June 21, 2013 Quote Unquote Tricks of the Trade By Sadie Stein “Generally one would like to avoid tricking oneself.” —Ian McEwan, the Art of Fiction No. 173
June 21, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Quaker Meeting, Blue Trout, and the Call of the Wild By Sadie Stein Quaker Meeting in London, c.1723. Why aren’t there more novels about Quaker worship? It’s inherently dramatic, people sitting in silence and waiting for God to speak through them. Dramatic—and really, really funny. For proof look no further than Nicholson Baker’s forthcoming novel, Traveling Sprinkler. The hero, Paul Chowder, spends a lot of time attending Quaker meetings (i.e., church). Most of the rest of the novel he spends trying to teach himself the guitar, write (incredibly dorky) songs, and win back the girlfriend who left him in Baker’s earlier novel The Anthologist. There are lots of reasons to love Traveling Sprinkler: Baker gets sweeter with each new book, and underneath the sweetness lie witty arguments about poetry and song and taste. Among other things, this is the best novel I’ve read about Spotify. It also vividly captures Quaker beliefs and practices at a moment when, as Paul Elie wrote last year in the New York Times, many novelists have trouble writing about religion. —Lorin Stein “Beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm, a sarcasm that for some would always be wickedly amusing, for others just wicked.” So says essayist (and issue 204 contributor) Vivian Gornick of critic and writer Mary McCarthy on The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. In a piece drawn from her introduction to a new edition of McCarthy’s 1949 novel, The Oasis, Gornick highlights the book’s biting satire but, more importantly, McCarthy’s fearlessness in barely disguising her characters from their real-life counterparts (mostly her Partisan Review colleagues). As McCarthy stated in her Art of Fiction interview, “What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” —Justin Alvarez Read More
June 21, 2013 On the Shelf Anonymous Library Sculptures, and Other News By Sadie Stein Anonymous, bookish sculptures have been popping up at Scottish libraries. “It’s nice to go out with a bang”: Alice Munro may (or may not) retire. This will, predicts The New Republic, result in the sort of tedious furor that accompanies any such statement. Some pediatricians are prescribing books to small children: great! (Lollipops are, presumably, a thing of the past.) Tom Wolfe’s next book, The Kingdom of Speech, is a “nonfiction account of the animal/human speech divide.”
June 20, 2013 Look A Residential Library By Sadie Stein Well, this is fantastic. In 1889, British prime minister William Gladstone decided to make his 32,000-book library available to the public. Further, he envisioned the space (located in Wales) as a sort of scholarly hotel, at which visitors might spend the night and enjoy meals. And you still can! For a very reasonable $75 per night (dinner and breakfast included), you can stay in a lovely room, have access to the entire library, and roam the gorgeous grounds. Via Bookriot.
June 20, 2013 Out of Print English as a Strange Language: Slim John By Mark Asch At Bókin, the used bookstore in 101 Reykjavik where Bobby Fischer spent his endgame, the clutter goes all the way up to the ceiling, from which hang collages of magazine clippings picturing Halldor Laxness and the great beauties of the world (an eighties-era Miss Iceland poses with the collected works of her favorite author, William Shakespeare). Christmas-tree lights adorn a waist-high pyramid of hardcovers next to the register. The English-language section, right by the door when you come in, is half blocked off by unsorted boxes and piles of new acquisitions with pages already curling, glue already dissolving. In Iceland, it’s traditional to open presents on Christmas Eve: a new article of clothing, so the Yule Cat doesn’t get you, and a new book to curl up with. So it was that last December I angled my way into the English stacks, scanned the green spines of Fay Weldon novels and Van Der Valk mysteries sold on by British backpackers, and found Slim John. Published in 1969, with a cover betraying the influence of Penguin under the swinging, Saul Bass-esque art direction of Germano Facetti, Slim John is in fact the companion volume to a serial of the same name produced by the BBC for overseas broadcast as part of their English by Television initiative. The book is part textbook with exercise sheets, and part shooting script with accompanying stills. Slim John, building on the previous English by Television program, Walter and Connie, is a course for “near-beginners” in English; this means, explains English by Radio and Television head Christopher Dilke in his foreward, “that a coherent and life-like situation can be created from the start.” Though under the supervision of a linguist, the episodes were penned by four veterans of TV thrillers, including Brian Hayles, who wrote thirty episodes of Doctor Who during the tenures of Doctors One through Three. The serial format, which “tends to make the viewer come back for the next lesson just because he wants to know what happens,” per Dilke of the BBC, was undertaken because “fashions change in teaching as well as in dress.” In order to integrate narrative sophistication with regular language pedagogy within Slim John, Dilke explains, “a situation has been invented which makes it necessary for robots planning a take-over of the world to learn English.” Read More
June 20, 2013 First Person Child Mortality By Rachael Maddux “I’ve been having a lot of anxiety about death lately,” my friend Kate said. It was early September and she and I and some others were crammed into a red leather booth in a bar that had once been a gas station. It was still warm outside but it wouldn’t be much longer. “I think it’s because my grandmother just died,” she said. “I don’t know—I’ve never really thought much about it before now.” As she spoke, the upper half of my body slumped out and across the table, empty glasses clinking as my elbow nudged them aside. “Tell me what that’s like,” I said, eyes wide, as if imploring her to recount some illicit rendezvous. She laughed and everyone laughed and the waitress came over and we ordered another round. Read More