June 28, 2013 Video & Multimedia I Am Not Resigned! By Sadie Stein I think we can all agree that what this day needs is Joan Crawford dramatically reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music.”
June 28, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Lustig, Kiwis, and Carousels By The Paris Review “In the United States, the country with the world’s highest prison population rate (followed closely by Russia), prisoners work for between 93 cents and $5 a day, if they’re paid at all … But the Gulag is an image firmly imprinted on our American brains. It’s easy to imagine—exciting, even, especially since it’s so far away.” A short history of the show trial, with unforgettable digressions, by Daily regular Sophie Pinkham. —Lorin Stein In 1989, historian Arlette Farge published Le goût de l’archive, her account of immersing herself in the ancient records of the archives of the Bastille. While a virtual love letter to historiography may sound less than riveting, this is an engaging and strangely moving evocation of the pleasures of scholarship. Now out in a new translation (The Allure of the Archives) from Yale University Press. —Sadie O. Stein Initially, David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down seems like the perfect summer read: light in conflict, filled with the typical summer escapades that teenagers get into when there’s nothing better to do but get in trouble. However, Ballantyne’s an expert poker player, and a prime example of New Zealand literature (“slaughterhouse fiction”), in which the pastoral paradise initially imagined by Britain as a South Pacific Eden instead morphed from an economy of industrialized violence into casual societal violence. (See the recent Jane Campion miniseries Top of the Lake, for example.) No one leaves this novel unscathed, characters or reader. You’ve been warned. —Justin Alvarez A few nights ago I watched Max Ophüls’s La Ronde. At the beginning of the movie and between each vignette in it, the omnipresent narrator delivers a little sing-song bit about the inevitable turn, turn, turn of romantic affairs while cranking a carousel round and round. And what a magnificent carousel it is—by far my favorite part of the movie. A turn-of-the-century model (La Ronde was filmed in France 1950 but set in fin-de-siècle Vienna), it has a wooden horse or two, but also a bicycle, a step-stool, a swing, an armchair. Oil lamps hang from the interior of its scalloped canopy. When looking for information about the provenance of this particular carousel, I came across images of two astounding modern carousels at the annual Christmas market in Brussels. This article gives the story behind them. —Clare Fentress New Directions has put out the most beautiful set of postcards, featuring the book cover that the legendary Alvin Lustig designed between 1941 and 1953. Almost too pretty to use. —S.O.S.
June 28, 2013 On the Shelf Date Your Characters, and Other News By Sadie Stein Hogarth is launching a new series in which modern writers reinterpret Shakespeare. First up: Anne Tyler does The Taming of the Shrew, while Jeanette Winterson takes on The Winter’s Tale. In their own words: “We at Author’s Promoter thought it would be awesome if there was a site where you could check out characters from books and read up about them before deciding if you wanted to read their story; we also thought it would be pretty cool if you could find the type of characters you love to read about. In a way, we wanted to offer a ‘dating site’ for readers; we know that no matter how awesome the site gets it will always need more and more improvement adapting to readers and authors’ needs and that is exactly what we intend on doing!” The above is what we got when we selected “Male; asexual; human; 5’ 4”. So, n.b. If you’re more into blind book dating, on the other hand … E. L. James has overtaken J. K. Rowling’s perch on the mysterious Forbes Most Influential list. In which you were tricked into reading science fiction.
June 27, 2013 Arts & Culture Town of Marvels By Rosecrans Baldwin Image via oxfordmississippi.com. The boy and the girl were engaged, driving to California, where the girl wanted to make costumes for the movies. The boy planned to study Native American archaeology; he was just out of the Navy. They were the sort of young people I felt accurate calling beautiful—good-looking, around twenty years old, in love. But it was more than that. The fact is, it’s sustaining, getting older, to meet young adults who are hopeful and naïve, just enough. They had a car, a dog, a vision. But they didn’t have a book. Leaving New England, they’d heard about a certain book on NPR, and the girl thought it sounded just right. The boy said they’d find a copy on the road somewhere. They drove for days, heading south from New Hampshire: Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee. No book. The girl pressed. The boy promised. Bookstores don’t exactly dot the American highway in the grand manner of Sbarros. Finally, driving through Mississippi, seeing a sign for Oxford, the boy suggested they stop, stretch their legs, find the damn book. Oxford was a university town, there had to be a bookstore somewhere. They parked in the tiny main square. A bookstore stood on the corner under a sign for Fortune’s Famous Ice Cream. The girl walked the dog, the boy went inside. He asked, Do you have this book? We do, the clerk said. And there it was, right next to the register, a stack of them. The clerk said, Do you want a signed copy? I guess so, the boy said. Wait, but you do know the author was here tonight, right? He just did a reading, the clerk said after a moment. It was about seven P.M., the verge of dusk. The boy was confused. Suddenly, the clerk was pointing out the window, saying, Wait, that’s him going by right there. No one really knows the value of book tours. Whether or not they’re good ideas, or if they improve book sales. I happen to think the author is the last person you’d want to talk to about a book; they hate it by that point, they’ve already moved on to a new lover. Besides, the author never knows what the book is about anyway. Read More
June 27, 2013 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Rutu Modan, Cartoonist By Rutu Modan Sunday I have no idea how this happened, but apparently I’ve agreed to give a talk to the entire pre-K and first grade at a local school. A total of seven classes. While I do, in fact, also illustrate children books, it’s really due to my interest in books and less to my interest in children. It’s not that I don’t like children—I’m quite fond of mine—but speaking to children is a bit scary. They don’t know they’re supposed to hide it if they’re bored. I show the kids books I’ve illustrated, share my work methods, and even throw in a professional secret: I can’t draw horses’ feet. During the Q&A, a curly-haired girl persistently raises her hand and when I call on her she says, “My mother looks much younger than you.” But all in all, I realize that between these kids and my students at the art academy there is no big difference in understanding. Read More
June 27, 2013 Look A Rejection Is a Rejection Is a Rejection By Sadie Stein Behold what is either the best or worst rejection letter we have ever seen (depending on your capacity for cruelty), sent to Gertrude Stein in 1912 by publisher Arthur C. Fifield. Given that the manuscript in question became Three Lives (among other things) we suppose she had the last laugh. And as an editor, you can’t help thinking: Just how much time did this guy have on his hands? Thanks, Electric Lit!