June 11, 2013 On the Shelf Dads Reading Exciting Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Doesn’t it seem like a picture of a dad reading is about the last thing that would inspire recalcitrant kids to crack an exciting book? Either way: these vintage school library posters are fantastic. A glimpse at Edward Snowden’s bookshelf is … not that illuminating. (As one would expect of a spy.) In Norway, 50 Shades is wrested from the top of the best-seller list by a new translation of the Bible. Related: the many guises of Too Hot to Handle. (Apparently a perennial titular favorite!) This new font was developed specifically to help those with dyslexia.
June 10, 2013 Quote Unquote Fortifications By Sadie Stein “[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement―not incitement.” —Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance
June 10, 2013 First Person You Two Just Crack Each Other Up By Andrew Hudgins I first saw my future wife drinking a beer on the porch at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. A common friend had told me Erin would be there and had gently nudged us toward each other, though she’d warned me Erin was a California-style Catholic handwringer, one who anguished over the plight of the downtrodden. Sometimes she had a good sense of humor, the friend said, and sometimes she was earnest and touchy, so I should watch my mouth until I figured out whether my, uh, particular sense of humor meshed with hers. What I saw, looking at the woman I would marry, was a tall, attractive woman with an open face and a jolt of curly hair off her forehead. Unlike the folktale Erin, she looked eager to laugh. In fact, hers was the face of someone who gravitated to laughter the way other people gravitate toward good looks or the palpably powerful. I decided to go with my instinct, rather than our friend’s warnings, which I’ll admit were more catnip to me than a red flag. She had a name. Erin McGraw—a name so Irish it might as well be Ireland McIrish, and when she told me who she was, I immediately asked if she’d heard about the Irishman who drowned in the vat at the brewery. “No,” she said. “They knew he was Irish because, before he died, he crawled out twice to take a leak.” Read More
June 10, 2013 Quote Unquote Don’t Be So Sure By Sadie Stein “I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?” —Maurice Sendak, 2004
June 10, 2013 Arts & Culture Stone to the Bone: On Ray Harryhausen By Dave Tompkins Skeletons seem to be preternaturally deft swordsmen. This one is giving Sinbad all he can handle, at one point throwing its shield like a Frisbee. It’s a roadhouse move, executed with zing and grimace. Sinbad ducks and the shield crashes into the evil sorcerer’s lab, causing a model dinosaur to take a header off the top shelf. This scene from 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was created by Ray Harryhausen, a special-effects pioneer who recently died, at the age of ninety-two. Only in this lost world could a model Sauropoda look faker than a skeleton wielding a scimitar. The realness was in the time and dedication that went into letting that shield fly, its rotation not unlike the UFO that Harryhausen drunkenly crashed into the Capitol two years earlier in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. While destroying national landmarks makes for a good time, stop-motion animation also demands archeological patience. A mere shoofly of a skeleton’s wrist can equal a full day’s work. For Harryhausen, a little boy’s “dinosaur phase” evolved into a lifetime of endless adjustments and clicks, a shot for every move and turn. One of his biggest challenges and triumphs was activating Medusa’s snake perm in Clash of the Titans (1981), not to mention the instant ossification induced by her stink-eye. Harryhausen would also embellish the legend: Medusa as a graceful archer with snake arrows was as myth-busting to me as a Kraken showing up in a movie without tentacles. Read More
June 10, 2013 On the Shelf Farewell, Iain Banks, and Other News By Sadie Stein Iain Banks died Sunday, age fifty-nine. Friends and colleagues pay tribute. “A stiff-legged figure in a wolf suit cuts a caper, pawing at the air, eyeing the page in front of him with mischief of one kind and another in mind. It’s Max, of course, there on the front of Google.co.uk to celebrate what would have been the eighty-fifth birthday of his creator, Maurice Sendak.” Is the doodle not in the spirit of the famously touchy Sendak? Scarlett Johansson is suing a French novelist for using her name—a character resembles her, so he refers to her that way for about sixty pages—sans permission. The Indiana Department of Education is trying to facilitate summer reading by making three thousand books available online and matching said titles to students’ interests and reading levels.