November 19, 2012 Contests Win Lovely Gloves with a Brave New Turkey By Sadie Stein The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. —Brave New World As should be perfectly obvious from the above quote, we are giving away a pair of cozy, woolen Etre gloves (made by one of the last British glove manufacturers) to the person who can make the best, most apt Thanksgiving turkey from Aldous Huxley’s handprint. Will your turkey be chrome yellow? Savage? Dystopian? Psychedelic? Whatever your motif, send your turkey, be it photoshopped, collaged and scanned, handpainted, to [email protected] by December 1st.
November 19, 2012 On Poetry “repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise”: Poets Mourning Poets By Casey N. Cep “I used to want to live / to avoid your elegy,” Robert Lowell confessed in “For John Berryman.” The death of one poet is an extraordinary occasion for another poet. It is like the day a stonemason dies and another has to carve his headstone. Like a rough ashlar, the elegy sits waiting to be shaped into a memorial for the one who is gone. The death of a poet so great as Jack Gilbert last week pains, but also promises remembrances fitting the one who died. Gilbert devoted most of his elegies to his wife, Michiko Nogami, but poets have forever elegized one another. We can trace the canon through the poems that poets have written to mourn their own: Henri Cole grieving Elizabeth Bishop; Bishop remembering Robert Lowell; Lowell lamenting the death of John Berryman; Berryman longing for Roethke, Jarrell, Hughes, Plath, Schwartz, and William Carlos Williams; W.H. Auden elegizing Yeats; Shelley bemoaning the loss of Keats; all the way back to Ovid mourning Orpheus. Read More
November 19, 2012 On the Shelf Beautiful Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Stationer Mr. Boddington’s Studio does a series of whimsical Penguin Classics covers. Raymond Carver’s OkCupid profile, as edited by Gordon Lish. “On the Kindle, each screen shot floats in space, isolated from the previous or subsequent ones, an effect that left my memory of the book weirdly nebulous.” The challenges of reviewing on the Kindle. Five books on anxiety. “Mr. Roth hasn’t given up writing entirely. He is collaborating on a novella, via e-mail, with the 8-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend.”
November 16, 2012 Bulletin Happy Dagur Islenskrar Tungu! By Sadie Stein Jónas Hallgrímsson. Self-portrait (1845). Pen and ink Today is Icelandic Language Day (literally, “day of the Icelandic tongue”), a festival designed to coincide with the birthday of Jónas Hallgrímsson. As well as an accomplished poet, author, and naturalist, Hallgrímsson was a committed Icelandic nationalist and founder of the journal Fjölnir. He died in 1844 at only thirty-seven, but to this day is considered one of Iceland’s most beloved poets. It is said that Hallgrímsson’s poetry, which dealt often with Iceland, its landscapes, and its people, resists easy translation. Nevertheless, even in the following translation, the themes come through. A Toast to Iceland Our land of lakes forever fair below blue mountain summits, of swans, of salmon leaping where the silver water plummets, of glaciers swelling broad and bare above earth’s fiery sinews — the Lord pour out his largess there as long as earth continues! In 1945, Hallgrímsson was at the center of a rather bizarre controversy. A fan, one Sigurjón Pétursson, spearheaded a campaign to move the poet’s body from Copenhagen, where he died, to his childhood home of Öxnadalur, Iceland. The Icelandic government disagreed: they wanted him reburied at the national burial ground at Þingvellir. Undaunted, Pétursson raised the funds himself, supervised the excavation (which involved digging up four other bodies), and escorted the coffin, defiantly, to Öxnadalur. Once there, however, he couldn’t get any priest to perform the service, and the coffin stood in the church for a week before the government had it moved to Þingvellir, where it was buried and remains to this day. The poet’s legacy, however, is a happier one. Every year, the Jónas Hallgrímsson Award is given to someone who has contributed to the language.
November 16, 2012 Books I Opened the Door By J. D. Daniels At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab’s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick—about Robur’s doomed enterprise in Verne’s Maître du Monde—about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film The Black Hole. Eleven thousand words in, and may God grant that I learn it sooner next time or else not at all, I understood with blinding clarity that my book itself was another doomed enterprise. As Don Quixote said: y yo hasta agora no sé lo que conquisto a fuerza de mis trabajos—I do not even know what I am conquering. “Master of the world”! Robur-le-Conquérant!—what a delusion! what a farce! The quintessence of megalomania: Richard Wagner named his dog Robur. Read More
November 16, 2012 Video & Multimedia Far-Out By Sadie Stein We at the Review are big fans of the work of Tomi Ungerer, so we were delighted to hear about this documentary on the idiosyncratic illustrator. As the trailer and this interview with the director show, it promises to be memorable.