a girl but maybe a boy. It might be the last item on a long checklist of routine things: height, weight, blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, check; vision and hearing, check; mumps vaccine, chickenpox history, tetanus shot, check; then, finally, the duck-walk diagnostic test. Me, I was in the school gym. I’d waited with friends for my turn in the locker room with the doctor who’d volunteered to give physicals for the middle-school athletes. He knew my mother, so we made polite conversation between routine questions. Then, he asked me to bend and take a few steps. I did so, staring at the cracked concrete beneath my bare feet. When I was allowed to straighten, I could see that the doctor’s face had changed completely. Locked on my torso, his now-serious eyes ticked left-right-left-right, then fixed on the planes and angles of my shoulders and hips. Trusting that I trusted him, the doctor placed one of his hands on my shoulder and his other hand on my hip. After a moment, one of his hands moved to my back and traced the misaligned knobs of my spine. That sensation, a man’s hand running down my spine impersonally, as if I were no more animate than a mannequin or cadaver, would become very familiar to me. Scoliosis curves your spine into an S, a biological scarlet letter glaringly visible by X-ray but also perceptible to the naked eye. Read More
October 30, 2013 Quote Unquote Surprised by Joy By Sadie Stein “Soybeans really need an uplift, being on the dull side but, like dull people, respond readily to the right contacts.” —Irma S. Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking
October 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Called Back By Casey N. Cep Emily Dickinson published only ten poems. Printed in various newspapers, her verses all appeared anonymously. It was not some failure of contemporary taste but her own decision that kept the rest of her poetry private. Dickinson wrote in one poem that “Publication—is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—” and indeed she seems to have felt there was something crass, even violative about fixing one’s words in a particular arrangement of type, surrendering them for a price. And yet, I am grateful to have been able to pay small sums of money for her poetry. A few complete editions, two selected volumes, and one pocket collection: new and used, hardback and paperback, her poetry has always been something for which I was willing to pay. I dreamed of sitting by the fire with my Emily Dickinson while someone I loved sat reading Robert Frost. I collected all these copies of her poetry so that no matter where I went, I would be ready for those dangling conversations. But the books I gathered have gotten to rest these last few days as I’ve spent hours clicking away in the Emily Dickinson Archive. For the first time since her death, almost all of her poetry, published and unpublished, finished and unfinished, appears together in high-resolution scans, just waiting for readers and scholars to page through it electronically. The first poem I ever received by e-mail was one by Emily Dickinson. Ten years ago, on what would be one of my last true snow days, when school was cancelled and all the world was covered in possibility, a teacher sent me an e-mail: “Don’t forget to put down the books and enjoy some of this winter wonderland,” she wrote, and then beneath her signature included the text of Emily Dickinson’s “It sifts from Leaden Sieves.” Read More
October 30, 2013 On the Shelf Frolicking, and Other News By Sadie Stein At Salon, poet and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis curates a portfolio inspired by Maya Angelou. The New York Public Library now releases lists of the most checked-out books of the month, and they are exactly what one might expect. Here are many pictures of Hemingway frolicking with cats. Because there are no second acts in American life, Conrad Murray—yes, Michael Jackson’s doctor—is, obviously, writing a memoir.