January 16, 2013 On the Shelf Writing in Jewish, and Other News By Sadie Stein The literature of Washington, D. C.? Ah, the old “I let an author stay in my house and he published ridiculous things about me” conundrum. Children, it seems, like real books. Philip Roth: “I don’t write in Jewish, I write in American.” Here is a house constructed around an enormous bookshelf.
January 15, 2013 Arts & Culture On The Road Again By Robert Moor A dirt road scrolls beneath a pair of huarache sandals. In a flash, it turns from moonlit to sunlit, and the pebbly dirt smoothes to bleached, cracked concrete. The shot lingers three or four beats longer than it should, the camera gliding over the road as the sandals flop and their owner huffs. Cue title card. This sequence—the opening shots of Walter Salles’s wildly uneven, flickeringly vivid new film adaptation of On The Road—foregrounds the oft-overlooked double entendre nested in the novel’s title: it is both a romantic portrait of life “on the road” and a ruminative discourse on roads. Later in the film occurs a similar shot, this time of the highway’s surface streaking by like a meteor shower, as Sal Paradise intones: “The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. And zoom went the car, and we were off again, to California.” Throughout the book, Kerouac expresses awe at the vast interconnectedness that the American road system allows—an epiphany so common it barely registers for modern readers. But half a century ago, it still struck with a bright clang. Read More
January 15, 2013 Arts & Culture The Joys of Reading By Sadie Stein The anniversary of the British Museum led me to spend a few hours wandering their extensive online collections. This print, made by Marcel Jules Gingembre d’Aubépine around 1886, is called Les joies du bibliophile.
January 15, 2013 At Work A Visit with Evan S. Connell By Gemma Sieff Evan S. Connell, who died last week, was eighty-six when I interviewed him at Ponce de Leon, a nursing home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he had moved after selling his condominium at Fort Marcy. He had lived an incredibly solitary life. One of his caretakers mentioned that some of the other residents assumed at first that he was mute. I wish that the transcribed text that follows better reflected Mr. Connell’s timbre, because you’d be able to hear the way his inarticulacy was equal parts reticence and modesty. He had a wonderful laugh, a huh-huh-huh, gentle and self-deprecating. You could tell he was accustomed to downplaying his erudition. But he clearly wanted to communicate what he considered important. Read More
January 15, 2013 On the Shelf Conspiracy Theories, and Other News By Sadie Stein Literary conspiracy theories, anyone? Paragraph is a new app that curates great short stories. (Yes, we are represented!) And, inevitably, iambic pentameter bots. What would Jesus eat? The subgenre of Christian cookbooks. And … the National Book Critics Circle finalists are announced.
January 14, 2013 First Person ThunderStick By Pamela Petro It came in a box. A big box, with two or three others. Sam had finally cleaned house. It’s not every day you get a box of tennis racquets in the mail. I ripped it open and immediately shook hands with each one. “Now guys, shake hands with the racquet.” If I’d said that once I’d said it, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five times. Once for each tennis clinic I’d taught for little kids over high school summers. Kids who’d devised a game called Hit the Ball at the Teacher, which they’d passed on to their younger brothers and sisters, the little buggers. There was a Yonex in the box that felt cold and distant—the shake of a bureaucrat. There was another I’ve since given away that felt insubstantial—the absent shake of someone scanning the room for more important hands. And then there was the Prince. I swear to you, the Prince’s handle still felt warm. The grip was slightly sticky—as a good grip should be—and worn where my right index finger curled up the beveled edge of the shaft. It filled my palm easily and comfortably: the racquet’s way of looking me straight in the eye as our hands met. This was Emma’s racquet. The frame was a little slick for my tastes. Shiny black, with an aqua-blue and pink blaze up both sides of the head that looked like rain blotches on a Doppler weather map. And it was called ThunderStick. There was a lightning bolt through the diagonal slash of the n “Thunder.” “Lord, did Emma know that?” I wondered. Not her style. And there was another message from the manufacturer along the inside rim: “Sweet Spot Suspension.” If that were true, I figured it was okay that it looked a little cheesy and was called ThunderStick. I fingered the strings and saw they were worn, with little bits of neon-yellow fuzz stuck at the junctions where the vertical and horizontal rows overlapped. Evidence that this racquet was not new. Evidence that Emma had hit with it. Read More