May 8, 2013 Books Reading in the Bath: Solved By Sadie Stein In the age-old battle between book and bath, man has tried many things: the reading tray, the conveniently placed towel, the waterproof page. An eight-year-old has gone one better, inventing a device that suspends the book safely above the tub.
May 8, 2013 On the Shelf Fun with Word Frequency, and Other News By Sadie Stein See how many times a word or phrase is used in a book! Hours of … okay, maybe not fun, but hours. New research suggests that there exists a family of “ultraconserved words”—including ashes, man, worm, and not—that have survived, virtually unchanged, for fifteen thousand years. Amanda Knox tells the Times what she reads. Among others: Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Foster Wallace. The Harper Lee copyright fracas inspires a list of literary lawsuits. “I’ve been getting death threats.” Charlaine Harris on the end of Sookie Stackhouse.
May 7, 2013 Look The Tiny Gatsby By Sadie Stein Even if, like some of us, you already have Great Gatsby fatigue, you can enjoy playing with this (raven-haired) F. Scott Fitzgerald doll. Send him and Zelda out on the town. Let Hemingway insult him in a rental car. Send him to the south with the Murphys (although you’ll have to use a Barbie and Ken or someone to play them). Bring him to the movies and let him weep into his tiny martini as you watch Baz Luhrmann’s extravaganza.
May 7, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Angela Carter By Sadie Stein “A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.” —Angela Carter
May 7, 2013 Arts & Culture La Couture Comique By Robert Pranzatelli Lucien Métivet’s name may not be familiar to many contemporary readers or art aficionada, and placed alongside that of his friend and fellow art student Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec it may seem, by comparison, thoroughly obscure. A century ago, however, Métivet was a hugely popular belle epoque artist, celebrated not so much for his paintings as for his posters, book and magazine illustrations, advertising art, and—especially—his humorous drawings. He embodied, in the 1890s and after, an idea that the world has only now begun to embrace: that a cartoonist and fine artist can be one and the same. His 1893 poster portraying chanteuse Eugénie Buffet as a woman of the cold streets not only advertised her performances at the club Ambassadeurs; it immortalized her stage persona and made Métivet’s name at the age of thirty. It remains as much a part of the visual legacy of the era as Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters of Buffet’s mentor Aristide Bruant. But Métivet’s stock in trade for the decades that followed was drawing, swiftly and prolifically, for publication—whether supplying covers and cartoons for Le Rire (Laughter), the most popular humor journal in Paris, or dozens of illustrations for an edition of Maupassant or Balzac, or for a lesbian-themed erotic novel (or two) by Pierre Louÿs, or for the first two adventure-filled volumes of Paul d’Ivoi’s Voyages Excentriques, a hugely successful (and conspicuously deliberate) competitor to Jules Verne’s Les Voyages Extraordinaires. Quantity and artistic quality, however, rarely go hand in hand, especially under deadline, and an undiscriminating catch-all collection of L. M.’s work is liable to make a poor impression, cluttered as it is with examples of the slapdash and the merely adequate. That the appreciation of a prolific artist requires selectivity is no surprise; the surprise, instead, is the insouciance of the exceptions, the fact that among drawings printed as amusing diversions a century ago there are those that still charm, still resurface with a wink and a smile to inspire a reciprocal smile across a divide of so many generations. The survival of the sunny and comic, as if blithely stepping over world wars, cultural upheavals, and time itself, is always a kind of miracle. And now it is spring again, a time when ladies, and at least a few gentlemen, think of fashion. Métivet’s Modes Potagères (Vegetable Fashion), a full-page color illustration from the April 6, 1901, issue of Le Rire included a brief text as caption, which encourages us to note, and savor, such features as the lettuce bodice, pickle sleeves, and artichoke ruffle on the outfit of the dark-haired beauty in the pumpkin toque; and the beetroot princess dress with its green-pea flowerbed and cardoon collar with curly-endive neck ruff on the elegant lady of the cauliflower hat and carrot umbrella. With its precisely enumerated whimsicality, cheerful colors, and the evident and so-human pride and pleasure in the faces and postures of the models, this is an image perpetually floriferous. Read More
May 7, 2013 On the Shelf Wild and Crazy Libraries, and Other News By Sadie Stein “It is definitely not your mother’s Donnell,” says the New York Times, ominously, of the new plans for the Fifty-Third Street branch of the New York Public Library. Famously reclusive eighty-seven-year-old national treasure Harper Lee is suing literary agent Samuel Pinkus over the copyright for To Kill a Mockingbird. Says Lee’s lawyer, “Pinkus knew that Harper Lee was an elderly woman with physical infirmities that made it difficult for her to read and see … Harper Lee had no idea she had assigned her copyright.” The new Goodreads archnemesis (our word), Riffle, is live. Martin Amis apparently “views the Brooklyn hipster scene as populated by conventional posers.” If fictional mothers wrote hypothetical parenting books—because why not?