December 19, 2012 Arts & Culture Scott and Longfellow: Partners in the Long, Mild Twilight By Micki Myers A hundred years ago, one of the great dramas in the history of exploration was taking place at the very bottom of the earth, a place so shrouded in mystery that it had not yet been mapped. After simmering for a long time, the “Heroic Age” of polar exploration had reached its apotheosis in the form of a mad dash undertaken by rivals to be the first to claim the planet’s last great prize: the South Pole. The exploits of Scott and Amundsen have since become a metaphor for the essential yin and yang of human exploits. Their race brings all the opposites together: success and failure; life and death; good planning and bad planning. The great irony of the outcome is that the winner of the battle, Amundsen, ended up losing the war; public opinion preferred to laud the martyred hero left frozen in the ice as “Scott of the Antarctic.” Read More
December 19, 2012 On the Shelf New Bram Stoker, and Other News By Sadie Stein Read a rediscovered Bram Stoker story. Reasons to adore Rebecca West. Successful (really!) pitch letters. The literary grotesques of Feliks Topolski. Salman Rushdie versus Pankaj Mishra.
December 18, 2012 Bulletin Available Now! Three Object Lessons, an Audio Book By Sadie Stein Listen to a preview of Wallace Shawn reading Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” one of the stories included in the Paris Review anthology Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story. The full recording is now available in Three Object Lessons, an audio book only available on the Paris Review app. Play Audio
December 18, 2012 Arts & Culture Old New York By André Aciman The Sixth Avenue El train has just cleared the steep bend off Third Street. It is now picking up speed and will, any moment now, bolt uptown. Next stop, Eighth Street, then past Jefferson Market, Fourteenth Street, then all the way north till it reaches Fifty-Ninth Street. But perhaps it is not racing up at all but grinding to a stop after that notoriously difficult curve before Bleeker Street. It’s hard to tell. The blue lettering on the train’s marker light must spell something, but it’s hard to decipher this as well. Under the el two vehicles seem to know where they’re headed. To the left of the train, on the corner of Sixth and Cornelia, a scrawny, wedge-shaped, twelve-story high-rise strains to look taller than it is. Its numberless lighted windows suggest that, despite darkness everywhere, this is by no means nighttime, but evening, maybe early evening. The building’s residents are probably preparing dinner, some just walking in after work, others listening to the radio, the children are doing homework. This is 1922, and this is Sloan country. Read More
December 18, 2012 Arts & Culture Digital Silence By Alex Carp Eli Horowitz is not particularly tech savvy, but he’s spent a lot of time thinking about what consumer technology can do. Until a few months ago, long after most of his friends and colleagues had bought iPhones, the former McSweeney’s editor and publisher was still taking their calls (and text messages) on a frayed LG flip-phone that was too worn down to snap closed completely; he had started to think of it as “more like a flap-phone.” By the time he upgraded, however, he’d already been long at work on The Silent History, a digital, serialized novel containing stories that, with the help of GPS, can only be read at the physical locations where they are set. “We came up with the very clunky shorthand description of a serialized exploratory novel for iPhone. Which just rolls off the tongue,” said Matt Derby, one of the novel’s authors, on a recent weekend on the Lower East Side. Read More
December 18, 2012 On the Shelf GoT Beer, and Other News By Sadie Stein British children’s magazine Puffin Post is folding after forty years. “#bromance goes sour when 2 friends, Prince Harry and Falstaff, are all #yolo #rkoi #dom until Harry inherits the crown and a conscience.” Yup, Twitter Shakespeare. The (inevitable?) Game of Thrones beer. An inventory of Emily Dickinson’s family artifacts. Indiana Jones journal mystery solved!