July 26, 2013 Listen Kristin Dombek’s “Letter from Williamsburg” By Lorin Stein Il Pordenone, The Holy Trinity This essay may sound strange, read by a man—it is very specifically a woman’s essay. But Dombek’s voice is so powerful, every time I read “Letter from Williamsburg,” I hear it in my head. It’s like a song I want to sing along to. In fact, I remember reading the first two paragraphs to our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, over the phone, before the rest of the essay was written. I wanted him to hear how beautifully Dombek modulates her tone from the sublime to the mundane. I only wish I could do justice to the music on the page. Read the full essay in our Summer 2013 issue.
July 26, 2013 Arts & Culture War of the Words By James Hughes Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom. Courtesy of Rainbow Films. My Lunches with Orson, a collection of off-the-cuff conversations between filmmaker Henry Jaglom and Hollywood lion Orson Welles, recorded before Welles died of heart failure in 1985 (when his body was discovered, he had a typewriter in his lap, keystrokes from a comeback that was cruelly out of reach), arrived in bookstores last week with much fanfare. The chats were recorded weekly at the duo’s favorite restaurant, the now-shuttered Ma Maison on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and were conducted not only with Welles’s consent but at his urging. The transcripts read less like a meal and more like forkfuls from a dessert cart that endlessly whizzes by. Welles stabs at topics this way and that, exposing his deepest grudges and marveling over his unmatched moments of grandeur, sometimes in the same sentence. Author Peter Biskind combed through the cassettes, dozens of which Jaglom had stashed in a shoebox, and edited them for maximum punch. In his introduction, Biskind claims this “may be the last undiscovered trove of Welles on Welles.” Excerpts from the book, which can be snacked on online, reveal Jaglom recoiling at times as his companion blows buckshot across Hollywood. With each passing course, Welles serves up one-liners, each more potent than the last, and dismisses showbiz royalty past and present. High-powered table-hoppers are skewered the moment they’re out of earshot. Richard Burton gets the breeze. Waiters get shushed. Jaglom gets embarrassed. Even Wolfgang Puck, the chef preparing Welles’s meals, is targeted. (This was before Puck slid to Spago, the quintessential mideighties hot spot he erected off the Sunset Strip.) While Welles has no problem chortling about a leading Broadway critic who was unaware that the disgruntled staff at his favorite hotel routinely pissed in his morning tea, he doesn’t seem particularly mindful of his own tableside vulnerabilities. Read More
July 26, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Oology, Impostors, Sweden By The Paris Review Lord Walter Rothschild, founder of England’s Natural History Museum at Tring, home of the world’s largest bird-egg collection. Julian Rubinstein’s “Operation Easter,” in last week’s New Yorker, has been my breakfast reading and dinner conversation most of this week. Concerned with the obsession for collecting birds’ eggs—a mania that dates back almost to the mid-nineteenth century—the article relates lurid tales of collectors falling off cliffs in pursuit of nests, hiding amassed collections in secret compartments in their beds, and donning guises to steal eggs from a museum (the party in question pinched ten thousand eggs in some three years). When investigators from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds apprehend a suspect in his apartment, the man tells them, “Thank God you’ve come … I can’t stop.” With investigators jumping into cars, busting down doors, and engaging in two-day island-wide manhunts, this article reads more than a little like a thriller. I’d love to see Gary Oldman in a starring role when it hits the big screen. —Nicole Rudick I can’t help seconding Sadie’s recommendation of In Love, a novella by Alfred Hayes that has just been reissued by New York Review Classics. The story of a casual love affair that becomes serious as soon it starts to fall apart, In Love harks back to a classic French tradition—what you might call the Novel of Disillusionment—perfected over a century by Constant, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Proust, among others. At the same time, in its use of one-sided dialogue, its film noir sensibility, and its evocation of New York life, this 1953 masterpiece also seems utterly modern—a culmination and a book utterly at home in its moment. —Lorin Stein This month I had a particularly blue moment. I returned to an old favorite, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye , and then immediately afterward read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book that had been recommended to me several times by fellow students and professors alike. It would be difficult for me to state, with confidence, what exactly Bluets is about. The book-length essay is written in vignettes, each numbered and varying in length. Nelson begins with a captivating proposition: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” Something that began as “[a]n appreciation, an affinity” became something “more serious” and then “it became somehow personal.” I drifted easily into Nelson’s world of blue, in which she seamlessly strings together personal narratives, quotes, and facts, each poignant sketch its own bluish jewel. —Jo Stewart Read More
July 26, 2013 On the Shelf Austen Ousts Darwin, and Other News By Sadie Stein Jane Austen is indeed replacing Darwin on the £10 note. Margaret Atwood has written an opera, fifteen years in development, about the poet Pauline Johnson. The letters of Roald Dahl, spanning most of his life, will be published in 2016. This map, a “chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the comings and goings of characters in the The Great Gatsby,” is lovely.
July 25, 2013 Arts & Culture Beer Paradise By Win Bassett My life might well be divided into two categories: Before Beer and After Beer. Life AB started in the middle of a trailing, boring Carolina winter. Previously, bourbon had been my drink, and I thought the horizon of beer extended only to bottles with “light” surnames. If you had asked me to describe beer culture, I would have said, What culture? But then one evening, prior to the first round of trivia at a local bar, a friend bought a Rogue Dead Guy for me. Rather than commit impoliteness, the nastiest of southern sins, I sipped the beer with a smile. And then everything changed. This rich, decadent bread was nothing like the stale, crumbling crackers that filled the malted liquid basket of my past. Now, when referring to places I’ve been before the coming of hops into my life that day, I say, “I’ve been there, but I wasn’t a beer person yet.” At five o’clock on a mid-September Friday afternoon, the woman I am dating and I have to sneak out of our offices early for our first trip to Asheville together and my first visit to the city “as a beer person.” She comes from the eleventh floor, on loan to the bank from her consulting company. It’s her first job after graduating from Chapel Hill, and it’s a placeholder while she figures out what she really wants to do. I descend from the thirty-ninth floor, permanently on loan to the partners at my law firm. It’s my first job after graduating from the law school down the road from her sorority house, and I took it, in part, so that someone might introduce me to a woman or to her sister or to her mother much in the same way that Alec describes Fitzgerald’s semi-autobiographical Amory in This Side of Paradise: ALEC: Oh, he writes stuff.CECELIA: Does he play the piano?ALEC: Don’t think so.CECELIA: (Speculatively) Drink?ALEC: Yes—nothing queer about him.CECELIA: Money?ALEC: Good Lord—ask him, he used to have a lot, and he’s got some income now.(MRS. CONNAGE appears.) MRS. CONNAGE: Alec, of course we’re glad to have any friend of yours—ALEC: You certainly ought to meet Amory. I wish I could have met Fitzgerald. I think of him frequently, or rather, I think of his pseudo-autobiographical characters often enough. The draining struggle between writing and money, loves and incomes, and seeming “queer” and appearing “respectable” draws me to Fitzgerald’s characters—Amory in Paradise, Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned. While it may seem strange, even perverse, given his own history with alcohol, Fitzgerald and his writing have always felt particularly tied up with my budding passion for beer. Maybe it’s merely a question of timing, maybe of geography—but for me the two are inexplicably and inextricably linked. Read More
July 25, 2013 Arts & Culture Hypothetical Tom Robbins–Inspired Ben & Jerry’s Flavors By Sadie Stein While we enjoyed the book-inspired ice cream flavors the good people at HuffPo Books put together for National Ice Cream Month, it got us pondering a very real question: How is it that, given their sensibilities and aesthetic, Ben & Jerry’s has never produced an ice cream inspired by the work of Tom Robbins? While one friend pointed out that perhaps Baskin-Robbins gets dibs, the following immediately suggested themselves: Even Cowgirls Get the BlueberriesAnother Rocky Roadside AttractionVanilla IncognitoSkinny Legs and Almond (obviously a fat-free yogurt) Many thanks to all who helped contribute ideas, although it should be said that no one could come up with a delicious flavor based on Still Life with Woodpecker.