July 8, 2013 Listen “I Ducked Behind My Paris Review…” By Sadie Stein This song, “Dear Joseph,” comes courtesy of Australian group t:dy t:wns. As they explain it, “My friend and I wrote a song about an airplane trip I took where I was distracted from reading my Paris Review by my seat mate, a guy named Joseph, who was very chatty and DEMONSTRATIVELY scared of flying. He was really something.”
July 8, 2013 Arts & Culture Daring Daisy Ashford, the Greatest Ever Nine-Year-Old Novelist By Alice Bolin It all began on the back cover of the great poet James Schuyler’s 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere. In the novel, Schuyler creates an absolutely odd and believable childhood world, told only through dialogue between the young brother and sister Alfred and Guinevere Gates and excerpts from Guinevere’s diary. Alfred and Guinevere is the best novel I’ve ever read about childhood, because it accurately depicts the way children brilliantly and hilariously mimic adults, the way that children’s conversations are imperfectly observed imitations of adult conversations. Because of this insight, it doesn’t read like an adult imitating children—and it is incredibly funny. I’ve read it many times; I can’t get enough of it. Going through it again this spring, I was caught by a review from Commonweal quoted on the back cover. “A deft and funny creation of a high quality,” the critic wrote, “somewhere between the terror-haunted humor of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unselfconscious amusements of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters.” I had never heard of The Young Visiters. Neither, as it happens, had any of the dozen people I’ve mentioned it to in the months since. When I sought The Young Visiters out at the library, I was startled by what would seem to be the most important fact about it. “You could have told me,” I said silently to Commonweal, “that this book was written by a nine-year-old.” When in 1919 a grown-up Daisy Ashford rediscovered and agreed to publish The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan, which she had written twenty-eight years earlier, it was an immediate and absolute success. It is a Victorian “society novel” following “an elderly man of forty-two” named Alfred Salteena and his friends, the young lovers Ethel Montecue and Bernard Clark, as Mr. Salteena strives to become a gentleman. With its distinctive, graceless narrative voice and original spelling errors intact, readers regarded it as a remarkable specimen of children’s grand and unselfconscious ridiculousness. It was so popular in the United States and in Ashford’s native United Kingdom that it went through eight printings in its first year. Read More
July 8, 2013 On the Shelf Rahm Emanuel to Jump in Lake If Kids Read, and Other News By Sadie Stein “This ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendentally platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers.” And other literary takedowns. Playing on children’s eternal desire to see authority figures drenched in cold water, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Chicago Bear Israel Idonije have sworn to jump in wintry Lake Michigan if local kids read two million books this summer. Think the fun is over now that you’re back at work? Not so fast: here’s an idioms and formulaic language quiz! Plus: (more) dirty jokes from Shakespeare. When James Joyce, Jeanette Winterson, and Salman Rushdie wrote for children.
July 5, 2013 Quote Unquote Summer! By Sadie Stein “‘I’ll have to calm down a bit. Or else I’ll burst with happiness.’” —Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness
July 5, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Tragedy, Poetry, Music By The Paris Review I’ve been catching up on the last two issues of the Fairleigh Dickinson journal, The Literary Review. Of special brilliance: a long polyphonic poem by Leon Weinmann about Simone Weil, a bravely whiny New York poem by Rachel Zucker (“I don’t want to have coffee or not have coffee / or listen to This American Life podcast on infidelity”), and a novella by Paula Bomer, “Inside Madeleine,” about a town slut destroyed by love. It’s so arresting I raced to finish so I could pass the issue along to a friend. —Lorin Stein Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle is a strange mixture of concert film—specifically, the 2011 tribute to the late Canadian folk singer at Town Hall—and documentary. But if at times the biographical elements are unsatisfying, the music makes it well worth seeing. Beyond the lovely McGarrigles covers from the concert (I especially liked the version of “Walking Song” performed by her son, Rufus Wainwright), we are treated to original recordings by Kate and her sister Anna, as well as the kind of impromptu jam sessions that take place when everyone in the family is a professional musician. I promptly dug out all my McGarrigle albums, and have been listening to little else since. —Sadie O. Stein Read More
July 4, 2013 Arts & Culture Light and Dark By Ethan Hauser It has been almost three months since the Boston Marathon bombings and the riveting manhunt that followed: less than a hundred days, a fraction of the time needed to understand what happened, what will happen. Still, that searing week lingers vividly in our consciousness. A runner crumples on Boylston Street, paralyzed by the blast. Medics rush against the tide of a fleeing crowd. A helicopter outfitted with heat sensors tracks the shadowy movement of a man under a tarp, stowed away in a boat moored in the inland backyard of a place called Watertown. It has all the contours of a dream: precise in some places, blurry in others, tantalizingly real and unreal. In early May a woman in Virginia with no link to the bombers found a cemetery that would accept the older brother’s body, after many had refused. She had no connection to the Tsarnaevs, or at least no more than the rest of us wrapped up in this unfolding. Asked why she made the effort, she told her interviewer on National Public Radio: “Jesus tells us to—in the parable of the Good Samaritan—love your neighbor as yourself. And your neighbor is not just someone you belong with but someone who is alien to you.” She lives along the same Eastern Seaboard, 550 miles south of Boston, in a state with its own prominent place in the birth of our nation. Read More