January 17, 2014 On the Shelf Cinema’s Most Realistic Psychopath, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Still from No Country for Old Men, 2007. The Gordon Lish Bot is trolling Twitter, demanding that writers craft their 140 characters more meticulously. It’s fine invective, but masochists will wish for the sting of the real thing. Science has cast its formidable gaze on movie psychopaths, declaring No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh the most “realistic.” And yet no one, living or dead, has ever dared to sport that haircut. The curiously robust posthumous life of V. C. Andrews. Lewis Carroll’s “Wise Words About Letter-Writing” still apply in the lawless land of electronic mail. This introduction to Korean alphabet art is full of colorful translations: “Using a dustpan, the black mountain is split to form letters, and then the canvas is propped up vertically, and stains caused by gravity are left behind.”
January 16, 2014 Quote Unquote A Creator of Inwardness By Dan Piepenbring Photograph by Peter Hujar. Susan Sontag was born today in 1933. INTERVIEWER Is it old-fashioned to think that the purpose of literature is to educate us about life? SONTAG Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness. —Susan Sontag, the Art of Fiction No. 143
January 16, 2014 First Person, Our Daily Correspondent West Side Story By Sadie Stein Image: Design of Signage I like my psychiatrist, but I often find that occupying fifty minutes with an account of my tedious life feels like a high price to pay for responsible prescription. “Do you try to make him laugh?” my dad asked, when he picked me up from my first-ever appointment. “Do you want to be his favorite patient?” (My dad visited a therapist briefly in the 1970s, hence his expertise.) I explained loftily that this was a medical situation and not like that at all, and that the doctor had been amazed that with my family history I had never been treated before. Then I admitted that yes, of course I wanted to be his favorite. “When I saw my guy,” said my dad, “I sang to him.” And he began to sing, very beautifully, to the tune of the Love Story theme, Dog food is the kingI wish it weren’t but I can’t do anythingIt’s so damn good it even makes the sparrows singAnd grown men weep and angels cry. There was a moment of silence. “What did he do?” I asked. “He made me turn around so I wasn’t playing to his reaction all the time and had to actually engage.” Read More
January 16, 2014 Look He Did, After All, Attend the Tuskegee Institute By Timothy Leo Taranto This week, we’re presenting Timothy Leo Taranto’s illustrated author puns. Today: Ralph Elliphant
January 16, 2014 From the Archive A Few Exits Back on the Information Superhighway By Dan Piepenbring Thanks to the unflagging efforts of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine—which has had, since 1996, the unenviable task of preserving as much of the Internet as possible—we recently exhumed the original version of our Web site. Better still, we rediscovered these two videos of our late founding editor, George Plimpton. In the grainy, hypercompressed format that marked mankind’s earliest forays into digital recording, he helpfully explains where you are and what you might do here. These were the days of 28.8k modems, of CompuServe and Netscape, when the word multimedia carried a frisson of ultramodern potential. As you watch, you can practically hear the bleat and drone of the dial-up connection. That’s technology, baby. These videos are not high definition. They are virtual fossils. Handle them with care. Read More
January 16, 2014 On the Shelf Peace Reigns Throughout the Land, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Stained glass window, Denis and Saint Sebastian Church, Kruft, Germany. Photo: Reinhardhauke, Wikimedia Commons. Great news: we’re living in the most peaceful era* in human history! “To hell with Gatsby’s green light!” Why we should stop teaching novels to high school students. Shelley Jackson is, “weather permitting,” inscribing a story entirely in snow. One way to save a failing bookshop: beg people on Facebook to come spend money there. Forget Paris. Nantes, a city “situated in the estuary of the Loire,” is where it’s at. *persistent, intractable religious hostilities notwithstanding