August 9, 2013 Look Under Cover By Sadie Stein Seattle artist James Allen creates “Book Excavations” by cutting away layers of pages.
August 9, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Roller Skates, Arson, Eliot By The Paris Review Just this morning, I read eagerly through Sam Anderson’s profile of Gary England, Oklahoma’s “benevolent weather god,” in a preview from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. I’ve heard a lot about England—chief meteorologist for Oklahoma City’s Channel 9—over the years from my husband, a native of that lonely corner of the state where the panhandle begins (his hometown of Woodward was hit in 1947 by one of the state’s worst tornadoes). England’s a hero in that part of the country. “It’s Friday night in the big town” is how he would start his end-of-the-week broadcasts, and though I wish Anderson’s article had given us a bit more of England himself, it’s a bittersweet, if subtle, encomium to a bygone time in which weather forecasters weren’t entertainers as much as they were, well, weather forecasters. —Nicole Rudick It sounds pretty soft, doesn’t it, a book about reading Middlemarch. Might as well write a book about loving the Beatles, or how Proust can change your life. But Rebecca Mead is tough-minded and has a reporter’s impatience with mush. In My Life in Middlemarch, she gives us several unlikely things at once—a lively reading of George Eliot’s novel, an intimate portrait of Eliot herself, and a book about the consolations of getting older. As Mead shows, this is one of Eliot’s great themes, for as Eliot told her diary, “Few women, I fear, have had such reasons as I have to think the long sad years of youth worth living for the sake of middle age.” —Lorin Stein Read More
August 9, 2013 On the Shelf Wretched Writing, and Other News By Sadie Stein “I draw a hot sorrow bath in my despair room.” This quote, by Keanu Reeves, is part of an anthology called Wretched Writing. Herewith, the Kill Your Darlings trailer, featuring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg. Meet idiosyncratic Houston-area used bookstore Good Books in the Woods. A beautiful missed connection electrifies the Internet; the author is revealed.
August 8, 2013 Arts & Culture The Joke About Chickens By Wyatt Williams At dinner a couple of years ago, I told the restaurant critic that I should write a story about chickens. That’s exactly what I said: “I think I should write a story about chickens.” We were dining on roasted bone marrow and ribeyes and rye Manhattans at a steakhouse that neither of us could afford. The newspaper was footing the bill. This was a joke. At least it should have been, because prior to stating my intentions to write a story about chickens, I had been trying and failing to write a story about chickens for four years without realizing it. I should have laughed and laughed and laughed because miserable failure is funny, especially when you’re unaware that you’re repeating the same mistakes. The problem with jokes about chickens is that they aren’t funny. Read More
August 8, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Sara Teasdale By Sadie Stein With the man I love who loves me not I walked in the street-lamps’ flare — But oh, the girls who ask for love In the lights of Union Square. —Sara Teasdale, “Union Square”
August 8, 2013 Books It Can Be Embarrassing to Love Dorothea By Pamela Erens George Eliot’s Middlemarch has been my favorite novel ever since one summer nearly thirty years ago, when I read it on the recommendation of a Victorian literature–obsessed college friend. I’ve read it twice since then, which might not seem like a lot for a favorite book, but it is nine hundred pages long, and its richness holds me for many years at a time. I love Middlemarch, published in 1872, for many reasons. I love Eliot’s gently intrusive narrator, her aphoristic habit of mind, her asides on medical research and philanthropy and manners. She can be extremely funny at times, a fact often overlooked by impatient readers. But Eliot’s wonderful narrator appears in her other great books as well—Daniel Deronda and Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner—so why is Middlemarch my best beloved? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that this particular novel, more even than Eliot’s others, is all about people trying to be good—out of religious belief or a desire to improve the lot of the common man or the love of a woman or in expiation of past badness. The attempt is portrayed as difficult, almost killing at times, and many of the characters fail at it spectacularly. The novel is set against the backdrop of political do-gooding: the great British reforms of the late 1820s and early 1830s, which greatly expanded the number of Englishmen (not women, of course) who could vote. It was a time when the concept of the good itself was beginning to have a more democratic and less aristocratic connotation. At the center of the many story lines in Middlemarch (marriages, deaths, legacies, falls from grace) is Dorothea Brooke, a nineteen-year-old orphan with a decent inheritance who has dreams of doing some great work in the world. At first she wants to improve the cottages of the tenant farmers who work on her uncle’s estate. Her plans are not met with much enthusiasm; those around her are the sort who think things are fine just the way they are. Courted by a local landowner who is considered a very good catch, she instead decides to marry a much older scholar whom she imagines to be some sort of genius. She will be his helpmeet; she’ll learn Greek and Latin so that she can help him guide his magnum opus into the world. Unfortunately her new husband, Casaubon, turns out to be a dry and humorless pedant who over time crushes Dorothea’s every impulse toward joy and intimacy. She, knowing she is bound to him legally, and feeling bound to him morally, fights against her resentment and loneliness, and although she no longer believes in his talent or his project, gives over her days to providing the lowly secretarial aid he demands. Read More