January 3, 2013 History Happy Birthday, J. R. R. Tolkien By Sadie Stein In honor of January 3, enjoy this illustrated Christmas letter that the author drew for his son: a twenty-year tradition in the Tolkien home. [Via Letters of Note.]
January 3, 2013 Letter from Our Southern Editor Saved By John Jeremiah Sullivan Ten years ago I was on the highway from Tennessee to Kentucky—can’t even remember the reason for the trip—but I kept the car radio on the AM band, set to “Scan,” because I’d noticed, over several years’ driving around this part of the world, how almost every small town you pass has at least one little church that’s broadcasting a low-wattage radio show, and you often hear fascinatingly crazy preaching on those transmissions and, less frequently, fine singing. That particular Sunday in January it was raining, and I was somewhere north of Memphis, passing depressing roadside storage buildings, when a remarkable live signal came across. The sound at first was like that of a giant wet towel rhythmically slapping on somebody’s back. After a minute I realized it came from hundreds of rain-soaked shoes stomping in unison on a concrete floor. I tried to imagine the inside of the church. It must have been cavernous. Or maybe—more likely—it was a warehouse, where this Pentecostal group had been forced to convene. Slap … slap … midtempo, it filled the car, as the people chanted a single line, “If He sends me, I’ll GO-oooo … If He sends me, I’ll GO-oooo,” a three-note melody, simple to the point of crudity, but with a strange elegance. Folks got up and started testifying. A woman thanked God because on Christmas Eve she’d gone to the welfare office to get food stamps, and there’d been something wrong with her forms—a paper she hadn’t known was expired—“but the man give it to me anyway,” she said. “God softened his heart.” Read More
January 3, 2013 Weird Book Room Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality By Sadie Stein Selected from AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.
January 3, 2013 First Person Street Scene By Jiayang Fan Well into my adolescence, New York City began and ended with a single street. For a long time, it did not even seem important that I learn the name of the street; everyone simply called it the Street of the People of Tang. The Tang, of course, were the Chinese, and Americans, foreigners to the street, named it Chinatown. Of course, strictly speaking, I was a foreigner too. Because my mother worked in a suburban Connecticut town, all colonnaded colonials and frosty-haired WASPs, and spoke halting English, we boarded the Metro-North only when desperation over the last can of aoki mushrooms made it imperative. Later, when I grew to speak better English than she, I became the navigator. “So when we take the downtown green line, where is it that we get off again?” my mother would ask, eyes squinting nervously over the teeming throngs we would soon join at the mouth of Grand Central. Canal, I answered, always the same answer. We get off at Canal Street. Read More
January 3, 2013 On the Shelf Literary Resolutions, and Other News By Sadie Stein For indie bookstores, it was a happy holiday. Speaking of—Prairie Lights Bookstore is starting a small press! Tackling Pepys, and other literary resolutions. Related? Literary feuds of 2012! Now open for business: the London Centre for Book Arts.
January 2, 2013 Video & Multimedia Educational Viewing By Sadie Stein We love the single-sentence animations Recommended Reading produces in concert with new fiction. In this latest, Grier Dill animates and scores a sentence from Lincoln Michel’s “Our Education.” Enjoy!