July 29, 2013 Arts & Culture Gin, Cigarettes, and Desperation: The Carson McCullers Diet By Sadie Stein From Modern Drunkard: Carson liked sherry with her tea, brandy with her coffee, and her purse with a large flask of whiskey. Between books, when she was neither famous nor monied, she claimed she existed almost exclusively on gin, cigarettes, and desperation for weeks at a time. During her most productive years she employed a round-the-clock drinking system: she’d start the day at her typewriter with a ritual glass a beer, a way of saying it was time to work, then steadily sip sherry as she typed. If it was cold and there was no wood for the stove, she’d turn up the heat with double shots of whiskey. She concluded her workday before dinner, which she primed with a martini. Then it was off to the parties, which meant more martinis, cognac, and, oftentimes, corn whiskey. Finally, she ended the day as it began, with a bedtime beer. Her recuperative abilities are the stuff of legend—she would rise the following morning, shake off her hangover like so much dust, down her morning beer, and get back to work. And thank you, Michelle Dean, for drawing to our attention!
July 29, 2013 Arts & Culture The Tournament of Literary Friends By Katherine Hill We’re tournament people, my husband and I. The way some people climb rocks or brew beer (I don’t know: What do other people do?), we draw sloppy 64-berth brackets in coffee-stained spiral-bound notebooks then set to vigorous, regimented discussion, rationally whittling down the field until an undisputed champion emerges. Notable competitions past include Most Intriguing City (Helsinki def. Buenos Aires) and Favorite Animal (Polar Bear def. House Cat). Most times, Matt is the tournament master, the committee of one who conceives and presents the field to me, which I then imperiously adjudicate, usually while reclining on a couch or airplane seat and eating something packed with butterfat. It’s a good arrangement, because he is a historian who likes categories and I am a writer who likes making things up. For tournament people, the next bracket is always a gift. Matt’s mom visited last month, and she brought with her a 32-person field of literary characters for each of us to complete. Our champions were to be not the greatest or most iconic or most influential figures, but the characters we’d most like to have as friends. “Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert?” Claire Messud had recently demanded of Publishers Weekly. She had a point. We took Alexander Portnoy instead. Read More
July 29, 2013 Look Beatrix Potter, “Study of a Spider” By Sadie Stein Via Victoria and Albert Museum. Yes, she may be known for her anthropomorphic animals, but Beatrix Potter’s studies of local flora and fauna show an entirely different side: that of the committed naturalist and conservationist.
July 29, 2013 On the Shelf Chocolate, Jerks, and Other News By Sadie Stein We all know OMG has some years on it, but, as it turns out, so do unfriend, outasight, and hang out. Some leaves, woman holding a birdcage for some reason, and seventeen other contemporary book-cover clichés. According to a study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, bookstore sales may benefit from the aroma of chocolate. “One unexpected development of becoming a writer is meeting literary heroes … Unfortunately, sometimes they turn out to be asses, or they hit on you.” [WARNING: the following is disturbing.] The frontispiece of this nineteenth-century book reads, “The leather with which this book is bound is human skin, from a soldier who died during the great Southern Rebellion.” And it is not an idle boast; rather, it’s an example of the (hopefully) lost art of anthropodermic bibliopegy. Read at your own risk.
July 26, 2013 Listen Kristin Dombek’s “Letter from Williamsburg” By Lorin Stein Il Pordenone, The Holy Trinity This essay may sound strange, read by a man—it is very specifically a woman’s essay. But Dombek’s voice is so powerful, every time I read “Letter from Williamsburg,” I hear it in my head. It’s like a song I want to sing along to. In fact, I remember reading the first two paragraphs to our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, over the phone, before the rest of the essay was written. I wanted him to hear how beautifully Dombek modulates her tone from the sublime to the mundane. I only wish I could do justice to the music on the page. Read the full essay in our Summer 2013 issue.
July 26, 2013 Arts & Culture War of the Words By James Hughes Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom. Courtesy of Rainbow Films. My Lunches with Orson, a collection of off-the-cuff conversations between filmmaker Henry Jaglom and Hollywood lion Orson Welles, recorded before Welles died of heart failure in 1985 (when his body was discovered, he had a typewriter in his lap, keystrokes from a comeback that was cruelly out of reach), arrived in bookstores last week with much fanfare. The chats were recorded weekly at the duo’s favorite restaurant, the now-shuttered Ma Maison on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and were conducted not only with Welles’s consent but at his urging. The transcripts read less like a meal and more like forkfuls from a dessert cart that endlessly whizzes by. Welles stabs at topics this way and that, exposing his deepest grudges and marveling over his unmatched moments of grandeur, sometimes in the same sentence. Author Peter Biskind combed through the cassettes, dozens of which Jaglom had stashed in a shoebox, and edited them for maximum punch. In his introduction, Biskind claims this “may be the last undiscovered trove of Welles on Welles.” Excerpts from the book, which can be snacked on online, reveal Jaglom recoiling at times as his companion blows buckshot across Hollywood. With each passing course, Welles serves up one-liners, each more potent than the last, and dismisses showbiz royalty past and present. High-powered table-hoppers are skewered the moment they’re out of earshot. Richard Burton gets the breeze. Waiters get shushed. Jaglom gets embarrassed. Even Wolfgang Puck, the chef preparing Welles’s meals, is targeted. (This was before Puck slid to Spago, the quintessential mideighties hot spot he erected off the Sunset Strip.) While Welles has no problem chortling about a leading Broadway critic who was unaware that the disgruntled staff at his favorite hotel routinely pissed in his morning tea, he doesn’t seem particularly mindful of his own tableside vulnerabilities. Read More