August 27, 2013 Arts & Culture The Beauty of the Heroine: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Poetic Portrait By Alexandra Pechman The Parting of Lancelot and Guinevere, 1874, albumen silver print from glass negative, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1952, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The beauty of the heroine is evident to every one,” Julia Margaret Cameron wrote as the postscript of a letter accompanying the first copy of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which she illustrated with photographs. She was speaking specifically of her image Vivien and Merlin, but, as evidenced in a show of her photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of Cameron’s greatest talents lay in animating many heroines of poetry through her unconventionally dreamy photographs. Read More
August 27, 2013 Quote Unquote In the Club By Sadie Stein “I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.” —Jeanette Winterson, the Art of Fiction No. 150
August 27, 2013 Books The Last Bookstore By Casey N. Cep Photography credit Scott Garner. My father’s father was a carpenter. I never met my grandfather, but I know from photographs and stories that in addition to farming, keeping dairy cows, and working on a cannery line, he earned money by carpentry. I also know from the sawhorses that my father inherited from his father. The wooden trestles stood ever-vigilant in our garage, ready to serve whenever their nail-bitten, blade-gauged bodies were needed. The sawhorses were two of a few inherited things that reminded me of the grandfather I never met: a pear tree that still stands but no longer grows heavy with fruit in early autumn; a concrete trough he made that my sister, used for her horse’s drinking water; a pitchfork on which the handle had been replaced many times, and that we used for moving straw, hay, manure, or leaves, depending on the season. Our inheritance felt large, but it was the sawhorses that I most admired, especially when my father put them to use constructing bookshelves for my bedroom. My father was no stranger to construction; he built the log cabin in which I was raised. He inherited not only tools but also skills from his father, so he was able to cut, stain, and install the wide bookshelves on my bedroom walls in no time. The shelves were required to house my growing library, acquired book by book in a thrilling sequence of gifts, purchases, and trades. The day those bookshelves were installed was both an end and a beginning. It was the beginning of my treating books like objects and the end of my venerating them as relics. The order of the library, the logic of the archive, the structure of the bookstore all faded that day; suddenly, my books were mine to play with and I could do with them as I pleased. I could arrange them by height or by color. I could divide them with whatever objects I wanted: the painted deer skull I had been given as a dream catcher, the glow-in-the-dark vampire mask I had bought on a family vacation, the ornate carousel music boxes I had collected. Read More
August 27, 2013 On the Shelf Kafkaesque Hotels, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Want to lose a friend who’s a writer? Ask her, a month in, how it’s going. Better still, ask her to describe what she’s working on.” Mark Slouka explains the etiquette. The great affect/effect problem. Libraries across Quebec are banding together to help rebuild the branch destroyed in the July Lac-Megantic oil-train derailment. “The rise of the belles-lettres establishment, celebrating France’s literary culture, and even that of its neighbours, is the latest marketing sensation in the French capital, as hoteliers come up with ever more innovative—or desperate—ways to attract guests.” These include a Proust-themed hotel, a hostelry devoted to literary lovers, and a third containing an ominous-sounding Franz Kafka room. The latest in long-overdue library books: an alumna returns a volume to her Michigan school library thirty-three years late, from Dubai.
August 26, 2013 Look Nowhere to Go But Everywhere By Sadie Stein Paul Rogers has made “an illustrated scroll” in which he illustrates a line from every page of On the Road.
August 26, 2013 Arts & Culture Lessons from an Eleven-City Book Tour By Toby Barlow I learned that ravens are multicolored, like cockatoos, only their plumage radiates out far beyond what our spectrum can see. I learned that the waxing moon sliver comes in the shape of a comma, hinting at more to come. I learned Lou Reed has an incredibly firm handshake. Read More