July 9, 2013 On the Shelf Giant Mr. Darcy Terrorizes London, and Other News By Sadie Stein A twelve-foot fiberglass Mr. Darcy is currently standing in the middle of Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake, and is terrifying. A new analytics tool claims it can detect sarcasm in online comments. But the best part: “Its clients include the Home Office, EU Commission and Dubai Courts.” The artist formerly known as “the” is now represented by the symbol Ћ. Book titles missing one (key) letter. A scientifically accurate “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Sample lyric: “Thirty-two light years in the sky / Ten parsecs which is really high.”
July 8, 2013 First Person Say Uncle By Mike Scalise My average encounter with my eighteen-month-old nephew, Crosby, goes like this: First, I press a button. The boy, who lives in Charlotte, appears on a piece of handheld video technology, wobbling like a sleepy bear cub, eating something that’s not food (a TV remote; a shoe, maybe). Several states away, my wife and I speak into our technology. We say “Crosby-face! There’s Crosby-face!” Then my brother-in-law’s unseen voice commands his son, like God or a drive-thru employee, to “give your aunt and uncle a kiss.” Crosby lunges at his screen, at us, toothless, dripping with joy. Like it’s a part of a script, I yell “Crosby’s trying to eat my face!” then my wife yells “Who’s trying to eat somebody’s face?” and right on cue our screen goes pink with a toddler’s wet gums. It goes on like this for minutes, my wife and I encouraging our poor nephew—this pure, adorable maniac—to actually ingest a touchscreen device. “Oh no! Crosby’s eating us!” we say to no one. “He’s eating our noses! What will we do?!?” we say, until Crosby, cackling wildly, knocks the device from his father’s hands, and like the ill-fated hunters of the Blair Witch ghost, our transmission falls black at once. Until seconds later, when we repeat the whole encounter again. This interaction, or some version of it, has happened at least three times a week for the last year and a half in my home. As an uncle, I don’t know if I can take much more. Read More
July 8, 2013 Listen “I Ducked Behind My Paris Review…” By Sadie Stein This song, “Dear Joseph,” comes courtesy of Australian group t:dy t:wns. As they explain it, “My friend and I wrote a song about an airplane trip I took where I was distracted from reading my Paris Review by my seat mate, a guy named Joseph, who was very chatty and DEMONSTRATIVELY scared of flying. He was really something.”
July 8, 2013 Arts & Culture Daring Daisy Ashford, the Greatest Ever Nine-Year-Old Novelist By Alice Bolin It all began on the back cover of the great poet James Schuyler’s 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere. In the novel, Schuyler creates an absolutely odd and believable childhood world, told only through dialogue between the young brother and sister Alfred and Guinevere Gates and excerpts from Guinevere’s diary. Alfred and Guinevere is the best novel I’ve ever read about childhood, because it accurately depicts the way children brilliantly and hilariously mimic adults, the way that children’s conversations are imperfectly observed imitations of adult conversations. Because of this insight, it doesn’t read like an adult imitating children—and it is incredibly funny. I’ve read it many times; I can’t get enough of it. Going through it again this spring, I was caught by a review from Commonweal quoted on the back cover. “A deft and funny creation of a high quality,” the critic wrote, “somewhere between the terror-haunted humor of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica and the placid, presumably unselfconscious amusements of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters.” I had never heard of The Young Visiters. Neither, as it happens, had any of the dozen people I’ve mentioned it to in the months since. When I sought The Young Visiters out at the library, I was startled by what would seem to be the most important fact about it. “You could have told me,” I said silently to Commonweal, “that this book was written by a nine-year-old.” When in 1919 a grown-up Daisy Ashford rediscovered and agreed to publish The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan, which she had written twenty-eight years earlier, it was an immediate and absolute success. It is a Victorian “society novel” following “an elderly man of forty-two” named Alfred Salteena and his friends, the young lovers Ethel Montecue and Bernard Clark, as Mr. Salteena strives to become a gentleman. With its distinctive, graceless narrative voice and original spelling errors intact, readers regarded it as a remarkable specimen of children’s grand and unselfconscious ridiculousness. It was so popular in the United States and in Ashford’s native United Kingdom that it went through eight printings in its first year. Read More
July 8, 2013 On the Shelf Rahm Emanuel to Jump in Lake If Kids Read, and Other News By Sadie Stein “This ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendentally platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers.” And other literary takedowns. Playing on children’s eternal desire to see authority figures drenched in cold water, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Chicago Bear Israel Idonije have sworn to jump in wintry Lake Michigan if local kids read two million books this summer. Think the fun is over now that you’re back at work? Not so fast: here’s an idioms and formulaic language quiz! Plus: (more) dirty jokes from Shakespeare. When James Joyce, Jeanette Winterson, and Salman Rushdie wrote for children.
July 5, 2013 Quote Unquote Summer! By Sadie Stein “‘I’ll have to calm down a bit. Or else I’ll burst with happiness.’” —Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness