March 8, 2013 Contests Last Chance, Poseurs! Win a Briefcase By Sadie Stein Here is the youngest resident of the Hotel Duncan taking a “sensitivity break” from his senior thesis, on the fin-de-siècle poet Trumbull Stickney, 1995: “But that I know these places are my own / I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber / The earth, and I to people it alone. // It rains across the country I remember.” —Lorin Stein Remember! Whether you had a Romantic phase, a Beat fixation, an Aesthetic idyll, send us your picture of yourself at your most self-seriously bookish and you could win a Frank Clegg English Briefcase. Send your picture, along with a brief description of your influences of the time, to [email protected]. All entries must be in by Monday, March 11. (Luckily for you, staff is ineligible; this is hard to top!)
March 8, 2013 Arts & Culture Papal Abdication: A Potpourri of Popery By Mike Duncan and Jason Novak Pause Play Play Prev | Next Mike Duncan is studying public history at Southwest Texas State, in Austin, and is currently at work on an historical marker for Warner Brothers cartoonist Tex Avery. Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.
March 8, 2013 Look Day of Kings By Sadie Stein “But all this world is like a tale we hear – Men’s evil, and their glory, disappear.” ― فردوسی, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, completed by Ferdowsi on this day in the year 1010.
March 8, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Underwater Photography, Semicolons, Rimbaud By The Paris Review When I was a teenager, I had a series of dreams in which I would attempt to do the most banal tasks underwater: eat breakfast, cut my toenails, read a book whose waterlogged pages would always stick together. I never really thought much about the dream’s implications—Was I suffocating under life’s demands? Or was it just something I ate?—until I stumbled on Bruce Mozert’s 1950s underwater photography. Using a self-constructed underwater camera, Mozert spent his career shooting underwater portraits for numerous lifestyle magazines—entirely without digital manipulation. (One Mozert trick was “using baking powder to create the powdery ‘smoke’ coming out of the underwater barbecue.”) Why would a photographer devote his life to such a niche? Some things (like the genesis of my dreams) are better left unanswered. —Justin Alvarez I’m impressed by a twenty-eight-page examination of “The Endangered Semicolon” in the debut issue of Apology, Jesse Pearson’s new quarterly. It’s disheartening, though, to read that the semicolon is in decline, not least because it is my favorite punctuation mark—a fact that displeased Matt Sumell, who cheerfully rejected the suggested use of semicolons in his story for issue 200 (save two) and who wrote me recently with the sole purpose of informing me that he still doesn’t use semicolons. I pity him and Alexander Theroux, who bemoans in Apology the semicolon’s typographical imbalance (neither a colon nor a period) and its existence as a tentative mark, an “illicit and uneasy compromise.” Let others have the em dash, the period, the showy exclamation point. I’ll keep the semicolon, so adept at capturing a particular cadence, a curt melody. —Nicole Rudick Read More
March 8, 2013 On the Shelf Built of Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Dutch artist Frank Halmans makes book houses, in a series called Built of Books. Pablo Neruda is going to be exhumed. Why? “Manuel Araya, who was Neruda’s chauffer during the sick writer’s last few months, says agents of the dictatorship took advantage of his ailment to inject poison into his stomach while he was bedridden at the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago.” Stand by. Simon Akam: “I hate Bridezillas for one simple reason: bride does not rhyme with god. Ergo, Bridezillas is not a functioning pun.” The Vatican Library, or Bibliotheca Apostolica, is planning to digitize its eighty-nine thousand holdings. In more accessible reading, a tribute to NYC bookstores.
March 7, 2013 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Tim Small, Publisher, Writer, Filmmaker By Tim Small DAY ONE 10:00 A.M. Having just quit my job (well, not just quit, but still) to dedicate myself to “my own projects,” I have the great luxury of being able to sleep until ten every morning. It’s disgraceful. I eat bread and butter and drink a cup of tea while I watch last night’s NBA highlights. I am in love with Kyrie Irving. 11:00 A.M. Yesterday I gave a copy of Train Dreams to my special lady, mostly because I started reading it again and it’s just a perfect-perfect gem of a book. I read more of it on the subway as I make my way to VICE Italy, my old office, where I have to pick up two pallets of new Milan Review books. They are both comics and they will both be presented at BilBOlBul, the independent comics festival in Bologna. One is the Italian translation of Prison Pit, a hilarious and ultra-violent graphic novel by Johnny Ryan, which is like a mixture between violent mangas, wrestling, and a twelve year old’s brain. I decided to title it Il pozzo di sangue, which literally means “the well of blood.” The other is called Rap Violent in the Ghetto Street and it is a collection of dumb, satirical comic strips about rap and new-age philosophy (but filtered through a weird take on Italian popular culture) by Dr. Pira, an Italian artist who specializes in terrible drawings with an amazing sense of humor. It’s very hard to explain to Americans, but Italians seem to get it. Read More