July 18, 2013 On the Shelf Finnegans Wake, Spell-checked, and Other News By Sadie Stein Here is a page of Finnegans Wake put through spell-check. What your e-mail opener means. What your e-mail sign-off means. The anatomy of a book cover. And, without further ado, the Malcolm Gladwell book generator.
July 17, 2013 Arts & Culture The Old Men and the Sea By Sadie Stein Hemingway Days, the annual Key West celebration of all things Papa, takes place from July 16–21 this year. Scheduled events include thematic lectures by Hemingway experts, readings, cocktail parties, a silent auction, a marlin derby, and, of course, the famous Sloppy Joe’s lookalike contest. The following is a video from 2010. Though for the first thirty-six seconds it seems disappointingly lite on Hemingways, just wait.
July 17, 2013 Arts & Culture The Return of the (Feline) Repressed By Rhonda Lieberman and Lauren O'Neill-Butler It is no accident that cats dominate the Internet. Their cute antics erupt on our screens with the persistence of repressed material rising to the surface—because they are repressed material: the feline precursors repressed by Official Art History. Until now, our knee-jerk anthropocentrism has blinded us to something any kitten could see. An entire movement—Minimalism—was in fact actually made for cats.* Minimalist icons are in fact cat toys and litter boxes. In his famous study of copycats, Harold Bloom caterwauled about the “anxiety of influence” that spurs artists to strongly misread (i.e. forget to credit) their influences, while they nevertheless betray them with all kinds of clues, tracking litter all over the place. With the Minimalists, we have discovered a feline influence so pervasive and so obvious; it is unbelievable that the Academy has never figured it out. What follows is a much needed pedagogical intervention to demystify misreadings of Minimalism that have circulated—and even been funded—by respectable institutions. So much discourse has been generated—and how wrong everyone has been. Some of our findings: Donald Judd’s Litter Box, the initial red flag, strangely neglected by piles of scholarship. In Judd’s 1965 essay “Specific Objects” (specific objects for cats!), he meows about an art that is “neither painting nor sculpture.” He howled at “relational composition,” noting, “Objects are depersonalized, art should no longer express human emotion.” His subtext? Art should instead be a potty for pussycats! Read More
July 17, 2013 Arts & Culture Poets in the Workplace By Sadie Stein Remember: today is Take Your Poet to Work Day. Full instructions for toting your preferred wordsmith can be found here; an excerpt is below. (Since a poster-size version of this picture glowers over the Paris Review kitchen, I think we’ve got it covered.)
July 17, 2013 On the Shelf Man Steals Books to Find Meaning of Life, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Everyone on earth has one good book in them,” and other bad advice for aspiring writers. A young man who stole eight hundred books from a single store, in search of the meaning of life, says, “I couldn’t comprehend the meaning of life … I was hoping to find the answer by reading those books.” John Grisham novels were banned at Guantanamo Bay, which greatly pleased John Grisham. A comprehensive history of the limerick is being penned, appropriately enough, by the Limerick Writers Centre. The Atlantic Books releases a history of Mark Twain writings from the magazine archives.
July 16, 2013 Listen Donna Stonecipher’s “Model City” By Nikkitha Bakshani I am partial to sentences with this framework: “There are two kinds of [ ]: those who [ ], and those who [ ].” The setup should, ideally, involve a chiasmus or double entendre or any florid rhetorical device that offsets the blatant generalization being made. The best of such sentences are aware of their blatant generalizations but strive for truth anyway, recklessly. That’s the last line of this recording. Stonecipher’s syntactical attempt to polarize the past and future sinks as it tries to swim, for she—or the general truth of life—has already convinced us that the past, present, and future are in flux. Read the full poem in our Summer 2013 issue.