February 22, 2013 Arts & Culture The Joys of Yiddish Dictionaries By Ezra Glinter One of the best things I’ve ordered on the Internet recently is a Yiddish translation of The Hobbit. After getting lost in the mail in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, it finally arrived: a medium-sized white-on-black paperback titled Der Hobit, with a dedication to the “workers and residents of the Newtonville Starbucks (my office).” The translator, Barry Goldstein, is a retired computer programmer, and reworking The Hobbit is only one of his hobbies. He is an arctic traveler who has taken several trips to Greenland, and he has rendered accounts of Shackleton’s voyages into Yiddish. He is also on the editorial team of a more momentous, if not quite as whimsical, project: the new Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, released in January by Indiana University Press. Now, thanks to Goldstein, I have the Yiddish Hobbit, and the means to read it. A dictionary is meant to be a reflection of a language (or a prescription for it, depending on your view), but the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary reflects an entire culture. (In the interest of full disclosure, the dictionary received a grant from the Forward Association, which publishes the newspaper for which I work.) Unlike previous dictionaries, its audience is mainly English speakers, not Yiddish. It is aimed at readers of Yiddish literature (or Yiddish translations of children’s fantasy novels), rather than people who want to speak or write the language, though an English-Yiddish dictionary is also on the way. In the battle between descriptivism and prescriptivism it takes a middle path, erring on the side of the descriptive. Taken with its predecessors, it tells the story of Yiddish in America. Read More
February 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Weirdest Titles of the Year By Sadie Stein Forget the Oscars: what we’re interested in is the Diagram Prize, which rewards the oddest title of the year. The shortlist follows; vote for your favorite before March 22 at We Love This Book. Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop, by Reginald Bakeley God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis, by Tom Hickman How Tea Cosies Changed the World, by Loani Prior How to Sharpen Pencils, by David Rees Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts, by Jerry Gagne Was Hitler Ill?, by Hans-Joachim Neumann and Henrik Eberle
February 22, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Crapalachia, Welty, Animalia By The Paris Review Though the book doesn’t come out until the middle of next month, I can’t wait until then to say how much I liked Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia. It’s about his youth in rural West Virginia, where he spent his formative years under the influence of his Grandma Ruby and Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. The book is subtitled “a biography of a place,” but it’s more a biography of a handful of people, and Ruby and Nathan are easily its star characters: beguiling in their weirdness and utterly charming in their deep affection for each other and for Scott. His voice is wholly unaffected, and his account manages to be both comic and unpretentiously sentimental. —Nicole Rudick My worst reading habit is not reading too fast, or too slow, or stopping books in the middle, or right before the end (though I do all of those things). It’s my persistent impulse to read books that reflect my mood—an impulse that, if indulged often, reduces my reading list to a positively uncatholic range of authors and subjects. But one recent evening, my initial, “safe” pick (James’s The Golden Bowl) was thwarted by Geneviève Castrée’s Susceptible, which, when spotted in a pile of neglected books, looked too intriguing to let alone. An autobiographical comic, the work is less like an illustrated diary and more like a scrapbook; it shows rather than tells, pasting together a series of vignettes to build a narrative of the author’s troubled early life. Castrée’s beautifully toned black-and-white drawings even read more like vintage photographs than they do sketches. The book’s pervasive melancholy is still lingering with me, a reminder of why we really read: to feel things besides our own emotions. —Clare Fentress Read More
February 22, 2013 On the Shelf DFW: the Trading Card, and Other News By Sadie Stein David Foster Wallace: the trading card. While you’re at it: pro-book desktop wallpaper. On bribing librarians, and other ways to discover new books. Speaking of libraries: here is what Auden checked out of the New York Society Library. (How many titles can you decipher?) James Patterson and, oddly enough, the Duchess of Cornwall are teaming up to encourage fathers to read to their children.
February 21, 2013 Video & Multimedia Anaïs Nin on Heroes By Sadie Stein February 21 is the anniversary of Anaïs Nin’s birth. In the following film, Nin discusses Lou Andreas-Salomé and Friedrich Nietzsche.
February 21, 2013 History Happy Birthday, Telephone Book By Sadie Stein On this day in 1878, the world saw the first telephone directory. The twenty-page book, which listed the numbers of phones in New Haven, Connecticut, instructed users not to “use the wire more than three minutes at a time, or more than twice an hour.”