August 22, 2013 On the Shelf A Kerouac Muse Dies, and Other News By Sadie Stein Beatrice Kozera, the real-life inspiration for “Terry, the Mexican girl” in On the Road, has died, at ninety-two. Apparently she only learned of her involvement a few years ago. Monica Ali is one of the new faces of Marks and Spencer. “In a sign of the times, aspiring astronauts were asked to write a Twitter post, a limerick or a haiku as part of their NASA applications.” A good sign? Reports of the Nook’s death were greatly exaggerated. Is Edward Snowden really Thomas Pynchon?
August 21, 2013 Arts & Culture Little House on Avon By Laura C. Mallonee A couple of years after I graduated college, my mother gave me a present: her old set of Portuguese Little House on the Prairie books, which she first read at the age of twelve in Brazil. Uma Casa na Campina—the familiar story of a family leaving the safe realm of the Wisconsin woods for the unknown American West—had awakened her to wanderlust: reading itself became her own covered wagon plowing through uncharted prairies. Such yearning quickly blossomed into a passion for the English language, the channel through which a whole literary world came to life. And decades later on hot summer days, we would lie out in the yard as she labored, in her delicate accent, to bring the iconic figures of the literary canon to life. She guided my sister and me through glorious readings of many authors—from Charlotte Brontë to Nathaniel Hawthorne—but the one I mostly vividly remember to this day is Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was in the third grade when we started the Little House books together, fully immersing ourselves in Wilder’s world. If Ma made flap-jacks, we topped our Saturday morning pancakes with old-fashioned maple syrup; when the Ingalls family ate sourdough biscuits, we cultured yeast for our own bread. My sister and I stripped the tender, green sheaths from store-bought cobs, soaked them, dried them, and made our own cornhusk dolls. In lieu of a gingerbread house, we gathered twigs and pebbles from the yard, constructing miniature log cabins inside halved cardboard boxes. My mother even made us calico sunbonnets using a costume pattern she found at the fabric store. Nothing about this seemed unusual to me; it was all part of the great narrative we had entered. Read More
August 21, 2013 Arts & Culture Ah, Underpants! By Sadie Stein In the words of my colleague Justin Alvarez, “Holy Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill’s underpants finally for sale!” Well, for a cool $1,750. The shop’s owner captioned the shorts “longjohn’s journey into night.” Seriously, we can do this all day.
August 21, 2013 Bull City Summer Ground Down By Michael Croley Shelley Duncan at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, on August 9, 2013. Wet-plate tintype by Leah Sobsey/Tim Telkamp. On his first night in Toledo, in his first at bat, Shelley Duncan cue-balled a dribbler to the pitcher. On contact, he yelled, “Shit,” and began his reflexive sprint down the line. When he returned to the dugout, nobody on the team said anything to him or even looked his way. On this road trip, he was 1-10, with a .217 average for the season. He arrived in Durham from Tampa on May 6, after hitting only .182 in twenty games with the big club. As he pulled off his helmet to reveal a tangle of blond, thinning hair, I noticed a far-off look in his eyes, as though they had been hollowed out. It’s a look familiar to anyone who has seen the photographs of Walker Evans: complete exhaustion meshed with pure confusion. He took his helmet in his right hand and walked down the steps, lightly tapping the plastic against the metal railing; his lips, as he spoke to himself, made only slight putters of admonishment. He carefully put the helmet away in its nook and sat down on the bench with his white batting gloves still velcroed at the wrists. Before I even got to know Shelley Duncan, I was already worried about his future in baseball. I first became interested in Duncan a week earlier when, watching the team in Columbus, I had spotted his name in the Durham Bulls’ media guide as having the most major-league experience of the roster. He had two considerable stints with the Indians and, before that, had made his rookie debut with the Yankees. I was intrigued because, on the surface, he seemed the aging veteran with big-league time, now toiling in the purgatory of Triple-A where everyone is either on their way up or down, or out of baseball altogether. Watching him at the end of the bench, I had no idea that his mother had passed away from brain cancer earlier in the summer or that his brother had been diagnosed with the same disease. I didn’t know that his twin sons had been born last July and he’d been away from them for almost half their lives. He was just a player who seemed near the end. Read More
August 21, 2013 On the Shelf This Book Is Controversial, and Other News By Sadie Stein Labeling it gay propaganda, an official in the Saratov region of Russia has called for the removal of LGBT history book Gays: They Changed the World (pictured above) from bookstore shelves. “When you meet somebody who bores you, you have to put up with him until he leaves. But when you meet a boring character, you turn the page.” In memory of Elmore Leonard, Esquire runs the “What I’ve Learned” feature the author did in 2005. Meanwhile, the New York Times gives us a compendium of the vast number of adaptations spawned by Leonard’s work. Rob Sheffield, author of karaoke memoir Turn Around Bright Eyes, suggests appropriate song choices for Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and others. Bookshelfies—in which people take self-portraits in front of their bookshelves—is both a word and a thing.
August 20, 2013 Nostalgia Unbroken Crayon By Alia Akkam Everywhere I look there is paint. In the bristles of the brushes, hastily run through the sink, that bake atop the windowsill, on the collage of red and black splotches staining the metal table, filling bottles on the back shelf with tempera greens and blues, and dirtying the smocks my classmates gleefully slip on. To them, making papier-mâché panda bears out of old newspapers is a reward for practicing rows of cursive Ks and struggling through multiplication quizzes. I am the one who stares at the clock waiting for a sluggish second hand to make its orbit so I can be a minute closer to the well-worn marble notebooks tucked inside my desk. Mrs. Grigg is our art teacher. She has a mane of gray curls, wears long, flowing skirts, and smells of musk. I discover that her first name is Yolanda, an ethereal departure from the Pats and Joannes who preside over the PTA bake sales, and I think maybe I can ask her what is wrong with me. Yolanda will tell me the truth. But I see the way she scowls when my ruler fails to prevent crooked lines, and when my green, left-handed scissors leave ragged edges, maligning what could have been a perfect triangle. So I remain silent. One day we are making Santa Clauses out of construction paper. For the artistically average children they will become centerpieces at the Christmas dinner table. I will toss mine into a garbage can on the walk home from school. As I curl strips of white paper around a pencil to make Santa’s beard, frustrated they aren’t half as springy as those the kids around me are churning out, I sulk. “Are you miserable?” Mrs. Grigg asks me as she shifts the glasses from around her neck to the bridge of her nose and peers at my deformed Santa. I nod. Finally, I tell myself, Yolanda realizes no good can come from me sitting in this room pretending I have a shred of artistic talent. I fear art class almost as much as gym, where I can’t dribble a basketball and am picked last for teams. Even when the kickball is placed on home plate instead of rolled to me, my foot fails to make contact. Surely, being uncoordinated is punishment enough for an elementary school girl surrounded by ruthlessly laughing children. But Mrs. Grigg does not tell me I can sit in the corner and read my language arts textbook as I have dreamed. “You should have told me. You could have made a dreidel,” she says. She leaves me choking in the mist of her earthy perfume before I can tell her I am not Jewish. I continue winding shreds of paper around the unsharpened No. 2, one eye on the clock. Read More