January 10, 2013 On the Shelf Lost Ferraris, and Other News By Sadie Stein Have you written a novel’s worth of e-mail this year? Possibly. Another question: Is it any good? Richard Blanco is the lucky poet who will read at the 2013 presidential inauguration! This in turn leads Slate, in Slateish form, to ask, “Can Richard Blanco Write a Great Inaugural Poem? Can Anyone?” Patricia Cornwell is suing a former (emphasis on the former) financial manager: “It is a tale of an alleged betrayal, fraud, of high-rollers, multimillion-dollar homes, a helicopter, a lost Ferrari, a rare book collection, and political donations to Hillary Clinton.” This piece is about how libraries are staying relevant by moving beyond reading, but classes like hog butchering and blacksmithing seem like much more of a throwback to the days when you picked up your books at the general store.
January 9, 2013 In Memoriam In Memoriam: Harvey Shapiro, 1924–2013 By Sadie Stein Harvey Shapiro, poet and editor, died on Monday at eighty-eight. The following ran in The Paris Review No. 84, Summer 1982. On A Sunday When you write something you want it to live— you have that obligation, to give it a start in life. Virginia Woolf, pockets full of stones, sinks into the sad river that surrounds us daily. Everything about London amazed her, the shapes and sight, the conversations on a bus. At the end of her life, she said London is my patriotism. I feel that about New York. Would Frank O’Hara say Virginia Woolf, get up? No, but images from her novels stay in my head—the old poet (Swinburne, I suppose) sits on the lawn of the countryhouse, mumbling into the sun. Pleased with the images, I won’t let the chaos of my life overwhelm me. There is the City, and the sun blazes on Central Park in September. These people on a Sunday are beautiful, various. And the poor among them make me think the experience I knew will be relived again, so that my sentences will keep hold of reality, for a while at least.
January 9, 2013 Arts & Culture Contingencies By Lynne Tillman To celebrate the sixty-fifth anniversary of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, New Directions is relaunching this classic text as an expanded edition. In addition to exercises by Queneau making their English-language debut, this edition also includes new exercises penned by contemporary authors. The following, in the spirit of Queneau, is by Lynne Tillman. At dinner with so-called intelligent people, during our discussion of the Marquis de Sade, I recognized a common lunacy: the fairy tale of absolute and complete freedom. People don’t know what to do with the freedom they have, I announced, and trounced off, as if insulted. Today, I took a bus, a random bus, no particular number, a white and blue bus, or pale green. No matter, it was a bus, and I took it. First I stood in line, with everyone else, a citizen of a city standing peacefully, waiting for public transport, a condition of urban life. I heard two men, no particular men, or maybe very particular men, but not to me. I took the bus, anyway. The men were discussing their office, where they seemed mad about a woman, and I listened because I could. They described her in broad terms: “She’s got big tits…. OMG, that ass. Shit!” I entered the bus, paid my fare, the driver said nothing, and unencumbered, except by my hopes and dreams and desires, I walked to the back of the bus, my eyes roving, checking for free seats, and there were good reasons why I kept moving, and took the seat I chose, but these are insignificant reasons except to me. I found a seat all to myself, sat down, exhaling freely, and happily, because I celebrate public buses, especially when I have my own seat next to a window, but then the two men, still exclaiming about the woman’s ass and tits, took the seats behind me. Now I felt hindered also by their bulk and hulk, as well as their boisterous voices, bellows about asses and tits, and if I hadn’t known myself as myself, if I didn’t understand the invisible boundaries in which I existed, with my freedom, I would have assaulted the men. I was bigger than both, and freer, and a black belt in karate. Before I had the chance to pummel one or both, because I was at liberty to do what I wanted, even if it meant imprisonment for a day or two, the two men stopped their bellows, and instead turned to watch two other male passengers nearly come to blows, one jostling the other for a seat. Now the three of us, the tits and ass men and myself, alarmed by this altercation, became a community of sorts. Suddenly I heard a rip, certainly a rent of some kind, which made a decided sound in the air. The man, who had jostled the first for a seat, now watched by the newly formed society of the three of us, took that prized seat. Oh, I thought, oh, and wondered what my two companions thought. It was a strange day, and one has such strange freedoms; for I could have ridden that bus the entire day—until it ended its journeys, or until the bus driver informed me that I had to get off. Any number of possibilities presented themselves to me, I could even have fought him to remain! But thinking it over, I watched all the people I had known, in a sense, on the bus, as they removed themselves from it. I was alone again with my thoughts, not bothered by anything, and, when the bus stopped near a park, one I had never visited, I leaped off violently. Again, the driver said nothing, but now I took his silence to mean assent and even understanding, and walked toward the park and into it through its wide gates, and sat down, this time at a café, where I discovered that the man who had been jostled on the bus, earlier in the day, was being advised by another to patch his overcoat, a dark brown parka, the same one he had worn on the bus. A piece of fabric hung on its hem. It may have come down during the altercation. Now I thought, he’s having an alteration, and wondered if this linguistic association occurred to him as well. Here we are, I remember thinking, in a great chain of being, and he could think whatever he wanted. I pretended not to notice him, naturally. © 2013 by New Directions. Lynne Tillman is the author of several novels and short story collections, most recently Someday This Will Be Funny.
January 9, 2013 Bulletin The Hatchet Falls By Sadie Stein The Omnivore brings us the Hatchet Job of the Year Awards 2013. In their words, this pan-centric prize rewards “the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months” and “aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism.” View the shortlist here: few will be surprised to find Zoë Heller’s NYRB evisceration of Salman Rushdie’s Josef Anton, or that Naomi Woolf’s Vagina rated a few screeds. But who will win the year’s supply of potted shrimp? And has Adam Mars-Jones, 2012 winner for his Observer takedown of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, done justice to his prize?
January 9, 2013 First Person Hear that Lonesome Gasket Blow: Part 2 By Evan James Read part 1 here. On the table, next to an incomplete, five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle meant to show a pair of docile horses, a magazine calls my name. It calls to me with bold yellow proclamations in sans serif (“MY MAGIC WEDDING!” “THE FROCKS THAT ROCKED AND SHOCKED”), photo-framing pink boxes, and a rogues gallery of fame-brushed faces. This is the rope bridge, heavy with gossip, across which your sunburnt correspondent has teetered for the last two weeks—over howling, hungry rivers with names like Little Devil and Charming, further and further into a land where the bone marrow of J. R. R. Tolkien is used to fashion everything from high-grossing puberty allegories in 3-D to cheeky airline safety videos. This is Woman’s Day, New Zealand’s number one weekly magazine. The date is December 31, 2012, and, according to the mag’s house astrologer, manic Mars is moving smack-dab into my center stage. Read More
January 9, 2013 On the Shelf A Printer Called Lethem, and Other News By Sadie Stein Portlanders, start your smug engines: you live in the top city in America for readers. James Joyce in Trieste. Turkey has quietly lifted a ban on some 23,000 books. “The Lethem printer resides in the college’s library, Crossett, where it is used by students to print papers and assignments. Prior to Lethem, the college printers were called Rumi and Thoreau for no discernable reason, as neither went there.”