August 27, 2013 Books The Last Bookstore By Casey N. Cep Photography credit Scott Garner. My father’s father was a carpenter. I never met my grandfather, but I know from photographs and stories that in addition to farming, keeping dairy cows, and working on a cannery line, he earned money by carpentry. I also know from the sawhorses that my father inherited from his father. The wooden trestles stood ever-vigilant in our garage, ready to serve whenever their nail-bitten, blade-gauged bodies were needed. The sawhorses were two of a few inherited things that reminded me of the grandfather I never met: a pear tree that still stands but no longer grows heavy with fruit in early autumn; a concrete trough he made that my sister, used for her horse’s drinking water; a pitchfork on which the handle had been replaced many times, and that we used for moving straw, hay, manure, or leaves, depending on the season. Our inheritance felt large, but it was the sawhorses that I most admired, especially when my father put them to use constructing bookshelves for my bedroom. My father was no stranger to construction; he built the log cabin in which I was raised. He inherited not only tools but also skills from his father, so he was able to cut, stain, and install the wide bookshelves on my bedroom walls in no time. The shelves were required to house my growing library, acquired book by book in a thrilling sequence of gifts, purchases, and trades. The day those bookshelves were installed was both an end and a beginning. It was the beginning of my treating books like objects and the end of my venerating them as relics. The order of the library, the logic of the archive, the structure of the bookstore all faded that day; suddenly, my books were mine to play with and I could do with them as I pleased. I could arrange them by height or by color. I could divide them with whatever objects I wanted: the painted deer skull I had been given as a dream catcher, the glow-in-the-dark vampire mask I had bought on a family vacation, the ornate carousel music boxes I had collected. Read More
August 27, 2013 On the Shelf Kafkaesque Hotels, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Want to lose a friend who’s a writer? Ask her, a month in, how it’s going. Better still, ask her to describe what she’s working on.” Mark Slouka explains the etiquette. The great affect/effect problem. Libraries across Quebec are banding together to help rebuild the branch destroyed in the July Lac-Megantic oil-train derailment. “The rise of the belles-lettres establishment, celebrating France’s literary culture, and even that of its neighbours, is the latest marketing sensation in the French capital, as hoteliers come up with ever more innovative—or desperate—ways to attract guests.” These include a Proust-themed hotel, a hostelry devoted to literary lovers, and a third containing an ominous-sounding Franz Kafka room. The latest in long-overdue library books: an alumna returns a volume to her Michigan school library thirty-three years late, from Dubai.
August 26, 2013 Look Nowhere to Go But Everywhere By Sadie Stein Paul Rogers has made “an illustrated scroll” in which he illustrates a line from every page of On the Road.
August 26, 2013 Arts & Culture Lessons from an Eleven-City Book Tour By Toby Barlow I learned that ravens are multicolored, like cockatoos, only their plumage radiates out far beyond what our spectrum can see. I learned that the waxing moon sliver comes in the shape of a comma, hinting at more to come. I learned Lou Reed has an incredibly firm handshake. Read More
August 26, 2013 Bulletin Radio Days By Sadie Stein Photo courtesy of Flickr. Friends! We are thrilled to announce that this fall, when you pledge to support WNYC, you can get a subscription to The Paris Review! That’s right: keep public radio going strong, and while you’re at it receive four issues a year of poetry, fiction, interviews, and more. Just choose The Paris Review as your thank-you gift at the $100 pledge level. As always, you can pledge at a monthly level, or all at once. And yes, you can re-up an existing subscription, too!
August 26, 2013 History The Immortality Chronicles, Part 2 By Adam Leith Gollner What have we not done to live forever? My research into the endless ways we’ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now as The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Every Monday for the next five weeks, this chronological crash course will examine how humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. We all do and make to deal with oblivion. The conceit that art can ward off death is something we’ve been wrestling with since Greco-Roman times. The Theban lyric poet Pindar didn’t crave actual immortality, but still he wanted to reach out to the limits of the possible. Horace put it more bluntly in an ode: “I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramids’ royal pile, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy … I shall not altogether die.” Ovid shared that aim, boasting of how his couplets would outlive his lifetime, “so that in every time and in every place I may be celebrated throughout the world.” All creative efforts, what the ancient Greeks called poiesis, were done with immortality in mind, whether unconsciously or not. Socrates distinguished between three main forms of poiesis. The first is sexual reproduction, which provides immortality in the sense that a genetic lineage will survive the parent’s own bodily existence. The second category of poiesis is the attainment of fame through art or heroic accomplishment, which leaves a posthumous legacy. The third, and highest, expression of poiesis, according to Socrates, is philosophical, and it occurs when our pursuit of wisdom results in an experience of the soul’s indestructibility. Read More