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The Daily

 

  • Arts & Culture

    Dallas, Part 1: From Afar

    By

    Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. With all eyes on Dallas, it seemed fitting to re-run one of our favorite pieces from 2012, an ode to the city and its complicated legacy.

    Between 318 and 271 million years ago, the ancient continental core of North America butted against what would become South America. Land folded and faulted; mountains were born. Then what would become the Gulf of Mexico opened, and inland seas washed the peaks away. It pays to remember there are mountains beneath Dallas. The tops may have eroded, but the roots remain buried deep.

    Some 165 million years later—in 1841—John Neely Bryan built a shelter on a bluff and called the area Dallas.

    One hundred and twenty-two years later—in 1963—John F. Kennedy was shot on that bluff, now named Dealey Plaza.

    Seventeen years later—in 1980—J. R. Ewing was shot on TV. Read More

  • This Week’s Reading

    What We’re Loving: Russian Doubts, Family Ties, and the Letters Q, T, and X

    By
    From-Russia-With-Doubt-Paris-Review

    Kazimir Malevich. Or not.

    Where do letters come from? Why do they change? What are they, really? What makes a q a q, and what quiddity does it share with Q? These are questions that most kids outgrow around the time they learn how to read. Ewan Clayton has written a book for the rest of us. In The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing, he leads us through the formation of the Roman alphabet, the development of medieval scripts, the evolution of Renaissance and modern typefaces, the rise of cursive, the twentieth-century invention of “print” handwriting as a progressive educational tool, the unexpected success of e-mail, and into the future of data storage. A calligrapher (and former monk) who helped Apple create its onscreen fonts, Clayton is as interested in a digital Gill sans as he is in uncials written with a quill. Although different readers may warm to different chapters of his book, my galleys are dog-eared throughout. Whether his topic is Roman inscriptions, the bookkeeping traditions of the East India Company, the first admission of handwriting as evidence in a court of law, the pitfalls of the paperless office, or the experience of copying sacred texts, Clayton writes with ingenuous charm and contagious enthusiasm, often illustrating his points with “calligraphic studies” of his own. I only wish there were more of these—more illustrations in general—because he turns a line of type into an object of contemplation and makes it okay to be curious, all over again, about the ancient symbols we all spent so long learning to use, and to ignore. —Lorin Stein

    Nell Dunn’s 1963 short story collection Up the Junction ain’t for the faint of heart—think bleak birth and mundane death, impersonal sex, pub patrons whose breasts evoke “two cheeses in a gauze bag.” As a young woman Dunn forsook her posh West End upbringing (she’s the daughter of late businessman Sir Philip Dunn) to move to Battersea, South London, where she found work in a sweets factory. At 127 pages it’s an all-out romp, capturing a particular cultural moment and inspiring several more: eponymous works by Ken Loach (a 1965 BBC Wednesday Play), Peter Collinson (a 1968 feature film) and “Squeeze” (a 1979 #2 UK single) all owe their debt to Dunn. —Abby Gibbon Read More

  • Bulletin

    Have You Seen This Desk?

    By

    desk-large-610030748-1

    Today, George Eliot’s birthday, let us pay tribute to the sad chapter in our collective history when, in 2012, someone stole the author’s portable writing desk from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in Warwickshire. Having seen no updates in the ensuing year, we are left to assume that both thief and papier-mâché secretaire are still at large, and that some greedy literary mogul is gazing upon it as we speak. But as Miss Evans herself might have said, “It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.” May it bring inspiration.

     

  • The Poem Stuck in My Head

    Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick”

    By
    Plath-Hughes-Portrait-Paris-Review

    Collage via Flickr.

    I am a miner. The light burns blue.
    Waxy stalactites
    Drip and thicken, tears

    I am writing this while pregnant with my first son, just as Sylvia Plath was when she wrote “Nick and the Candlestick” in 1962.

    I wanted him: he was no surprise or trouble at all; he was passion and biology. But I am not happy. No one in smiley U.S.A. is supposed to say this at the news of a baby. An expectant mother is supposed to be ecstatic, full of promise and life. It is true, I marvel; the last thing I ever expected to be good at was creating a small person, that my body could nourish him both inside itself and within the world. He’s evidence that something inside me might work, even if other, less visible things do not.

    Remembering, even in sleep,
    Your crossed position.
    The blood blooms clean

    Before him, I would read Plath quotes from one of those ubiquitous Twitter feeds, feel recognition—and feel like a cliché. I do genuinely love her work, but it’s so expected, so reductive—even if, with him, it feels newly vital for me. We all know the narrative: marry a handsome, destructive man, go from one to two, three then four, and then kill yourself at thirty. Like so many girl-readers, I worshipped her and selfishly romanticized the tragedy. As a young woman, Plath sought the whirl and illusion of enchanted, swift New York, painfully unprepared for adulthood, and like so many others, I recognized all those standard youthful Manhattan dreams, darker when you feel everything twenty-fold, when you’re unsure of having any talent or worth, paralyzed by sensitivity, maybe a little weak, easy to dismantle. A cliché, yes, but the mythology, and the work, remain captivating and solid. As a writer and a reader and a human being with dark tendencies, I have great empathy for everything Plath. There is a reason she has endured. We may all fail miserably at love, family, and living, but we can try to be brave, especially in our work. As Plath says of her own womb, my stomach was always crawling with white newts and calcification, a gut that betrayed me, even when I tried to convince it of happy otherwise. Read More