July 10, 2013 On the Shelf High-Altitude Language, and Other News By Sadie Stein Reading can affect the behavior of those who identify strongly with the central characters, a new study (and a million Twi-hards) finds. In other research news: a controversial linguistics study suggests that high altitude can directly impact the development of languages. “Civil libertarians and consumer advocates call it digital book-burning: censoring, erasing, altering or restricting access to books in electronic formats.” The activist group Geeks Out has called for a boycott of the upcoming Ender’s Game film in protest of author Orson Scott Card, who opposes same-sex marriage. Card responds, in part, “Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.” In less fraught lit-cinematic news, Charlie Kaufman is taking on the adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five.
July 9, 2013 Arts & Culture Girls Together By Meganne Fabrega Courtesy of the Haug family. It’s a gray day in April and after nine hours on a crowded BoltBus I arrive in Philadelphia to see my old friend from college, Nicole, a fellow writer and veritable one-woman repository of Philadelphian history. I’m here to celebrate her birthday, to drink wine, and to comb through the detritus of a difficult past year for both of us. Really, I’m not here for research. So, of course it makes perfect sense that within five minutes of picking me up she turns her car toward 4100 Pine Street, an address I’ve seen scrawled on the front of numerous letters, in nineteenth-century directories, in the chicken-scratch handwriting of an 1870 Philadelphian census worker, and in journal after journal of Amy Ella Blanchard. I first encountered Blanchard’s work as a sullen adolescent, forced to go to an island in Maine every other weekend with my father and soon-to-be stepmother. The house where we stayed was built by Blanchard in the early twentieth century and her books lined the shelves, but I was too busy reading classics like Salem’s Lot to be bothered with these dusty old tomes. The fact that she was a relative of my father’s girlfriend made Blanchard’s novels even less attractive to me. Not many readers these days know who Blanchard was, but just barely a century ago she published at least a book a year, sometimes more, for girls and about girls. During her lifetime she wrote over eighty books, a play in 1896 about the importance of exercise for women, and even a couple of small booklets flouting such morals as “fritterings” and being “pound foolish.” A self-described late bloomer, Blanchard’s writing career started, and sputtered, with a story she published in a Salem, Massachusetts newspaper when she was in her teens, but it wasn’t until she was well into her thirties that her novels became an indispensable part of every young girl’s library. 4100 Pine Street is where Amy Ella Blanchard met her writerly fate, personally and professionally. In 1871, when she was fifteen years old, the Waugh family of Philadelphia hired her to be a tutor for their young son, future marine artist and camouflage designer Frederick Judd Waugh. Patriarch Samuel Bell Waugh was a renowned Philadelphian painter of portraits, including at least two of President Lincoln; his wife, Mary, specialized in miniatures; and Frederick’s older half sister, Ida, was hard at work pursuing her own painting career. A family of artists, the Waughs quickly took young Amy under their wing. They kept inspired company in their time and introduced Amy to a creative world that was far removed from her hometown of Baltimore in more ways than one. Read More
July 9, 2013 Arts & Culture Book and Cheese Pairings By Sadie Stein Bayley Hazen Blue: Virginia Woolf. “It would be too simple to say this is any ordinary cheese with the blues—it’s dense with flavor, care and feeling. The Bayley Hazen has a balanced mix of flavors that range from buttered toast, to chocolate and hazelnuts, and even the dark bitterness of liquorice. This Stilton-like blue is a mix of narratives—the Mrs. Dalloway of cheeses, if you will. It’s a delicious modern classic. Its taste, and the moment you first fell in love with it, will permeate in your memory for years. Don’t let this one get away.” (Via Airship Daily.)
July 9, 2013 Department of Sex Ed Dirty Parts By Kate Levin The last time I slept with Carolyn she pushed me off her in the midst of our lovemaking and turned away from me. At first I did not understand what it was she wanted. But she bumped her behind against me until I realized that was what I was being offered, a marble peach. No, I said. Try it. She looked over her shoulder. Please. I came up close behind her. Just easy, she said. Just a little. I went in too fast. Not that much, she said. She said, Oh. I pressed in, remained, pumped. She arched, clearly in some pain. And I found, suddenly, that I was thrilled. I started raiding my parents’ library on the belief that reading their books would let me reproduce their thoughts. Same words in, same ideas out: the alchemy made sense to a middle schooler. When I started plucking novels from their shelves in an investigative frenzy, I was surprised that my parents didn’t seem more concerned about their privacy. Couldn’t they see that I was about to tunnel into their psyches? Wouldn’t their jig soon be up? A nice theory, but a book or two later, the ominous fog of adult tension that drove me to espionage in the first place still pervaded our house, inscrutable as ever. If novels couldn’t help me decipher it, I consoled myself, at least they could help me escape it; that much I knew from an established history of total, meal-skipping absorption in the Lois Lowrys and L. M. Montgomerys on my own bookshelf. So I kept at my parents’ paperbacks with a shrug of “why not?”—feeling at times engaged and accomplished, at others bewildered and bored—until the day I picked up Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent and wandered into that passage, in which the narrator found, suddenly, that he was thrilled. Read More
July 9, 2013 On the Shelf Giant Mr. Darcy Terrorizes London, and Other News By Sadie Stein A twelve-foot fiberglass Mr. Darcy is currently standing in the middle of Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake, and is terrifying. A new analytics tool claims it can detect sarcasm in online comments. But the best part: “Its clients include the Home Office, EU Commission and Dubai Courts.” The artist formerly known as “the” is now represented by the symbol Ћ. Book titles missing one (key) letter. A scientifically accurate “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Sample lyric: “Thirty-two light years in the sky / Ten parsecs which is really high.”
July 8, 2013 First Person Say Uncle By Mike Scalise My average encounter with my eighteen-month-old nephew, Crosby, goes like this: First, I press a button. The boy, who lives in Charlotte, appears on a piece of handheld video technology, wobbling like a sleepy bear cub, eating something that’s not food (a TV remote; a shoe, maybe). Several states away, my wife and I speak into our technology. We say “Crosby-face! There’s Crosby-face!” Then my brother-in-law’s unseen voice commands his son, like God or a drive-thru employee, to “give your aunt and uncle a kiss.” Crosby lunges at his screen, at us, toothless, dripping with joy. Like it’s a part of a script, I yell “Crosby’s trying to eat my face!” then my wife yells “Who’s trying to eat somebody’s face?” and right on cue our screen goes pink with a toddler’s wet gums. It goes on like this for minutes, my wife and I encouraging our poor nephew—this pure, adorable maniac—to actually ingest a touchscreen device. “Oh no! Crosby’s eating us!” we say to no one. “He’s eating our noses! What will we do?!?” we say, until Crosby, cackling wildly, knocks the device from his father’s hands, and like the ill-fated hunters of the Blair Witch ghost, our transmission falls black at once. Until seconds later, when we repeat the whole encounter again. This interaction, or some version of it, has happened at least three times a week for the last year and a half in my home. As an uncle, I don’t know if I can take much more. Read More