November 27, 2013 On the Shelf Amazon Is Stressful, and Other News By Sadie Stein In honor of Thanksgiving, novels full of good food. Hundreds of writers have volunteered to sell books at indie bookstores this Small Business Saturday. An undercover BBC investigation has found that working at the Amazon warehouse during the holiday season can lead to “mental and physical illness.” Keep a notebook, write daily, and other tips from Nicholson Baker. And whether or not you finish the books, twenty great opening lines.
November 26, 2013 Video & Multimedia An American in Paris By Sadie Stein While book trailers don’t always feel logical, the video made for Nancy Miller’s memoir Breathless is an exception. The project began as a graphic book. As a result, Miller, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, had a wealth of cartoons she had never used, and which subsequently became the trailer. Watch it below.
November 26, 2013 Arts & Culture What We Talk About When We Talk About Ill-Fitting Doll Suits By Sadie Stein Male dolls in a range of ill-fitting costumes. For all humanity’s technological achievements, no one in the history of the world has ever succeeded in producing a realistic-looking miniature suit for a male doll. Any father doll who works a white-collar job looks instantly ridiculous: lumpen, clownish, stripped of all authority. The only play scenarios in which a miniature male doll’s suits make any sense is that in which he has just gotten out of prison and hasn’t had a chance to get new clothes, or if the dollhouse paterfamilias is David Byrne. I need not say that neither plotline is popular. In his 1913 essay “On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel,” Rilke wrote, “Sexless as the dolls of childhood were, [the doll-souls] can find no decease in their stagnant ecstasy, which has neither inflow nor outflow.” Which is all very well, but seriously, doll men have terrible-looking suits. Read More
November 26, 2013 Quote Unquote Seeing Is Believing By Sadie Stein Sandpoint, Idaho. ROBINSON No, a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision. INTERVIEWER How would one learn to see ordinary things this way? ROBINSON It’s not an acquired skill. It’s a skill that we’re born with that we lose. We learn not to do it. —Marilynne Robinson, the Art of Fiction No. 198
November 26, 2013 On the Shelf On Not Thinking Like a Writer, and Other News By Sadie Stein “The artist must avoid thinking like a writer.” The letters of Cézanne. “It isn’t only about droll or absurd situations, it’s about the language used to describe those situations.” Paul Auster on Samuel Beckett. In honor of Umberto Eco’s Legendary Lands, maps of imaginary lands. “Last December, on a Sunday like so many Boston Sundays, one that began in sunshine but gave way to snow showers, three hundred members of Old South Church gathered for a congregational meeting. After hours of debate following weeks of discussion, they voted to sell one of their two copies of the Bay Psalm Book.” Casey N. Cep on America’s first book.