May 14, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Mrs. Dalloway! By Sadie Stein “Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.” ―Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, published on this day in 1925
May 14, 2013 On the Shelf Auden Journal Found, and Other News By Sadie Stein “I am happy, but in debt … I have no job. My [U.S.] visa is out of order. There may be a war. But I have an epithalamion to write and cannot worry much.” A journal W. H. Auden kept in 1939, believed lost, has been found. (Not sure where; details are vague.) It will go to auction next month. Meet the “grand impresario of American etymologists” and his “unique self-published journal, Comments on Etymology.” David Hare is adapting Behind the Beautiful Forevers for the London stage. Reading the stoop books of Brooklyn. Speaking of the borough of kings: a topless book club.
May 13, 2013 Arts & Culture In Session By Joshua J. Friedman Back-cover photo from the author’s first-edition copy of Gideon’s Trumpet. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Supreme Court was as controversial and obscure as it had ever been. Little understood in the best of times, it had recently outlawed segregated schools over the objections of Southern states and expanded protections for criminal suspects—protections that Congress was already scheming to revoke. More than ever, the public needed the press to explain the workings of the court. But the newspapermen of the day were barely equipped for the task: they lacked the legal expertise to properly interpret a Supreme Court opinion, if they ever read one, and wire-service reporters habitually wrote their stories on the court’s opinions before they were even issued. Yet while the justices resented being portrayed as “a mysterious body operating behind a veil of secrecy,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren once grumbled, they made little effort to communicate with the public. They generally refused to speak to the press, and until the 1920s, they delayed the distribution of printed copies of their opinions, forcing even the most diligent reporters to base their stories on a single hearing of the opinion from the bench. (And CNN and Fox News know how accurate first impressions can be.) “All of official Washington except the Supreme Court is acutely conscious of public relations,” wrote the New York Times’s Supreme Court correspondent Anthony Lewis in 1959. “The Supreme Court is about as oblivious as it is conceivable to be.” Lewis was thirty years old in 1957 when it fell to him to justify the ways of the Supreme Court to men. A Harvard graduate who had already won a Pulitzer for national reporting, Lewis was hired by the Times’s Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston, who hoped to improve the paper’s coverage of the court. To do the job right, Lewis would need training, so Reston sent him back to Harvard on a one-year fellowship at the law school. Lewis would have made his mark simply by learning enough to parse opinions and report them. But he went further, writing eloquent articles that teased out larger truths from legal minutiae. Professorial by nature, Lewis treated newspaper readers to a continuing legal seminar over their morning coffee. After Lewis died this past March, at the age of eighty-five, he was eulogized as having transformed American legal journalism. Read More
May 13, 2013 Arts & Culture Mr. Men as Social Critique By Sadie Stein We meet Mr Messy—a man whose entire day-to-day existence is the undiluted expression of his individuality. His very untidiness is a metaphor for his blissful and unselfconscious disregard for the Social Order. Yes, there are times when he himself is a victim of this individuality—as when he trips over a brush he has left on his garden path—but he goes through life with a smile on his face. This series of reviews from 2010 is, in a word, brilliant.
May 13, 2013 Arts & Culture Garry Winogrand and the Art of the Opening By Richard B. Woodward Garry Winogrand, El Morocco, New York, 1955, black-and-white photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Scroll down for a slide show of photographs by Winogrand, with audio interviews conducted during the March 6 opening of his posthumous retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Garry Winogrand (1928–84) was the first photographer to realize how much juicy comedy could be squeezed out of New York’s art and literary scenes. During the late sixties, early seventies, when he would arrive with his Leica at a Museum of Modern Art opening or a costume ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at Norman Mailer’s fiftieth birthday party, he would sometimes announce to the crowd, “I’m here,” as if an event did not officially begin until he was there to record it. He was more right than even he might have guessed. Were it not for his mordant photos of those ragged, sybaritic evenings, best represented in the 1977 book Public Relations, it would be hard to imagine them. Mad Men and other dramatic re-creations tidy up the social anarchy of those years; Winogrand’s camera didn’t. From the haphazard lines of men and women awkwardly at ease, uniformed in black tie or a too-tight harem top, heads wreathed with cigarette smoke and piles of teased hair, ghostly moues cut with rictus smiles and rows of perfect teeth, he fashioned dark instants of sublime lunacy. Everyone and everything seems false or imbecilic in his party pictures, his eye exposing secret acts of disintegration within rituals of supposed public glee. Behind his mockery of the self-satisfied and the strivers, though, is a winking acknowledgement that anyone can appear stricken when blasted by a flash at 1/125 of a second. Photography turns one and all into fools, including—especially—artists like himself, eager to hunt life and trap as many of its fleeting variables as possible inside a 35 mm frame but doomed to return empty-handed far more often than not. Read More
May 13, 2013 On the Shelf A Reading Rainbow, and Other News By Sadie Stein Tessa Hadley on how to write tedium, interestingly. Speaking of alleviating boredom: good reads for a long flight. Can there ever be too many literary-tattoo roundups? Well, whatever your answer, here’s a good one! LeVar Burton schools Stephen Colbert and Carey Mulligan on The Great Gatsby. But you don’t have to take his word for it! Dan Brown apparently deals with writer’s block by hanging upside down.