June 12, 2013 Look Picture Books By Sadie Stein Artist Ekaterina Panikanova paints on old books. As you can see, the results are extraordinary.
June 12, 2013 Bull City Summer Herald the Crack of Bats By Adam Sobsey Photo: Frank Hunter I am a pitching chauvinist. The mechanics of it are so complex, so cerebral, so deliberate—so difficult—that in the past, I’ve compared pitchers to authors and hitters to readers. Hitting a baseball is essentially reactive and instinctive; it seems like the sort of thing almost any big lug could do with enough practice, as long as he has wrists strong and quick enough to swing a bat, and decent hand-eye coordination. This year, the Durham Bulls have a prized young slugger, twenty-two-year-old Wil Myers. Myers hit thirty-seven home runs in the minor leagues in 2012. He was so good that the Bulls’ parent club, the Tampa Bay Rays, traded one of their best major-league pitchers for him. Myers was assigned to Triple-A Durham for a final polish, but for the first third of the season he appeared to need much more than that: on May 23, he was batting just .244, had hit only four home runs, and had struck out in 28 percent of his at-bats—among the league’s highest rates. Then Myers went on a tear, hitting five home runs in just six days, including one of the longest Durham Bulls Athletic Park has ever seen: a moonshot off the highest balcony of an office building that towers over left field. Read More
June 12, 2013 On the Shelf The Knight’s Tale, and Other News By Sadie Stein A London street artist, with an apparent interest in Middle English, paints, among other motifs, scenes from The Canterbury Tales. In one day—well, a day filled with further NSA surveillance revelations—1984’s Amazon sales jumped 6,021%. Seattle librarians take to the streets on a series of customized, book-carrying bicycles. In Scotland, June 22 will be National Flash Fiction Day. We won’t pretend to prefer all of these reader-designed covers of classics, but the idea (and creativity!) is fantastic.
June 11, 2013 Listen Lydia Davis’s “Local Obits” By Sadie Stein In seventh grade, I was teased mercilessly about my funny speaking voice, and I’ve been self-conscious about it ever since. It took some persuading to get me to make this recording, and it’s a testament to the story that I was game: while I love many things in issue 205, “Local Obits” was what I wanted to share. Anyone familiar with Lydia Davis’s work knows that she can do a lot with a little, and this piece—composed of elliptical snatches of lives, or, rather, someone else’s distillation thereof—turns the quotidian incantatory, funny, bittersweet, strange. A master class in the minimal (if not in performance).
June 11, 2013 Arts & Culture Faulkner, Cubed By Lindsay Gellman Today, Sotheby’s is auctioning off a collection of sixteen letters and ten postcards that William Faulkner wrote from Europe to his family in Oxford, Mississippi, chronicling his first trip to the Continent in the early fall of 1925. The collection of handwritten correspondence—which includes sketched self-portraits, as well as Faulkner’s musings on growing a beard (“makes me look sort of distinguished”) and dining alone in his hotel room (“here I sit with spaghetti”)—is expected to fetch between $250,000 and $350,000. The collection seems to provide glimpses of a relatable, human Faulkner: a twenty-eight-year-old who went to nightclubs, griped about money, and signed off as “Billy.” Yet the letters also hint at the profound influence that this trip—specifically, the modernist painting Faulkner first saw in Paris—would have on his fiction. In a letter dated September 22, 1925, he writes, “I have seen Rodin’s museum, and two private collections of Matisse and Picasso (who are yet alive and painting) as well as numberless young and struggling moderns. And Cézanne! That man dipped his brush in light …” Read More
June 11, 2013 Look Towers of Books! By Sadie Stein In Japan, arranging bookstore displays is an art form.