February 8, 2013 Bulletin A Bookish Wedding By Sadie Stein “The library has always been a sanctuary for me. I always felt validated as a child when the librarian went to, what I believed at the time, great lengths to attend to my inquisitiveness,” says Barbara Morrow, who on Friday married David Kurland in the Northwest History Room at Washington’s Everett Public Library. “Today, when I walk into a library, I feel calm. I look around at the stacks and know I can find out about anything. There before me, shelf after shelf, are ideas and knowledge.” Added the groom, “Libraries are full of ideas. A person needs lots of ideas. And we both love words … We are the ultimate nerds.” The two, who met on Match.com after he decided he “just wanted to have lunch with the woman who could write like that,” and who enjoy reading aloud to each other, were married by children’s librarian Theresa Gemmer. Librarian Joan Blacker acted as a de facto wedding planner. The bride sported book-shaped earrings; the groom a bookshelf-patterned tie. Following cake with the staff, the bride renewed her library card. Hearty congratulations from everyone at 62 White Street!
February 8, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Carson, Hatterr, Fidel By The Paris Review If you’re going to judge a book by its endpapers, then I recommend Julie Morstad’s The Wayside. I’ve spent a fair amount of time imagining them on the walls of the drawing room I don’t have. It helps that the rest of the book—all new drawings by the Canadian illustrator—is equal parts charming and strange. There’s definitely an Edward Gorey–esque feel to her work, but I also see occasional hints of William Pène du Bois (in a troupe of women acrobats) and Amy Cutler (in the wonderful patterned textiles). I think my favorite drawing may be a double gatefold depicting groups of flatly rendered performing-arts kids doing their thing. It’s Attic form meets Fame. —Nicole Rudick In the early fifties, a married Cuban socialite has an epistolary romance with a dashing political prisoner. They meet for one night, and the woman bears his child. Meanwhile the young man, freed from prison, seizes command of the struggle against Batista and becomes ruler of their country. It sounds (and reads) like a novel, but Havana Dreams, Wendy Gimbel’s 1998 portrait of Naty Revuelta and her daughter Alina, is a work of intimate reportage, and the relationship of these two women to Fidel Castro takes on an uncanny symbolic weight. The book invaded my own dreams. —Lorin Stein Read More
February 8, 2013 On the Shelf The Man in Black, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Coeur d’Alene Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.” (When questioned, Goedde clarified, “I don’t plan on moving this forward—it was a statement.”) “Jane Austen has been dead for close to two hundred years, but it’s hard to imagine she’s gotten much rest in her grave in Westminster Abbey, what with all the rewrites, updates and zombifications of her work.” Enough already! says Carolyn Kellogg. “Son, where are your books on trains?” On selling books to Johnny Cash. (Spoiler: as amazing as it sounds.) Yes, there is a hotel designed to look like Joseph Conrad’s steamer. Ten hotels based on literature.
February 7, 2013 Quote Unquote Virginia Woolf, on Pancakes and Porridge By Sadie Stein “When in a good and merry mood Trisy would seize a dozen eggs, and a bucket of flour, coerce a cow to milk itself, and then mixing the ingredients toss them 20 times high up over the skyline, and catch them as they fell in dozens and dozens and dozens of pancakes. But her porridge was a very different affair … It dolloped out of a black pan in lumps of mortar. It stank: it stuck.” —From a series of sketches Woolf wrote for her nephews in their paper, The Charleston Bulletin. Illustration by Quentin Bell.
February 7, 2013 History Vanity of Vanities By Sadie Stein On February 7, 1497, in the midst of carnival, the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola inspired a falò delle vanità, exhorting his followers to burn immoral objects in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria. Tinder included cosmetics, mirrors, Boccacio’s books, artwork, clothing, instruments, and playing cards. (Some say that Botticelli, a devotee, was moved to burn some of his work, but this is speculation.) While these bonfires were not uncommon, the scale of this one made it the most famous. Obviously, in memoriam, we bring you the trailer for the 1990 film adaptation of the 1987 Tom Wolfe novel. Also: everyone was in that movie!
February 7, 2013 Arts & Culture Letter from Jaipur By J. D. Daniels Last year’s Jaipur Literature Festival was exciting and boring at the same time—a death threat is exciting, but thirty death threats are boring; as Dostoevsky wrote, “Man is a creature who can get used to anything.” Salman Rushdie was scheduled to attend: Islamic groups agitated to deny him a visa, which he does not need in order to enter India, but never mind. It was suggested that instead Rushdie might address the festival via video conference: the government itself advised against this. Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil, Amitava Kumar, and Ruchir Joshi read aloud in protest from The Satanic Verses, still banned in India, but, after the gravity of their collective transgression had been brought home to them, they left the festival. We know what comedy is: life is increased. Think of Rodney Dangerfield addressing the crowd at the end of Caddyshack: “Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” And we know what tragedy is: isolation increases. I used to think that life was about winning everything, Mike Tyson once said, but now I know that life is about losing everything. But what is India, with its boundless affirmation of life in general that befouls so many lives in the particular, with its joyous proliferation unto overcrowding, need, and misery? I did my small part, during my brief month there, to maintain those inequalities: Give me your shoes, I know you have other pair, you not need these, give them me, said a man as he tried to pull my sneakers off while a second man tried to pin my arms; and what he said was true, somewhere on the other side of the world I did have another pair of shoes, four shoes and only two feet; all the same, unhand me, my little friend, before I pick you up and throw you like a javelin. I attended the 2013 JLF. It began in the same way. Read More