September 19, 2013 On Design A Life in Matches By Justin Alvarez A Life in Matches: Marineland Restaurant, Marineland, California. Photograph by Ben Stott. How does one document his or her life? Do you track the minute details of each and every day in a diary, like Ned Rorem, or measure it out with coffee spoons, as J. Alfred Prufrock declared? When digging through the last boxes and cases from his grandfather’s home, Justin Bairamian found an old suitcase, full to the brim with thousands of matchbooks. They were from the Savoy in London to the Marineland Restaurant in California, and many had his grandfather’s own scribbles noting the location and year on the inside cover. Bairamian had discovered a beautiful record of a life well lived. Bairamian has allowed designer Ben Stott to catalogue a sample of the collection, one day at a time, on the blog A Life in Matches. It is a brilliant tribute to one man’s life, as well as insight into the evolution of graphic design. Pause Play Play Prev | Next
September 19, 2013 Bulletin A Demand for Love By Justin Alvarez For the first time in its sixty-three-year history, the National Book Foundation has published longlists for each of its four award categories. The fiction longlist was announced this morning, and it features a range of celebrated and debut authors, including Thomas Pynchon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Marra, and Paris Review contributor Rachel Kushner, for her latest novel, The Flamethrowers. Congratulations to all! On The Flamethrowers, Kushner writes in her essay from our Winter 2012 issue: As I wrote, events from my time, my life, began to echo those in the book, as if I were inside a game of call and response. While I wrote about ultraleft subversives, The Coming Insurrection, a book written by an anonymous French collective, was published in the United States, and its authors were arrested in France. As I wrote about riots, they were exploding in Greece. As I wrote about looting, it was rampant in London. The Occupy movement was born on the University of California campuses, and then reborn as a worldwide phenomenon, and by the time I needed to describe the effects of tear gas for a novel about the 1970s, all I had to do was watch live feeds from Oakland, California. … An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost. It was with images that I began The Flamethrowers. By the time I finished, I found myself with a large stash. You can read an excerpt from The Flamethrowers here.
September 19, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Mike Royko By Clare Fentress “Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don’t want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: always remember to remove the bell from the cat’s collar before cooking.” —Mike Royko
September 19, 2013 On the Shelf Vladimir Nabokov’s Butterfly Drawings, and Other News By Justin Alvarez Booktryst highlights well-known lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings. Has the Royal Hall from Beowulf been found? Archaeologists believe they now know the location of the hall where Hrothgar’s warriors once feasted. Cal O’Mara, Jerry Potts, Bob Lang: author D. W. Wilson lists the top ten absent fathers in literature. In feline book news, a cat procures the job title of “assistant librarian” at a Russian library. Perks include a raise in packs of cat food a month and “a spiffy bow tie.” “Well, that’s the end of the Booker Prize, then.”
September 18, 2013 First Person Not Weird About Brooklyn By Helen Rubinstein I had to put my leather loveseat up on Craigslist three times before someone answered the ad, and then that someone, in all of New York City, was the guy my closest friend had been sleeping with a few months earlier. I’d never met him, but I knew that he’d once had to leave her house late at night to go take some kind of medication, and that he got really, really sweaty during sex. Also that he didn’t have Internet access at home, kissed exclusively in chaste little pecks, and had two alarmingly close friends who were women. He and Marie were both writing novels about angels. They’d met at the university where they both taught writing and had both earned MFAs in fiction (at different times), and after they’d written together at a coffee shop one winter afternoon, they relocated to his kitchen table for what Marie called “the download”: a pre-hookup conversation about family and spirituality that lasted for hours. Read More
September 18, 2013 Quote Unquote The Sort of Thing That Would Be Difficult to Explain to Someone from Another Planet By Sadie Stein “Walter White is a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros.” —George R. R. Martin