November 8, 2013 Quote Unquote Beat It By Sadie Stein ISHIGURO My first summer after leaving school I worked for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle, where the royal family spend their summer holidays. In those days they used to recruit local students to be grouse beaters. The royal family would invite people to shoot on their estate. The Queen Mother and her guests would get into Land Rovers with shotguns and whiskey and drive over bits of the moor from shooting butt to shooting butt. That’s where they would aim and shoot. Fifteen of us would walk in formation across the moor, spaced about a hundred yards apart in the heather. The grouse live in the heather, and they hear us coming, and they hop. By the time we arrive at the butts, all of the grouse in the vicinity have accumulated and the Queen Mum and her friends are waiting with shotguns. Around the butts there’s no heather, so the grouse have got no choice but to fly up. Then the shooting starts. And then we walk to the next butt. It’s a bit like golf. INTERVIEWER Did you meet the Queen Mother? ISHIGURO Yes, quite regularly. Once she came round to our quarters, frighteningly, when there was only me and this other girl there. We didn’t know what on earth to do. We had a little chat, and she drove off again. But it was very informal. You’d often see her on the moors, though she herself didn’t shoot. I think there was a lot of alcohol consumed and it was all very chummy. —Kazuo Ishiguro, the Art of Fiction No. 196
November 8, 2013 On the Shelf Mad Money, and Other News By Sadie Stein “It will be fun to give some to prostitutes.” William T. Vollmann on hypothetically winning the Nobel. BuzzFeed Books is full steam ahead. In other behemoth news, Amazon reaches out to indie bookstores about carrying Nooks. “Nah. Here I’m surrounded by people, but I’m also pretty anonymous. Not having to bullshit—even with a roommate who’s a friend—is a plus.” On living in the NYU library.
November 7, 2013 On Film “The House We Live In”: Elizabeth Bishop on the Big Screen By Magdalena Edwards When I first traveled to Rio de Janeiro to research all things Elizabeth Bishop, in 2002, I did not understand how or why everyone—from university professors to taxi drivers, artisans, artists, and entrepreneurs—had something to say about a poeta norteamericana. I quickly learned that I had to spend less time explaining why I was in Brazil and more time listening to stories and parsing through advice on how to find the things I might be looking for, new clues to understanding Bishop’s creative period in the country with “too many waterfalls.” And when I went to Petrópolis to look for the house, a Fazenda Samambaia, that Bishop shared with her Brazilian lover Lota de Macedo Soares, the architect of aristocratic means who envisioned and built Rio de Janeiro’s Parque do Flamengo after New York’s Central Park, I am proud to say I made it as far as the front gate. I knocked and the housekeeper cracked it open and said that the lady of the house was not at home, she was traveling abroad and there was no way to allow me inside, not even for a quick look at the garden. It turns out that Bruno Barreto has a story, too, of what led him to make Reaching for the Moon (2013), a film about Bishop and Lota inspired by a bestselling book that was first published in Brazil in 1995. Bruno’s mother, Lucy Barreto, one of the film’s producers, has long loved Bishop’s poetry and once met Bishop and Lota at a lunch in Samambaia, years ago; she, Barreto’s mother, was the one who bought the rights to Carmen L. Oliveira’s bestseller Flores raras e banalíssimas: A história de Lota de Macedo Soares e Elizabeth Bishop, a novelistic account composed with details from personal interviews and much archival research. At first, Bruno Barreto was not interested in telling Bishop and Lota’s love story, and then something clicked. He wanted to make a film about loss. Read More
November 7, 2013 Arts & Culture Persuasion By Sadie Stein It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen will never be allowed to rest in peace but will instead, in perpetuity, act as a vague and grotesque figurehead who is required to comment on every social issue of the day, speak dialogue she never uttered, chase zombies, star in movies, breakdance, leap around Etsy, dabble in molecular gastronomy, inspire jewelry feuds, headline summer camps, appear on banknotes, and, occasionally, be sexy. Because WHAT IF JANE AUSTEN REWROTE ALL THE HOUSEMARTINS B-SIDES AND THEN THEY WERE ALL ILLUSTRATED LIKE VARGAS GIRLS AND THEN WE MADE THEM INTO TAROT CARDS AND THEN IT WAS A MUSIC VIDEO AND IT WENT VIRAL? WHAT IF THAT HAPPENED? Rant over. All that said, this new video game, Ever, Jane, looks fun. As the creators explain it on the Kickstarter page, Ever, Jane is a virtual world that allows people to role-play in Regency Period England. Similar to traditional role playing games, we advance our character through experience, but that is where the similarities end. Ever, Jane is about playing the actual character in the game, building stories. Our quests are derived from player’s actions and stories. And we gossip rather than swords and magic to demolish our enemies and aid our friends. I thoroughly enjoyed playing the prototype. I won’t pretend to have deepened my understanding of Regency England, but it certainly furthered my knowledge of role-play games. And everyone walks really fast.
November 7, 2013 History Kings Have Adorned Her By Diane Mehta David Sassoon (seated) and his sons Elias David, Albert (Abdallah), and Sassoon David. A fortune teller greeted David Sassoon on his way home from synagogue one night in Baghdad and told him to leave at once for India. He would be blessed with immense riches, she said. He was the son of Sheikh Sassoon, chief banker for the Ottoman pasha and nasi, or leader, of Baghdad’s Jewish community. Fleeing the despotic Daud Pasha, who had it out for the wealthy merchant, Sassoon settled in Bombay in 1833, eager to trade under British protection. Back in the 1830s, Bombay was a port city of seven islands, a relative backwater, but a place where Sassoon could live and conduct business in peace, thanks to the East India Company and in large part to its president, Gerald Aungier. Back in 1668, England, eager to pawn off the Portuguese territory, rented the company the worthless, swampy islands for £10 of gold a year. Aungier saw promise. He moved the company’s Surat operation 165 miles south to Bombay, established courts and added judges, guaranteed religious freedom and individual rights (and loans) to traders and artisans, encouraged racial and religious communities to have spokesmen, and built causeways, docks, and a mint. Aungier created the ethic of equal opportunity that Bombayites would cherish for centuries by urging justice to all “without fear or favor,” says Naresh Fernandes in his smart new biography of Bombay, City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay. November is the fifth anniversary of the bombings at the Taj and Oberoi, two luxury hotels in South Bombay. The much-loved Taj was built by the industrialist Jamshed Tata in 1903, after another hotel turned him away because of his skin color. It’s a hotel that well-off locals grew up in, wandering the halls to admire its magnificent art collection, and lunching at the Sea Lounge, which overlooks the Gateway of India. (It was famously a watering hole for gambler and derbyman Victor Sassoon, David’s great-grandson, who lived at a suite at the Taj in the 1920s and 1940s.) The targeted murders of Chabad Jews at Nariman House during the 2008 attacks were an odd turn of events. New Jews, known by few, they were not a part of Bombay’s historic landscape. They existed largely to house Israeli travelers, famously fond of long Indian sojourns. (Goa and the Himalayas are Israeli hubs.) The murders signaled not the arrival of anti-Semitism in India proper as much as it underscored the truth that anyone and everyone has always been welcome in Bombay. Though targeting Jews is no fluke anywhere, the real story is the story of Bombay’s Jews, which for all purposes started with David Sassoon. Read More
November 7, 2013 On the Shelf One Man’s Trash, and Other News By Sadie Stein Discarded books from the Birmingham Public Library become the basis for a series of pieces by local artists. P. D. James claims to have solved a 1931 cold case in the course of researching a mystery. In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe’s literary gumshoeing was less successful. The rise of Denglisch—and the introduction of words like shitstorm and cashcow into the German lexicon—is understandably controversial. Here are some bookish wedding cakes. We feel like that last one is really the cake of a match made in heaven. Mazel tov!