October 31, 2013 On the Shelf Edgar Allan Ho, and Other News By Sadie Stein This would either confuse an alien who had just set foot on Earth, or maybe explain everything: the NSA haiku generator. Along similar lines: Edgar Allan Ho, which BoingBoing has anointed Best Sexy Costume 2013. (As the creator of the admittedly theoretical Sexy Struwwelpeter, I respectfully disagree.) The Life of Frederick Douglass: A Graphic Novel comes to Kickstarter. According to the Common Core guidelines, The Hunger Games is more complex than The Grapes of Wrath. (But, plotwise, it sort of is, no?)
October 30, 2013 Arts & Culture This Is Spinal Fusion By Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza The doctor asks you to bend down, then waddle a few steps as he watches you. You might be ten but could be fourteen, at the pediatrician or in the school nurse’s office, probably a girl but maybe a boy. It might be the last item on a long checklist of routine things: height, weight, blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, check; vision and hearing, check; mumps vaccine, chickenpox history, tetanus shot, check; then, finally, the duck-walk diagnostic test. Me, I was in the school gym. I’d waited with friends for my turn in the locker room with the doctor who’d volunteered to give physicals for the middle-school athletes. He knew my mother, so we made polite conversation between routine questions. Then, he asked me to bend and take a few steps. I did so, staring at the cracked concrete beneath my bare feet. When I was allowed to straighten, I could see that the doctor’s face had changed completely. Locked on my torso, his now-serious eyes ticked left-right-left-right, then fixed on the planes and angles of my shoulders and hips. Trusting that I trusted him, the doctor placed one of his hands on my shoulder and his other hand on my hip. After a moment, one of his hands moved to my back and traced the misaligned knobs of my spine. That sensation, a man’s hand running down my spine impersonally, as if I were no more animate than a mannequin or cadaver, would become very familiar to me. Scoliosis curves your spine into an S, a biological scarlet letter glaringly visible by X-ray but also perceptible to the naked eye. Read More
October 30, 2013 Quote Unquote Surprised by Joy By Sadie Stein “Soybeans really need an uplift, being on the dull side but, like dull people, respond readily to the right contacts.” —Irma S. Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking
October 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Called Back By Casey N. Cep Emily Dickinson published only ten poems. Printed in various newspapers, her verses all appeared anonymously. It was not some failure of contemporary taste but her own decision that kept the rest of her poetry private. Dickinson wrote in one poem that “Publication—is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—” and indeed she seems to have felt there was something crass, even violative about fixing one’s words in a particular arrangement of type, surrendering them for a price. And yet, I am grateful to have been able to pay small sums of money for her poetry. A few complete editions, two selected volumes, and one pocket collection: new and used, hardback and paperback, her poetry has always been something for which I was willing to pay. I dreamed of sitting by the fire with my Emily Dickinson while someone I loved sat reading Robert Frost. I collected all these copies of her poetry so that no matter where I went, I would be ready for those dangling conversations. But the books I gathered have gotten to rest these last few days as I’ve spent hours clicking away in the Emily Dickinson Archive. For the first time since her death, almost all of her poetry, published and unpublished, finished and unfinished, appears together in high-resolution scans, just waiting for readers and scholars to page through it electronically. The first poem I ever received by e-mail was one by Emily Dickinson. Ten years ago, on what would be one of my last true snow days, when school was cancelled and all the world was covered in possibility, a teacher sent me an e-mail: “Don’t forget to put down the books and enjoy some of this winter wonderland,” she wrote, and then beneath her signature included the text of Emily Dickinson’s “It sifts from Leaden Sieves.” Read More
October 30, 2013 On the Shelf Frolicking, and Other News By Sadie Stein At Salon, poet and photographer Thomas Sayers Ellis curates a portfolio inspired by Maya Angelou. The New York Public Library now releases lists of the most checked-out books of the month, and they are exactly what one might expect. Here are many pictures of Hemingway frolicking with cats. Because there are no second acts in American life, Conrad Murray—yes, Michael Jackson’s doctor—is, obviously, writing a memoir.
October 29, 2013 Look Eyes Have It By Sadie Stein My high school had a volunteer program with a local children’s home, and periodically we would throw holiday parties and carnivals. For some reason I was usually working the craft table and we always had the kids make sock puppets. It wasn’t that anyone was under the illusion sock puppets were especially fun, and after the first few, the kids could hardly have wanted more, because it was always the same group of kids. But one of my schoolmate’s fathers had a line in sock manufacturing and donated them, and in the grand tradition of gift horses, we didn’t look these in their gaping, sock-puppet maws. We didn’t have very good glue; sometimes you could sort of get a clump of yarn “hair” to stick to the top of the sock, but more often than not the Elmer’s-stiffened skein would fall off immediately and somehow manage to adhere to the table or your fingers. Because the googly eyes were self-adhesive, they were the best accessory. So we would force them to take home dozens of glue-smeared socks festooned with the rolling eyes of maddened stallions, and that was the community service requirement, and I suppose college admissions people looked at that, and thought something, or would have were it not there. Here are classic books with googly eyes on them.