July 12, 2013 Look Spoiler Alert: Why We Abandon Books By Sadie Stein This infographic on “the psychology of abandonment”—that is, why we don’t finish certain books—makes for fun reading. But even more interesting is the Goodreads list of those titles most frequently abandoned. We don’t want to spoil Stieg Larsson for anyone, but let’s just say that those who don’t persevere are missing out on some sexual sadism and computer espionage.
July 12, 2013 On the Shelf Beckett on the Block, and Other News By Sadie Stein Reading University is now the proud owner of “almost certainly the most important English language manuscript still in private hands,” a six-notebook draft of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. (The damage? A cool [almost] one million pounds.) When writers eat. When writers drink. And speaking of comestibles: the typography picnic is a thing. Whether or not you’ve heard of them (we all know what happens when you assume), these six lesser-known women writers deserve your attention.
July 11, 2013 Arts & Culture The King of Queens By Tara Clancy Squatting behind a bookshelf with a stolen cup of coffee, I tilted my head like a dog at a shadow. Ear to shoulder, eyebrow raised, I mouthed the title of a book I’d never seen before. K-I-N-G L-E-A-R. Huh. Must be some Knights of the Round Table type-a-thing, I figured. Typically, when I cut classes, I was stealing away for a smoke, not Shakespeare. At sixteen, I was already a pack-a-day smoker. My brand was Marlboro Menthol, as opposed to Newport, that likely being the subconscious way Queens white girls differentiated themselves from Queens black girls—a thought I had much later in life. But on this day my caffeine addiction must have trumped my nicotine addiction, because I skipped the smoke, took a cup of coffee from the teacher’s lounge, and hid in an empty classroom to drink it. Straightaway I pulled the book from the shelf and split it in half, a gesture that tells me now I was not looking to read it, but to perform an autopsy. Maybe there would be pictures, or some chivalric bit of nonsense to help me pass the time. But there on the page was line after line of language as beautiful as it was bizarre, and I was mesmerized. I threw myself back, falling from my feet to my haunches, crossed my legs on the cold linoleum and turned to the beginning. Act 1. Scene 1. I had never read a book on my own. But I kept on, in a fury, cutting one class after the next after the next, until I was done. Read More
July 11, 2013 On Music Spring Fever By James S. Murphy Six weeks ago, the world celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the premiere of Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) on May 29, 1913, and of the legendary riot that accompanied it. It was the culmination of an ongoing celebration. In the past year, orchestras around the globe performed the piece. Carolina Performing Arts sponsored a symposium featuring leading scholars, a puppetry performance by Basil Twist, and a new reinterpretation of Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s ballet, called A Rite, by Anne Bogart and Bill T. Jones. Mark Morris, too, leapt onto the reboot bandwagon with Spring Spring Spring, danced to a musical reinterpretation of Stravinsky by the jazz group the Bad Plus. So, too, did the German choreographer Sasha Waltz, with her new ballet, performed on May 29 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the very theater in which the original premiered. Indubitably great as Stravinsky’s composition was, there is no doubt that much of the work’s fame and the desire to mark its anniversary rest on the riot. The Rite may have created a riot, but it was the myth of the riot that made The Rite and much attention has been spent in recent months on determining just what the source of the riot was. If we really want to understand that watershed moment, however, we might do better to recall a different anniversary. A hundred years ago today, on July 11, 1913, the ballet was performed for the first time in London. After the tumult in Paris, what must have happened in the conservative, even staid, cultural climate of England? France, after all, had spawned Baudelaire, the Moulin Rouge, and Ubu Roi. London had sired Tennyson, the pantomime, and H.M.S. Pinafore. If worldly Parisians had rioted, surely parochial Londoners must have rampaged. Read More
July 11, 2013 Look Edward Gorey Does the Classics By Sadie Stein Brain Pickings has posted a wonderful gallery of Edward Gorey’s Doubleday paperback covers, designed between 1953 and 1960. Some, like The War of the Worlds and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, feel like an obvious match for Gorey’s brand of Gothic whimsy. But the more unexpected pairings—his takes on Colette, Kierkegaard, and Chekhov—are just as amazing.
July 11, 2013 On the Shelf Parks and Prejudice, and Other News By Sadie Stein This speaks for itself: Pride and Prejudice mashed up with Parks and Recreation. Take this (anonymous) survey: What books do you pretend to have read? Shockingly, famously gregarious joiner J. D. Salinger was no fan of book clubs. Speaking of! The Catcher in the Rye and twenty-seven other books that Buzzfeed deems red flags. Windsor Castle is seeking “an exceptional scholar and bibliophile” to manage the Royal Library.