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The Daily

 

  • Arts & Culture

    Notes from a Bookshop: Late Summer, or Summer Is a Kind of Island

    By

    DeLillo

    3. Arcana

    Of one order are the mysteries of light
    and of another are those of fantasy
    Rider Tarot Deck instructions

    —Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

    A good friend came to visit this spring, and a few times during her stay, she pulled a book off the shelves, either from Moody Road Studios or at my home, shuffled the pages under her thumb, and stuck a finger on a line like an arrow hitting a bull’s-eye. Then she’d read the single line aloud, a kind of party trick.

    This would typically happen when we’d be in the middle of a conversation, talking about some big questions that we were swirling at the time, the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I, will-this-work-or-not, should-I-take-this-chance kind of conversations that tend to occur after some Southern Comfort on a patio. She used whatever book was in her hand as a literary tarot, and believed the line would tell us all we needed to know. Usually, bizarrely, it worked.

    I tried this on my own, but it fell flat. After the house was asleep, I would pose a question in my head and stalk a book, pull it from the stack before it could resist, flip open its pages and point hungrily at it, waiting for its answer. Each time, the result was tinny, hard-pressed, wanting. It reminded me of late nights with my Ouija board as a kid, waiting desperately for something to speak to me when I was really just waiting for my own voice.

    People ask a lot of their books. They want them to be amazing, they want them to be cheap, they want them the moment they walk through my door. I often feel like a kind of carnival showman, flashing bright colors in front of the customer, hoping something catches their eye. People’s personal restrictions always amaze me. “I don’t read books with dogs in them.” “I don’t like to have to think too hard.” “I can’t buy books with white covers.” Really? Read More

  • First Person

    On Keeping a Notebook, Part 1

    By
    SARAH_JOURNALlarge

    Photograph courtesy of the author.

    When I decided to move to New York to pursue writing, I took all of the notebooks I’d kept in high school out back of my apartment and burned them on the sidewalk separating my building from my neighbor’s. I didn’t use an accelerant because I expected the paper to burn easily, for the whole pile to go up in flames at the toss of a single match. Instead, I sat on the sidewalk with book after book of matches, tearing the notebooks apart and crumpling them, holding individual pages over the flames so they would catch, watching the spiral bindings blacken but persevere into the eventual pile of ashes and scraps of brown paper left behind an hour later. When my roommate came home, she told me what I’d done was stupid.

    I’ve kept a notebook since elementary school. Back then, I called it a diary because that’s what my friend Christina called hers. I remember her reading me accounts of eating hot dogs, meeting a cute boy, doing homework: “factual” records of events that were, whether or not important, beats on which to hang memories. I fashioned my diary after Christina’s but eventually grew bored and abandoned it. I didn’t see the point; I didn’t yet know what it meant to record the story of my inner life. I had a completely different relationship with my inner life then. There wasn’t a sense of anxiety around the need to find words for those things I was thinking and feeling. That anxiety came a few years later, in middle school, when my social life took a downturn and I started to keep a notebook again. The first thing I wrote was a song, the lyrics and melody for which are lost forever, as is the notebook. Read More

  • On the Shelf

    Finch Printing, and Other News

    By

    0pooprinter1large

  • Behold: an analog typewriter printer that uses ink made from zebra-finch droppings.
  • A massive archive of Charles Bukowski’s manuscripts and letters is now available online at Bukowski.net.
  • Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, and other popular stars of celebrity fan fiction.
  • This Japanese crime syndicate publishes its own magazine. Says the Guardian, “The front page of the magazine, a professionally produced publication featuring the gang’s familiar diamond-shaped logo, carries a piece by its boss, Kenichi Shinoda, instructing younger members to observe traditional yakuza values, including loyalty and discipline.”

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