May 30, 2013 On the Shelf When Authors Annotate, and Other News By Sadie Stein This list of authors’ annotations to books in their personal libraries is truly fantastic. (The above is, obviously, David Foster Wallace’s.) In a letter, Rudyard Kipling admits that “it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously” to material from other writers while writing The Jungle Book. Probable, even! Now we’re all really self-conscious about how we pronounce pecan. The National Book Critics Circle is introducing a new awards category, for first books in any genre. “One hundred and eighteen miles north of London, in the town of Boston, England, there lives a retired newspaperman named John Richards who is experiencing an unusually rotten spring. Richards is the founder and chairman of something called the Apostrophe Protection Society. His world, at least as related to the tiny mark that denotes possessives and the omission of letters from certain words, appears to be crashing down around him.”
May 29, 2013 Arts & Culture Some Sort of Alchemy By Albert Mobilio His names were many: christened Herman Blount, he reinvented himself as Sonny Blount, H. Sonne Blount, Le Sony’r Ra, and, finally, what he called his “vibrational name,” Sun Ra. Ra’s band, too, was rich in appellation—one could compile a dizzyingly poetic list of its nearly fifty names, including the Myth Science Arkestra, the Intergalactic Research Arkestra, the Cosmo Drama Arkestra, the Transmolecular Arkestra, and the Love Adventure Arkestra. As many names, Ra might have said, as there are stars in the sky. This jazz visionary was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and not on Saturn, as he often claimed; in Chicago, in the late forties, a young Sonny Blount played piano with Fletcher Henderson, sharpening his formidable skills as a composer and arranger with the big-band legend. The combo Ra formed soon after was part cult, part family. He called his musicians “tone scientists”; they humbly described themselves as “nobodies with the master.” He taught them to play a kinetic, improvisational swing (bachelor-pad wailing for the pharaohs) that drew on his own spiritual bouillabaisse of Egyptology, Kabbalah, numerology, the Nation of Islam, Neoplatonism, Swedenborg, and Edgar Allan Poe. During performances, Ra wore a metallic cape and crown, while his band and dancers, in similar Afro-Space garb, threaded through the audience conjuring tribal magic and orbital ecstasy. In 1972, Ra signed a multi-album deal with ABC/Impulse! Records and recorded what would become his most popular disc, Space Is the Place. The new, sleek volume Sun Ra + Ayé Aton: Space, Interiors and Exteriors, 1972 offers a trove of photographs once thought to be lost that show the musician in full regalia on location in Oakland, California, for the production of a film that was to accompany the album. Also included are photos of murals done by Ayé Aton, a Chicago artist who shared Ra’s cosmological inclinations. Read More
May 29, 2013 Bulletin Plimpton! and Bobby By Sadie Stein Writes filmmaker Tom Bean, George and Robert Kennedy were close friends for many years, and their relationship weaves into George’s story in interesting ways. Bobby had encouraged George to marry his first wife, Freddy, while they were all traveling on the ’68 presidential campaign together (George was making appearances and speeches on behalf of the campaign). Later, when Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, George dove on the attacker and helped disarm him. We spoke with Robert Kennedy Jr. about his memories of George’s relationship with his parents, and I think he perfectly articulated George’s love of adventure and his whole-hearted embrace of life. Plimpton! is playing at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center.
May 29, 2013 Bull City Summer Consider the Foul By Adam Sobsey Photo by Kate Joyce. About one of every six pitches is hit out of play—inert, a do-over, a mentally discarded blip as the ball shanked foul is discarded into the stands. No other sport includes this regular pileup of outcomes empty of conclusive results. Another unique element: when a foul ball reaches the seats, the game breaks the fourth wall. Only in baseball does the action penetrate the crowd so routinely. And it is no easy action: catching a foul pop-up barehanded stings, and a screaming line drive into the seats can kill you. Most people at Durham Bulls Athletic Park don’t pay much attention to the game, at their own risk. I recently started taking more notice of foul balls, tracking them on my score sheet along with all the other subparticulars I habitually tally: balls and strikes; first-pitch strikes; total pitches thrown per inning and per pitcher, broken down by balls and strikes; total swings; and swings-and-misses. There are plenty of reasons for this extensive annotation, but mainly it keeps me tuned into the action, pitch by pitch. Read More
May 29, 2013 On the Shelf Tom Hanks Hoards Typewriters, and Other News By Ellen Duffer Hemingway’s typewriter, not in Tom Hanks’s house. Everyone agrees that getting rid of books is deeply sad. Liberace, pre-Soderbergh, wrote a cookbook that now sells for around $500. Included is a salad recipe that orders you not to omit the pickles. This is a fantastic headline: “Vintage typewriters find new life in hands of writers, actors and old repairmen.” Just ask Tom Hanks, who apparently likes to buy restored machines that belonged to the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles. While e-book reading is on the rise, a new poll says parents overwhelmingly prefer reading print with their kids. Memoirist Rachel Howard says writing is like drawing: “Later, I could go back and do what artists call rendering—working the drawing, adding detail. But now I had a solid gesture sketch to work from.”
May 28, 2013 Fiction Sandwich Man By Nathan Deuel Managing this chain of Subway sandwich shops in Aleppo totally blows. I’m ensuring the bread gets baked, the cheeses displayed properly, that the tomatoes are freshly sliced and that the discs of various kinds of meat do not smell strange and that all the dispensers of condiments are filled. We ran out of napkins during the last bombardment and that was fucked up, but honestly I don’t even know if the home office even knows we are still open, let alone whether we are keeping customers hands clean. They don’t seem to care! But what is worse is that my BEST assistant manager quit in order to start working as a sniper in that old hospital building—she is a total fucking saint, with a quick finger that once punched out subtotals and now rips out bullets, I guess—and all I’m trying to do is hold it together, which is why I was so relieved when I had a little time off this weekend and had the chance to take our girl to a birthday party in Beirut. She’s just three-and-a-half, which seems really young to me, but what do I know? I just manage a chain of Subway sandwich shops in the embattled Syrian cultural capital of Aleppo. I’m no expert in what children are capable of. Read More