July 5, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Tragedy, Poetry, Music By The Paris Review I’ve been catching up on the last two issues of the Fairleigh Dickinson journal, The Literary Review. Of special brilliance: a long polyphonic poem by Leon Weinmann about Simone Weil, a bravely whiny New York poem by Rachel Zucker (“I don’t want to have coffee or not have coffee / or listen to This American Life podcast on infidelity”), and a novella by Paula Bomer, “Inside Madeleine,” about a town slut destroyed by love. It’s so arresting I raced to finish so I could pass the issue along to a friend. —Lorin Stein Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle is a strange mixture of concert film—specifically, the 2011 tribute to the late Canadian folk singer at Town Hall—and documentary. But if at times the biographical elements are unsatisfying, the music makes it well worth seeing. Beyond the lovely McGarrigles covers from the concert (I especially liked the version of “Walking Song” performed by her son, Rufus Wainwright), we are treated to original recordings by Kate and her sister Anna, as well as the kind of impromptu jam sessions that take place when everyone in the family is a professional musician. I promptly dug out all my McGarrigle albums, and have been listening to little else since. —Sadie O. Stein Read More
July 4, 2013 Arts & Culture Light and Dark By Ethan Hauser It has been almost three months since the Boston Marathon bombings and the riveting manhunt that followed: less than a hundred days, a fraction of the time needed to understand what happened, what will happen. Still, that searing week lingers vividly in our consciousness. A runner crumples on Boylston Street, paralyzed by the blast. Medics rush against the tide of a fleeing crowd. A helicopter outfitted with heat sensors tracks the shadowy movement of a man under a tarp, stowed away in a boat moored in the inland backyard of a place called Watertown. It has all the contours of a dream: precise in some places, blurry in others, tantalizingly real and unreal. In early May a woman in Virginia with no link to the bombers found a cemetery that would accept the older brother’s body, after many had refused. She had no connection to the Tsarnaevs, or at least no more than the rest of us wrapped up in this unfolding. Asked why she made the effort, she told her interviewer on National Public Radio: “Jesus tells us to—in the parable of the Good Samaritan—love your neighbor as yourself. And your neighbor is not just someone you belong with but someone who is alien to you.” She lives along the same Eastern Seaboard, 550 miles south of Boston, in a state with its own prominent place in the birth of our nation. Read More
July 4, 2013 Video & Multimedia Happy Fourth! By Sadie Stein George Plimpton’s passion for fireworks is legendary: he devoted a book to the subject, and held the title of Fireworks Commissioner of New York for some thirty years. In 2011, his son, Taylor, wrote movingly about sending his father’s ashes into space with his favorite firework, the kamuro. In 1994, Plimpton hosted the terrific documentary Fireworks, based on his book.
July 3, 2013 Arts & Culture Notes from a Bookshop: Early Summer, or Six Months In By Kelly McMasters Photo Credit: Lawrence Braun. Wear the old coat and buy the new book. —Austin Phelps When I tell people I run a bookshop, they often respond with envy or admiration. But first, a funny look flashes across their face—sometimes fleeting, sometimes not. A look that says, Poor girl. A look that says, She must be daft. I am not daft. It’s no secret that the bookstore industry is in trouble, and, six months into this experiment, I still don’t know if this dream is viable. Aside from the question of whether people will buy books or will simply use the shop to browse and then order from Amazon when they get home—or, as Michele Figlate’s fantastic Center For Fiction piece flays, order from their iPhone on the spot using our free Wi-Fi—there are the more prosaic reasons I may not be cut out to run a small business, like quarterly taxes and mopping the floor. But people’s love of books is not something I lose much sleep over. I’m a romantic, but I’m also a pragmatist. I did not open Moody Road Studios and assume it would pay my home mortgage or student loan, or even for my dark chocolate habit. Like many writers, I survive by keeping a dozen lines in the water. So I write. And edit. And review. And copyedit. And teach. I love each of these things and feel fortunate to be able to do work that I love and get paid for it. And I knew that in order to open this shop, I would need to continue to do all of these things in order to make it work. I won’t necessarily make money, but I can’t afford to lose any money either. Read More
July 3, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Mary Frances By Sadie Stein Image via Gourmet “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.” —M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
July 3, 2013 On the Shelf English Rude Word Enters German Language, and Other News By Sadie Stein Williams’ Book Store. On the manifold benefits of writing by hand. In which the author teaches Victorian literature to embryo accountants. Germany adopts shitstorm. Or, as the Beeb would have it, “English rude word enters German language.” Oh dear: the Chicago Sun-Times is discontinuing all book coverage. San Pedro’s Williams’ Book Store is closing after 104 years in business.