February 13, 2013 On the Shelf The Maurice Sendak School, and Other News By Sadie Stein Pablo Neruda’s body will be exhumed in search for answers to his suspicious death, in 1973. Was he poisoned by the Pinochet regime? As he said, forgetting is so long. U.S. and U.K.: two nations separated by slightly different cover art aesthetics. Which do you prefer? Three buyers are vying for Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books; all three contenders are apparently local. Brooklyn’s PS 118 will henceforth be known as the Maurice Sendak Community School. We were going to share with you the Craigslist posting for an attractive copy editor, but it has been flagged for removal.
February 12, 2013 Arts & Culture Notes from a Bookshop: February, or the Folly of Love By Kelly McMasters Sitting alone in my tiny bookshop on a cold February morning, I have the sensation that I’ve conjured a dream into reality. The light is crisp and blue through the door. A flight of red paper swallows—a Valentine homage to Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls”—hangs from the ceiling, fluttering quietly from the heat whooshing out of the floor grate. The room is small, just shy of two hundred fifty square feet, and an old pickled farm table sits squarely in the middle. The top of the table is covered with books, and the shelves lining two of the room’s walls also contain a patchwork of brightly colored spines. Valentine-themed woodblock prints handmade by my husband line the farm table and a grid of nature-inspired prints hold a wall. We live on an old dairy farm up in northeast Pennsylvania, and instead of cows in our three-bay English barn, we have two etching presses. He carves the images into blocks of clear pine, inks them up, and sends them through the press, cranking the smooth silver wheel like a captain on a ship. This is our store together, a kind of celebration of works on paper. We live on Moody Road, and so we call the shop Moody Road Studios. An artist and a writer, respectively, my husband and I had both been teaching and working in the city for more than a decade, until a little over a year ago. The idea of running a bookshop never entered our consciousness while in New York, mostly because it never could have happened. Space and funding were impossibilities—as one might guess, a writer and an artist in business together don’t quite make for a crack commerce force. But here, on Main Street in the small town of Honesdale, everything clicked into place. Read More
February 12, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln By Sadie Stein “My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.” —Abraham Lincoln
February 12, 2013 First Person Letter from Berlin: In the Cut By Zeke Turner Fabian One morning my first summer in Berlin, I woke up alone in a park with a piece of sweaty plastic wrap around my forearm. I still had the tattoo. I still didn’t have my keys. Fabian had given me the tattoo lying in his bed the night before. We met in a club thirty-six hours earlier, on Sunday afternoon, after I tried to pick up his roommate, a brooding Austrian boy with shoulder-length blond hair who was sitting alone away from the dance floor. He had a homemade tattoo of a sword on his wrist. His roommate had made it, he said, and did I want to meet him? They both turned out to be straight, and we spent the rest of the day dancing together and sharing our drinks and our cigarettes and whatever else we had. Another Sunday afternoon dancing at the same club, a Portuguese friend stopped me and asked, “Americans come here for the freedom, right?” Another Sunday there, a Scottish boy asked me if I moved to Berlin “just to have fun.” Usually in these situations I say, “I guess so.” Nobody with pupils that size could have patience for a real answer. Read More
February 12, 2013 On the Shelf Hypothetical Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein “But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an ‘immaculately factual’ recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.” Cold blood, indeed! Douglas Coupland makes some very nice furniture. E-readers: not big in Japan. Readers have rallied around Maine’s Longfellow Books, badly damaged in the weekend’s blizzard. “I never realized what this store means to people until this weekend,” says the owner. Bad hypothetical book proposals.
February 11, 2013 Arts & Culture February in Chicago By A-J Aronstein Just a few years ago, I had no idea what cold felt like, and no way to know how to prepare for it. I didn’t know my limit. Zero degrees. No degrees. None of them. Personally, that’s when I start to lose it. In this range, anyone’s capacity to describe what they are feeling—already a pretty fraught prospect—collapses into mutterings about “hanging in there.” And then the wind comes off the lake. February in Chicago: four weeks when it’s acceptable to shower in a hoodie and sleep in a balaclava, wool turtleneck sweater, and thermal socks. Anyone who says they’re not wearing long underwear is either lying or an idiot. I’m wearing one of my three pairs right now, and I’m sitting in my apartment. If I lean forward over the keyboard, I can feel the sun through my bay window on my face. It’s colder elsewhere, sure. Mostly in the settings of nineteenth-century Russian novels. And as we get toward March, I keep the weather for Duluth in my iPhone rotation, just to stay humble. But—as anyone around here will remind you over a Schlitz, or eight—Chicago is the largest American city that deals with negative-twenty-degree wind chills on a regular basis. The wind chill last week got down to negative twenty. In this range, we all become characters in a Jack London story, fighting to keep the blood in extremities we didn’t know we had. And I start to wonder: If I needed to build a fire and all I had was an iPhone, how long would it take for me to freeze to death? Read More