September 27, 2013 Arts & Culture One Ring to Rule Them All By Ted Scheinman Amid the bustle of this year’s Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), where many attendees sport Regency garb from dawn to dusk, one curious piece of material history is provoking sustained, triumphal glee. Last year, Kelly Clarkson, winner of the first American Idol, in 2002, bought a turquoise-and-gold ring that Austen had bequeathed to her sister, Cassandra. Clarkson is a devotee of the novelist and, by virtue of her fortune, a serious collector who already keeps a first edition of Persuasion in her personal library. Sotheby’s had placed the ring’s reserve price at £30,000; Clarkson paid £152,450. Original Austen totems are hard to come by. Slivers of her library have survived, as have a few likenesses by Cassandra, various small items of jewelry (including a topaz cross that Paula Byrne is especially fond of), and whatever portion of the novelist’s letters Cassandra didn’t burn. The scarcity of such items, and the national importance of the writer Rudyard Kipling once called “England’s Jane,” prompted furrowed brows on at least two continents over the prospect that this ring—perhaps she wore it as she wrote Persuasion!—might find an unceremonious home in southern California. Austen blogs and listservs lit up, as did the Republic of Pemberley. The Jane Austen’s House Museum, in the Hampshire village where Austen spent the last eight years of her life, marshaled this general unease into a pledge-drive campaign. Meanwhile, England’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, enforced a rare “temporary export bar” that kept the ring in the U.K. and gave the museum until the end of December 2013 to match the Clarkson bid. Vaizey’s statement was simple: “Jane Austen’s modest lifestyle and her early death mean that objects associated with her of any kind are extremely rare, so I hope that a UK buyer comes forward so this simple but elegant ring can be saved for the nation.” Read More
September 27, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Connell, Lewis, Cupcakes By The Paris Review Upside-down cupcakes, Sally Bell’s Kitchen. Just as in Evan S. Connell’s The Connoisseur, a pre-Columbian figurine caught my eye—in this case, on the book’s cover. I had enjoyed the understated yet resonant interview with Connell we published earlier this year (the man knew how to change the subject!), and I was equally moved by the book, the story of a Manhattan insurance executive who becomes hopelessly, inextricably obsessed with the aforementioned figurines. There are no frills, plot twists, or explosions: simply a series of small choices that can change a life forever. As the protagonist reflects near the end of the book, “[H]e has acquired a little knowledge, perhaps no deeper than a root trace, which can’t be lost.” —Justin Alvarez I have a terrible feeling that A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps may be a hard sell for some readers. But trust me: Chris West’s cultural history is fast paced and engaging, and the organizing principle takes the narrative in all kinds of unexpected directions. Sure, there’s a little light philately in there, but even those who only communicate electronically will be glad they picked it up. —Sadie O. Stein Read More
September 27, 2013 Look Eudora Welty, Photographer By Sadie Stein The Wiljax Gallery of Cleveland, Mississippi, is featuring a selection of Eudora Welty’s Depression-era photographic portraits, which the young writer developed and printed herself in her Jackson kitchen. It was the first time many of her subjects had been photographed; Welty reportedly tried to give copies to almost all of them. She would pursue photography through the 1950s; pictures she took were inspiration for several of her short stories.
September 27, 2013 On the Shelf Banned Books, Mugging, and Other News By Sadie Stein The beleaguered Edgar Allan Poe House, in Baltimore, will re-open to visitors weekends in October, prior to its official reopening in spring 2014. A survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts finds, depressingly, that less than half of respondents read a book for pleasure in 2012. “When it became Scotland’s National Book Town 15 years ago, it was a place suffering from the decline of traditional industries.” A visit to the Wigtown Book Festival, “a place saved by books.” Banned books mug shots.
September 26, 2013 Arts & Culture Doctored By Casey N. Cep During the bedtime-story portion of his twenty-one-hours-and-nineteen-minutes-long speech on the floor of Congress, Senator Ted Cruz, in an episode that has already achieved notoriety, read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham as his two daughters watched at home in their pajamas. “I will credit my father,” Senator Cruz said. “He invented green eggs and ham.” Cruz’s father, the senator remembered, would add food coloring to eggs or mix spinach into them to get the green color. But not even Dr. Seuss would say that he invented green eggs and ham. It was a bet with his publisher that led Theodor Seuss Geisel to write the book. Bennett Cerf wagered $50 that Geisel could not write a book with only fifty words. And yet by repeating forty-nine monosyllabic words and a single polysyllabic word (anywhere), Geisel assembled a book with 681 words total that would become his most popular book ever, selling tens of millions of copies. Geisel claimed that Cerf never paid him the $50, but Green Eggs and Ham was one of the many Beginner Books that made the author and his publishing house millions of dollars. Part of Dr. Seuss’s midcentury success came from federal education reform that dedicated money to stocking school libraries and promoting early education. “Children’s lit,” according to critic Louis Menand, “was a Cold War growth industry, right alongside Boeing, Northrop, and Dow Chemical.” Dr. Seuss, in particular, was very much of his time, and Menand offers a convincing read of The Cat in the Hat as an allegory for the problems of feminism, communism, and juvenile delinquency. Read More
September 26, 2013 Look Typewriter, Tip, Tip, Tip By Sadie Stein Paper Typerwriter, 2011, by Jennifer Collier. Vintage typewriter manual pages, gray board, and machine stitching. Via Art Made from Books: Altered Sculptured, Carved, Transformed.