February 4, 2013 Arts & Culture When Agatha Christie Was Investigated by MI5 By Sadie Stein One imagines that MI5 was busy during World War II. But not too busy, it would seem, to take the time to investigate Agatha Christie. Why? Well, says the Guardian, The answer, it can now be revealed, lay in the name of a character in her wartime novel N or M, whom she called Major Bletchley. He appears in the book as a friend of Christie’s pair of detectives, Tommy and Tuppence. In the book, published in 1941, N and M are the initials given to two of Hitler’s agents as Tommy and Tuppence hunt for the enemy within. Major Bletchley comes across as a tedious former Indian army officer who claims to know the secrets of Britain’s wartime efforts. Christie happened to be a close friend of Dilly Knox, one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park. MI5 was concerned that the major’s inside knowledge of the progress of the war was based on what the codebreakers knew about Hitler’s plans. Had Christie mischievously named the character Bletchley because Knox told her what was going on there? The codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire had broken German Enigma machine cyphers, enabling Churchill and his military commanders to know what the enemy was planning. Berlin believed Enigma was unbreakable, making it all the more essential to ensure that only a very small circle of people knew what the codebreakers at Bletchley were up to. What worried MI5 even more was that it was Knox who had just broken the Enigma machine cypher used by German secret service officers sending spies to Britain. It is almost unthinkable to imagine equal concern being lavished on the work of a modern bestseller; James Patterson and John Grisham somehow don’t seem likely tools of espionage, although it’s tempting to imagine government agents poring over the bestseller list in search of security breaches. In any event, MI5’s fears were unfounded. When confronted, Christie responded, “Bletchley? My dear, I was stuck there on my way by train from Oxford to London and took revenge by giving the name to one of my least lovable characters.”
February 4, 2013 On the Shelf Dr. Seuss’s Hats, and Other News By Sadie Stein “In Plath’s case, her writing began, soon after her death, to be relegated to a supporting role in a seductive, but intensely misleading, narrative of victimhood.” How to give the poet her due. Are these the fifty key moments in English literature? Discuss. The strange mystery of who firebombed London’s oldest anarchist bookshop, Freedom Books. “Believe me, when you get a dozen people seated at a fairly formal dinner party, and they’ve all got on perfectly ridiculous chapeaus, the evening takes care of itself.” A display of Dr. Seuss’s hats is going up at the New York Public Library. Related: Jon Stewart gets Seussical.
February 1, 2013 Windows on the World Luljeta Lleshanaku, Kruja, Albania By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. I usually prefer to write in my bedroom at my childhood home in Kruja. Traces of the old living style are in the yard in the front of window: the sheets hung for drying; the terracotta jars, or magrips, sixty-year-old objects once used by my grandfather as olive oil containers and now cut at the throat, transformed as flower vases; the ruined walls which once fenced in the tomato garden; the alembic, or lambik, which served, in the absence of running water, for washing hands after work. But also present is the invisible, the unseen: the erased objects and the missing human beings; the cut plum tree where my sister and I used to climb up during those beautiful summer mornings; the loud voice of my mother when coming back exhausted from her work; the mulberry tree which brought the insects and the good odor of pegmez, the syrup of condensed fruit; the liming thresholds before holidays; my uncles, my cousins, all those portraits and gestures which once populated this yard. On this inescapable, familiar stage, I can focus on the pelagic depth of a single and bounded situation. In my case creative freedom doesn’t necessarily mean hunting for a new landscape. This environment leads me toward something unmistakable, which is a kind of freedom, too. —Luljeta Lleshanaku
February 1, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Fires, Isolation, Whispering Gallery By The Paris Review Remember Rod McKuen? He’s the one who wrote those illustrated books of free verse with titles like Come to Me in Silence and Listen to the Warm. In the 1970s, McKuen called himself America’s most popular poet, and he may well have been. Since then he has faded into obscurity, without an heir—until now. For reasons best known to themselves, the poet and singer David Berman, the photographer Michael Schmelling, and the painter-sculptor Friedrich Kunath have created You Owe Me a Feeling, an unlikely late masterpiece in the McKuen mode. “Love is the 51st state,” Berman writes. And: “The whole country is turning / into LA (so let’s move to LA).” And: “Golden / retrievers / aren’t dogs, / they’re dogs / about dogs.” These aperçus appear between portraits of a rugged artiste doing his thing on a Kunath canvas, hefting a giant Kunath shoe, or nuzzling one of Kunath’s human-faced tangerines. It’s kind of hard to describe, but we all loved it, and (even though one of us [Nicole] has an e-mail address borrowed from a David Berman song) none of us happened to be stoned. —Lorin Stein What better way to celebrate the Centennial of Grand Central station than with a dozen bivalves at the Oyster Bar and a visit to the Whispering Gallery? While there, check out the New York Transit Museum’s exhibit “Grand by Design: A Centennial Celebration of Grand Central Terminal,” on view through March 15. —Sadie Stein Read More
February 1, 2013 On Sports The Poetics of Football By Ariel Lewiton I grew up outside Boston, a resident of Red Sox Nation, but mine was not a sports-loving household. My father watches football regularly these days, but he didn’t when I was a kid. He’d watch a game if it was on, distractedly, while doing something else. The rest of us did not. We didn’t follow game schedules or scores. I’ve never been to Fenway Park, though my middle school was less than a mile from the Green Monster. When they tore down Boston Garden I expressed manufactured dismay—I’d never been there either. Until I moved to Chicago after college and bought tickets to a few Cubs games on the cheap, at a yard sale, the only professional sporting event I’d ever attended was an early round of the 1994 World Cup—South Korea versus Bolivia—which ended in a tied shutout. My sister and I played soccer. She was better than me. I figure skated and entertained deluded fantasies of making it to the Olympics, but I couldn’t get any height on my jumps and my spins were too loose and wobbly. Eventually I switched to ice hockey, which I played with the same poor-to-barely-adequate ability as each of my prior athletic endeavors. In college I spent a week on the women’s rugby team before quitting because it hurt. Read More
February 1, 2013 On the Shelf Nabokov Museum Vandalized, and Other News By Sadie Stein “The common core state standards, a set of math and English goals agreed upon by forty-five states and now being implemented, sends cursive the way of the quill pen, while requiring instead that students be proficient in keyboarding by fourth grade.” Libraries have gone raucous! Bring back the shush! The Nabokov Museum has been vandalized by the so-called St. Petersburg Cossacks. Why? For “promoting pedophilia.” Perfumes inspired by dead writers. In the UK, doctors will soon be allowed to prescribe books.