June 20, 2013 First Person Child Mortality By Rachael Maddux “I’ve been having a lot of anxiety about death lately,” my friend Kate said. It was early September and she and I and some others were crammed into a red leather booth in a bar that had once been a gas station. It was still warm outside but it wouldn’t be much longer. “I think it’s because my grandmother just died,” she said. “I don’t know—I’ve never really thought much about it before now.” As she spoke, the upper half of my body slumped out and across the table, empty glasses clinking as my elbow nudged them aside. “Tell me what that’s like,” I said, eyes wide, as if imploring her to recount some illicit rendezvous. She laughed and everyone laughed and the waitress came over and we ordered another round. Read More
June 20, 2013 On the Shelf Sendak Does Tolstoy, and Other News By Sadie Stein Maurice Sendak illustrates Tolstoy. And speaking of collaborations! Appropriately enough, there is now an interactive app for William Shakespeare’s Star Wars. Everyone loves Bloomsday; why no Dalloway Day? (Dalloday?) Ten words for which we could really use English equivalents. (Although, really, we should just learn the ones we don’t know. Especially age-otori.) “Gertrude Stein, with her gnomish, arty, aphoristic tendencies, would seem to be ideal. ‘There is no there there’ may be one of the great proto-tweets.”
June 19, 2013 First Person Cutouts By Jonathan Wilson A few weeks ago I travelled to Israel to give some talks. Along with invitations to universities I had been contacted by the United States Embassy in Jerusalem and asked if I would participate in an event that would be part of “the cultural outreach program” before President Obama’s visit at the end of March. At first the terms of my employment were loose: I could discuss any aspect of my writing or writing life that I chose. As I was born in London and only came to America when I was twenty-six, I thought I might discuss the seductive appeal that American novelists, especially Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, held for me when I was a young man and how perhaps, more than anything, it was reading their fiction which stirred my desires to move to New York and become, if I could, both an American citizen and an American writer. The embassy thought this would be fine, but then someone higher up the ladder than the delightful and accommodating woman I had been dealing with decided to intervene. Would it be possible for me, in some way, to link my talk to the theme of “Great American Speeches?” I replied that while I had certainly admired and been impressed by President Obama’s Grant Park election victory speech, and while I had been thoroughly wowed by Aretha’s hat at the fist inauguration, I couldn’t really see how “Great American Speeches” had anything at all to do with my writing. Read More
June 19, 2013 Quote Unquote To the Letter By Sadie Stein “More than kisses, letters mingle souls.”* —John Donne *Not those of first cousins, except in the platonic sense.
June 19, 2013 On Food Drinking in the Golden Age By Ezra Glinter We live in a golden age of booze. I realized this a few weeks ago while doing shots of samogon at Speed Rack, a women’s bartending contest that had been described earlier in the evening as the “March Madness of boobies and booze” and the “roller derby of cocktail competitions.” While I swilled Russian moonshine across from a giant ice sculpture shaped like a bottle of Chartreuse, Jillian Webster, a dirty-blond Angeleno in a sleeveless Budweiser T-shirt, dueled with Eryn Reece, a dark-haired New Yorker wearing the black-and-pink-flame Speed Rack top. As they scooped and stirred to the sounds of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” the 500-strong crowd roared its encouragement. With frenzy of pouring and a smack of the buzzer, Reece pulled ahead, winning first place, bartender’s glory, and a trip for two to France. Read More
June 19, 2013 On the Shelf Discarded Books, Fake Names, and Other News By Sadie Stein In “Expired,” photographer Kerry Mansfield works with discarded books, to eerie effect. How Orwell, Voltaire, and Ann Landers chose their pen names. Meet Simon Vance, the name (or voice!) in audiobooks. Stephen King published Joyland with lofty, print-only intentions. But of course, it is now a pirated e-book. In non-news, Barbara Taylor Bradford is less than impressed by Fifty Shades of Grey.