November 8, 2013 Look The Great Columbia Book Slide of 1934 By Sadie Stein In 1934, Columbia University moved its twenty-two miles of books to the newly built Butler Library. By means of a really long slide. Which actually looks less fun than it sounds, and was much too shallow for human use. (Which is probably good, considering this was on a college campus.) Not to be confused with the recreational-use book slide from the Panorama House: … or the bokstörten of the Stockholm Public Records Building:
November 8, 2013 Bulletin Claire Vaye Watkins Wins Dylan Thomas Prize By Sadie Stein We are delighted to announce that Claire Vaye Watkins has won the Dylan Thomas Prize, awarded to the best work of literature published by an author under the age of thirty, for her debut short story collection Battleborn. Read an excerpt of Watkins’s story “Gold Mine,” from issue 195, here.
November 8, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Baseball, Giacometti, Literary Sprinting By The Paris Review Missing baseball yet? I am: I miss the slow churn of the season, I miss sitting in the stands, shielding my eyes from an afternoon sun as a hit flies into the air—is it foul? is it fair?—only to be caught at the wall by an outfielder. I miss the rhythm of apparent inactivity mixed with maximum tension. (I don’t miss the Cubs never winning a World Series.) What is beautiful about Steven Millhauser’s single-sentence story “Home Run” in Electric Literature is that not only does it celebrate our national pastime, it celebrates this rhythm through language. As editor Halimah Marcus explains in her introduction, “With nary a punctuation mark other than a comma, Millhauser builds momentum like the titular home run—the linguistic equivalent of bated breath, of rally towels, of screaming from your seat, of going, going, gone.” —Justin Alvarez In celebration of Neil Gaiman’s recent appointment at Bard College (my alma mater), I’ve been spending my evenings with American Gods. Not generally a reader of fantasy, at first I found myself echoing a question asked early on by our protagonist, Shadow: “What should I believe?” When we received an answer—“Everything”—it came from a man with a buffalo head. The book is a compendium of mythological tales, mixed together with intelligent precision and strewn with horror and humor. Ancient deities war with the rising gods of a digital world; a junkie leprechaun roams the streets in search of a misplaced gold coin; morticians by the names of Ibis and Jacquel chew on small bits of organs as they reseal their cadavers. Oh, and Lucille Ball is a god of the new millennium. Yet at the core of these phantasmagorical episodes is a commentary on melting-pot America, where the titans of other worlds are forgotten and replaced by newer, trendier gods—“gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon.” It’s no wonder that this novel has won both Hugo and Nebula awards or that the Internet has been in a frenzy over the rumored HBO adaptation. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More
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