June 26, 2013 First Person My California Trip By Rex Weiner We were gathered in the publisher’s corner office just off Park Avenue on a snowy afternoon in February, looking at the intriguing series of ads that had been coming in over the past few months. Professionally photographed, seductively styled, they showed a shiny steel apparatus encircled with golden buds of weed damp with the resins prized by discriminating potheads. “The question is,” said Thomas King Forcade, founder and head of the publishing empire he’d built under the Trans-High Corporation banner, “what the fuck is it?” “Shit to Gold!” declared the ads appearing in the magazine where I was employed, all full-page buys. “Paid in cash,” said the sales director of High Times, the monthly publication dedicated to the ways and means of marijuana. I was on the masthead as a contributing writer on diverse topics, mostly of a cultural nature, on a career trajectory common to New York writers who toil in diverse editorial fields. Penning pieces for anyone who paid, from garish girlie mags to in-flight journals and the glossier monthlies, my expectation was to be sitting behind the publisher’s desk one day in a similar corner office with a Park Avenue view. Leaning back in his chair and torching an overstuffed reefer with a switchblade that doubled as a lighter, Forcade said, “More importantly, you dig—” taking a long drag and holding the smoke for a pensive moment before expelling the finished thought in a low tight voice—“does it really work?” The device in the advertisement was called the Pot-A-Lyzer. Selling for $299.99 from a PO box in Huntington Beach, California, the Pot-A-Lyzer promised to transform ordinary marijuana of the lowest grade into super-weed equal to the headiest strains known to cannabis connoisseurs. Mexican ditch weed, for example, could be imbued with the psychoactive punch of Maui Wowee, Thai Stick, or Colombian Gold. Ergo, shit to gold. Read More
June 26, 2013 Bulletin A Space Odyssey By Sadie Stein You will be relieved to learn that Arthur C. Clarke’s DNA is going where no man has gone before. Prior to his 2008 death, the science fiction legend graciously donated several strands of hair to NASA’s “first ever solar sail mission into deep space.” The craft, named Sunjammer, after a 1964 Clarke story, will launch in 2014, with hair aboard.
June 26, 2013 Bull City Summer My Bullish Heart By David Henry Satchel Paige in 1968. When I was nine years old, it was my belief that a professional baseball player was the most exalted thing a man could be. Ballplayers rivaled the offspring of Greek gods—only marginally mortal and, if they fell, the results were apocalyptic. Some part of me still thinks so. And yet I seldom go to the ballpark anymore, even though I live just a short bike ride south of Louisville Slugger Field, a jewel of a stadium on the Ohio River housed in the red-brick shell of the old Brinly-Hardy train shed that dates back to 1839. So I was thrilled when Sam Stephenson offered me a press pass to the Durham Bulls’ four-game series against the Louisville Bats earlier this month. The first time I found myself in the presence of a big-league ballplayer was on a Sunday night in 1968 at the Atlanta airport. The Braves were coming in off a triumphant road trip that culminated in their winning both games of a doubleheader, which was broadcast earlier that day on WSB-TV, channel 2. After he switched off the set, my dad said the most astonishing thing: “Let’s go the airport and see them when they come in.” A jolt shot through me. Can we? Should we? Was such a thing even possible? Hundreds of other people had the same idea. We watched from behind glass as a staircase was wheeled up to the plane and our heroes descended, tieless in their sport jackets, and crossed the tarmac toward the terminal. (Henry Aaron, who’d gone oh-for-the-day, headed straight for the bus.) We raced downstairs to meet them at the baggage claim, where I came face-to-face with Satchel Paige. Read More
June 26, 2013 On the Shelf Here Is Hemingway Getting Married, and Other News By Sadie Stein Flavorwire has outdone itself with this slideshow of authors’ wedding pictures. (Yup: that’s Hemingway and Hadley.) R.I.P. Nook—we hardly knew ya. (Which is, I suppose, the problem.) Reports of Leonard Cohen’s death, on the other hand, are greatly exaggerated. Beginning tomorrow, the Royal Shakespeare Company will begin tweeting out playwright Mark Ravenhill’s version of Candide. If this is the best of possible worlds, what, then, are the others? At Bookish, an exclusive peek into a day in the life of editor Amy Einhorn. Jane Austen may (or may not) replace Charles Darwin on the £10 note. She is, says Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King, “quietly waiting in the wings,” presumably for a spectacular, 42nd Street–style star turn that delights creationists the world over!
June 25, 2013 On Translation Meet Me on the Bridge By Evan Fleischer One afternoon I decided to read Groucho Marx in French, because, well, why not? I had temporarily switched Boston for New York on the larkiest of larks, had accidentally been charged $9,000 for a pulled pork sandwich (where my saying “It’s that much because it comes with a little waiter who grows when you pour water on him, right?” fell unbelievably flat), and—with nothing in the immediate particular to do on that May afternoon—felt the moment was right for a book. Groucho and Me was translated into French in 1981 as Mémoire capitales, and it begins so: “L’ennui avec une autobiographie, c’est que l’on ne peut pas s’ecarter de la verite. Quand on ecrit sur un autre, on peut se permettre des retouches, voire carrement de la broderie anglaise.” (The trouble with an autobiography is that we cannot depart from the truth. When one writes of another, one is permitted alterations, even downright English embroidery.) Groucho wrote it like this: “The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland.” Read More
June 25, 2013 Listen Ben Lerner’s “False Spring” By Justin Alvarez “Would I be thought of as the biological father, just a donor, not at all?” “What is the effect of sildenafil citrate on stout-bodied passerines?” “What was the annual per capita gross national income of China at the time of ejaculation?” Ben Lerner’s “False Spring” is full of many questions, but not many answers. Blame it on his being a poet; he prefers ambiguity to resolution. “False Spring,” just like his novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, can be read as a Künstlerroman of sorts. Who knew a visit to the Park Slope Food Coop could be so transformative?