July 23, 2013 On the Shelf Wine for Dummies, and Other News By Sadie Stein Wine for Dummies (yes, like the books) is a real thing, and will shortly be presented to any host who invites me to dinner. In case you were wondering, this summer, Bill Gates will be reading, among other things, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger and Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts. Scrapbooks compiled by Ernest Hemingway’s mother throughout his childhood have been made available by the JFK Library. Someone has returned The Real Book About Snakes to Champaign County Library forty-one years late, with a fine in cash. Writes the conscientious borrower, “Sorry I’ve kept this book so long but I’m a really slow reader! I’ve enclosed my fine of $299.30 (41 years—2 cents a day). Once again, my apologies!!”
July 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Archie Revisited By Sadie Stein “If it could only be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper …” So says Sebastian Flyte of his teddy bear, one of the most memorable minor characters in Brideshead Revisited. Both affectation and security totem, Aloysius (played in the iconic ITV miniseries by one Delicatessen) was modeled on a real toy: Archibald Ormsby-Gore, who belonged to Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford friend John Betjeman. And while Aloysius may be Archibald’s most famous literary representation, it’s not the only one: in the 1940s, Betjeman wrote a book for his children, titled Archie and the Strict Baptists. (The main character, a practicing Baptist, is a keen amateur archeologist.) An illustrated version appeared in 1977. The bear, which Betjeman was holding when he died, now resides in St. Pancras, with his elephant companion, Jumbo.
July 22, 2013 Arts & Culture Maximum Ride By Sadie Stein While the thesis of this article—that business travelers still enjoy reading—may seem less than revelatory, we were intrigued by the following anecdote: Carrying a book while traveling often spurs conversations with strangers, many business travelers say. [Gene] Jannotti says he was holding a James Patterson novel when he walked into a restaurant and the maitre d’ remarked that he had read the same book. “I told him he couldn’t have read the same book and then opened the cover to show him James Patterson’s autograph,” Jannotti says. “Needless to say, he escorted me to a very nice table and came by several times to be sure that I was happy with the food and the service.” We feel that, on the contrary, there was every need to say this. We are, however, still figuring out the best use of the information.
July 22, 2013 On Music How to Prepare for the Past By Brian Cullman Lillian Roxon died forty years ago this August. Lillian was an Australian journalist who moved to New York in the late 1950s to cover popular culture for the Sydney Morning Herald and who fell madly in love with the city and with the sixties rock scene as it emerged. An unbridled enthusiast, scenemaker, and troublemaker, she was also one of the original Wild Grrrrls: bawdy, carousing, fiercely independent, unashamedly smart women on the town. Together, she, Germaine Greer, and Linda Eastman terrorized the city. At least the parts of the city that men frequented. I met Lillian when I was about sixteen. She had just published The Rock Encyclopedia, and I devoured it, read it cover to cover. This was pre Creem, and almost all there was for music junkies was Hit Parader, Teen Beat, and 16 Magazine. So of course I bought her book. And corrected it. The spirit of the book was wonderful, but the facts were all askew, and for a young trainspotter that was unforgivable. She had John Stewart from the Kingston Trio listed as a member of Buffalo Springfield. Things like that. I sent her about thirty handwritten pages of corrections, and she sent back a note graciously asking if I’d like to work on the second edition with her. There was no second edition, but she became my patron, taking me off to Max’s Kansas City and to clubs I never could have gotten into, not to mention taking me to all the back rooms and backstage scenes I didn’t even know existed. Read More
July 22, 2013 On the Shelf The Mysterious Book Sculptor of Edinburgh Strikes Again, and Other News By Sadie Stein The mysterious book sculptor of Edinburgh has struck again. Reads the card (perhaps intended to clarify things for those who wondered if the work was antibook), “In support of libraries, books, words & ideas.” “Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a shortcut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future.” “Instagram for writers”? Meet Hi. If the case of J. K. Rowling has whetted your appetite for pseuonymous lore, are you in luck! Read more on CNN, The National, and Time. (Although this book remains our favorite on the subject.)
July 19, 2013 First Person An Incident on Canal Street By Sadie Stein In July of 2001—I was in college at the time, working as a part-time waitress and part-time fact-checker—I found myself on Canal Street on a sweltering afternoon. It had been a long and unglamorous summer, hot in the way everyone knows from New York summer movies, but not, I remember thinking, even remotely iconic, or at least not any frame into which I happened to wander. I frequently wore a series of enormous house dresses I had gotten at a yard sale, and tried very hard to like certain classic albums by listening to them, intensely, on a loop. Somehow it seemed imperative, then, to fight violently for a spot on the lawn at Bryant Park, no matter what film was showing. I was too young to drink. I was acutely aware of being a total waste of time, and also found this interesting. It is hard to overstate my unsexiness. Two people I knew were involved with Shakespeare productions that were designed as thinly veiled allegories concerning the political situation. Everyone was wearing those mesh slippers, bedecked with sparkly flowers, which you could buy in Chinatown for a few dollars. At home, my dad was fighting with my teenage brother, who had a penchant for stealing the family car. “Your brother,” said my dad, “has a total disregard for the dictates of the social contract, as they apply to him. In this way, he is like Hitler. Well,” he amended, “Hitler and Edwin Booth.” On that particular day, the street was packed with vendors and workers and tourists looking for bags (although it should be noted that this was prior to the real designer-knockoff bag boom, or indeed, the ensuing crackdown.) This was no country for old men, although obviously it was full of old men. I had detoured through Chinatown in order to get some of the slippers, and also some five-for-a-dollar dumplings, and in the process of acquiring them had learned to add sugar to the soy sauce and sriracha on offer (this is a tip I share with you now) and seen three rats, which one assumes, but is always nice to have verified, I suppose. Read More