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.
January 31, 2013 First Person Getting Caught By Drew Bratcher Before our fathers lost their jobs, before the kid at school collapsed on the practice field, before our grandmothers forgot our names, before the first big uprooting, the tug of bourbon, and the crises of faith, there was a shameless season along the cattail-flanked pikes of northeast Nashville, a season as tough to fathom now as it is mortifying to confess, when our biggest concern, at least on weekend nights late, was whose house to roll with toilet paper. We were restive, brother. We were hemmed in by hills. There were no wars to fight. High-speed Internet had yet to invade the South. So under cover of catching a movie or playing pickup in the church gym, we pooled pocket money and raked the grocery clean of twelve- and twenty-four-packs of tissue. The cashier women could have tipped off the cops. There was no mistaking our intent for a collective case of irritable bowel syndrome. Still they shooed us through the sliding doors, perhaps wagering we might repay their clemency by passing over their cul-de-sacs. We rolled Laura, the sweetest girl you ever met, and Tyler, the most likely in our class to find a cure for cancer. We rolled whole blocks of strangers. We rolled our next-door neighbors. We rolled Laura again. And in one ballsy feat not likely to be bested this millennium, we rolled our high school basketball coach, a Brobdingnagian who, when he got to shouting, sounded like Darth Vader passing a kidney stone in an echo chamber. Read More
January 31, 2013 Arts & Culture Is Scotch Tape Scottish? By Sadie Stein Although it is hotly debated, some claim that on this day, in 1930, Scotch Tape was born. But what, you might ask, is particularly Caledonian about pressure-adhesive transparent tape? As About.com explains it, it was rooted in old-fashioned racism! The brand name Scotch came about while Richard Drew was testing his first masking tape to determine how much adhesive he needed to add. The body shop painter became frustrated with the sample masking tape and exclaimed, “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” The name was soon applied to the entire line of 3M tapes. Indeed, the brand so embraced the notion of being cheapskates that until 1944 their mascot was one Scotty McTape, a kilted boy with an enthusiasm for tape. And in case you were wondering to which clan the tape belongs, it appears to be unaffiliated.
January 31, 2013 Arts & Culture Hear That Lonesome Gasket Blow: Part 3 By Evan James Read part 1 here and part 2 here. I had only just started stepping to and fro under the shifting blush of light-emitting diodes, and with only the most pitiable amount of rhythm or flair, when a strawberry blond officer of the Wellington Police crossed the dance floor, tapped my shoulder, and asked me to come outside. My first thought was that, at last, I was getting hit on by someone who had their own car. Then I prayed, “Please, please be arresting me for writing about my impressions of the South Island.” Since arriving, I had not suffered so much as one evil eye in the world’s southernmost capital city (the closest being when I somewhat brusquely thrust a five-dollar note, the front of which shows the grinning profile of explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, at a middle-aged Chinese fruiterer at the Vivian Street open-air green market; she glared at me and my bag of ripe apricots). A peachy, pacific place. What could I have done to attract this sun-damaged arm of the law, aside from describing the kea parrot as a “bastard”? Being a bastard myself, I have nothing but affection for the kea. Had my two-step been so criminal? “Slow night?” I said. He asked how much I had been drinking. I managed a modest guess, adding, as he copied the details of my driver’s license onto a clipboard, that I worked for the university. “And how long have you been here?” The officer pointed his pen at the indefatigably thumping club. “About two minutes.” He sighed, embarrassed by his task (a random check, I would later learn), and wrote my two minutes down on his official paperwork. “All right. You wanna head back in?” Read More
January 31, 2013 On the Shelf Courier Font Is Improved, and Other News By Sadie Stein Paavo Anselm Alexis Hollo, a prolific and accomplished poet, critic, and translator, has died at seventy-eight. J. D. Salinger once wrote a biographer that he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Luckily for him, he won’t be around for the upcoming biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno, released by Simon & Schuster in September. Courier font has been perfected. Meet Courier Prime, if you dare. Robert Silvers, at lunch with the FT, talks editing, Zadie, and keeping the Pentagon Papers at the NYRB offices. “It became clear that we were building a utopian alternate-universe bestseller list—a syllabus for readers who are curious about the best transgressive, funny, gripping memoir and fiction written by every kind of person other than heterosexual men.” On the founding of Emily Books.