May 21, 2013 Listen Have You Ever Heard Virginia Woolf Speak? By Sadie Stein What follows is the only known surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937. The talk is titled “Craftsmanship.”
May 21, 2013 On the Shelf Nobel Tweets, and Other News By Sadie Stein From The Hairpin, “Etymological Origins of Words Related to Insults.” (And we really like that nice is on there.) A little reading-room escapism to brighten your Tuesday. “5 candidates have been selected for 2013 #NobelPrize in #Literature according to Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.” A rather innocuous tweet by the Swedish Academy (yes) has launched a flurry of Nobel speculation. Angry Wikipedia revenge-editor Qworty turns out to be novelist Robert Clark Young. Writes Andrew Leonard, dramatically, “Qworty’s edits undermine our faith in this great project. Qworty’s edits prove that Wikipedia’s content can be shaped by people settling grudges and acting out of spite and envy. Qworty alone, by his own account, has made 13,000 edits to Wikipedia. And Qworty, as the record will show, is not to be trusted.”
May 20, 2013 Arts & Culture POSTERITY IS STUPID By Italo Calvino To Eugenio Scalfari—Rome March 7, 1942 […] I accepted the praise you gave me at the start of your letter with barely restrained grunts of satisfaction. Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious and at the slightest flattery I immediately start to strut like a turkey. The accusations you make later on are completely without foundation: the idea that there were thousands of youths with literary ambitions was something I knew even in the irresponsible days spent behind our school desks, and this thought has always filled me with terror: that I might be one of those people, that I might be only one of those people. And if I have decided to be merely a modest agronomist this was not just because my family’s destiny forbade me the contemplative life, but also and principally because I was terrified by the thought of one day meeting a crowd of people like me, each one convinced that he and only he was a genius. Up here in Turin I know only students of agriculture, medicine, engineering, chemistry: all good guys who are thinking about getting a job, without a head full of nonsense, no mirages of glory, often without much intelligence. And as far as they are concerned, I am one of them: no one knows who Italo Calvino is, who he wanted or wants to be. With these people there is little talk of dreams and the future, though they too certainly think about such things. This is what I am for the people of Turin, Pigati included, but except for Roero and Maiga, of course. Only in this way can the deluded man of Via Bogino live. I don’t know how you feel in the environment you say you’ve moved into. Apart from the fact that the literary or pseudo-literary world has always aroused a certain dislike in me, for me it would only be discouraging. But instead, living like this, I feel happy in the knowledge that I am different from those around me, that I see things with a different eye to theirs, that I know how to appreciate or suffer from the world in my own way. And I feel myself superior. I prefer being the obscure, isolated figure hoping for the victory that will see his name on everyone’s lips rather than being one of the pack just following the destiny of a group. And you certainly can’t say that this kind of behavior of mine is accommodating. I may be accommodating in life, I’ll let myself be carried away passively in the course of my actions, but I will not prostitute my art. Eh, am I not good? 8 March: I found this letter that I had started to write yesterday evening and I reread it with interest. Dammit, what a lot of drivel I managed to write! In the end it’s impossible to understand anything in it. But better that way: the less one understands the more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought. In fact, let me say: POSTERITY IS STUPID Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that! […] Excerpted from Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985, translated by Martin McLaughlin, published by Princeton University Press today, May 20th. © 2013 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
May 20, 2013 Arts & Culture Upper West Side Story By Sadie Stein I was delighted and relieved, recently, to run across the Tumblr Stoop Books of Brooklyn, which has been garnering some well-deserved Internet buzz. Delighted because the Tumblr is a fun sociological study, really well executed; relieved because (in my mind) its existence obviates the need for me to create something similar. You see, for some months now, I have been keeping track of the books left on the giveaway table of my apartment building’s lobby. (On my lackluster Instagram feed, I tag these images with the rather lame #uwsidestories.) I have long thought, vaguely, that they’d make a good “photo piece”—I suspect it would have to do with print media, or ideas of ownership, or maybe the isolation of urban life—but given the reception of a recent neighbor-based work by an actual photographer, this seems increasingly ill-advised. In any case, it would have taken energy away from my other hypothetical Tumblr, “Gnomic Utterances,” which will consist of pictures of gnomes with cryptic things written under them.
May 20, 2013 My Literary Hero Natural History: Adalbert Stifter By Michael Lipkin Statute of Stifter, Linz. My literary hero, Adalbert Stifter, was introduced to me by a professor of German studies during my sophomore year at Binghamton University. At the time, I lived alone in a studio apartment on the west side of Binghamton, a small city in upstate New York crippled by its loss of the computer and defense industries. The low standard of living and high crime rate, palpable even in the city’s nicer parts, are all the more jarring for the beautiful view of the Catskill Mountains that graces the area. At the end of the school year, the cold lifts, the rains stop, and the weather turns mild. The air, normally raw and wet, is balmy, and thick with the smell of pine. In an e-mail, I expressed particular curiosity about the desiccated natural landscapes in Thomas Bernhard’s novels, and my professor suggested that I read Adalbert Stifter, an Austrian author who, despite the endorsements of Thomas Mann and W.G. Sebald, is remembered as a hokey sentimentalist, interested mostly in mountains and flowers.. The stories, novellas, and novels for which Stifter is known were written at the height of the Biedermeier period, a time of bourgeois reaction after the catastrophic, continent-wide destruction unleashed by the Napoleonic Wars. Beidermeier culture was fond of middle-class comfort, of painted plates, copper prints, simple furniture, and little knickknacks. Rather than challenge the political repression of post-Metternich Europe and take stock of the hopes for equality and immediacy in human relations shattered by the failed revolutions of 1848–49, the German-speaking world of Stifter’s time withdrew into the home, the family, and from there, into a world of fantasy. Desperate for my professor’s guidance and approval, I found Stifter’s novella collection Bunte Steine (Many-Colored Stones) in the deathly quiet German-language stacks of Bartle Library. Read More
May 20, 2013 On the Shelf How to Talk to Lady Writers, and Other News By Sadie Stein May or may not be competent needle-woman. “A large number of literary females are excellent needle-women, and good housewives.” Etiquette for dealing with the authoress, from 1854. You might see the headline “5 Books with Awful Original Titles” and think, Oh, how bad can they be? And then you read the list. George R. R. Martin enjoyed the new Gatsby. In case you were wondering. Meanwhile, Joyce Carol Oates takes to Twitter to discuss the experience of media. “If you are a writer, only writing really engages your concentration & excitement—even reading is a relatively passive activity.”