November 12, 2012 On the Shelf David Foster Wallace for Congress, and Other News By Sadie Stein Such literary luminaries as David Foster Wallace, Charles Darwin, and Voldemort were just a few of the write-in candidates found on the ballot for Georgia’s Tenth Congressional District following controversial anti-science comments by candidate Paul Broun. The literature of hockey. “Writers’ graves can be surprising places to visit. Unlike the luminaries housed at more elegant cemeteries, like Pere Lachaise in Paris (Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright), many literary stars lie for eternity in simpler, plainer spots around this country, with traditions around how to commemorate them as widely varied as the genres they comprise.” Next for the embattled Oxford American: fine dining? “He hated the idea of talking about things. We could sometimes, if you got the right moment, but even then it was almost cruel to do that to him—to do that to anyone of that generation.” Nanette Vonnegut talks about her dad to The Rumpus.
November 9, 2012 Arts & Culture A Letter from Gary Shteyngart’s Dog By Sadie Stein The following letter was sent by Gary Shteyngart’s dog to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Dear BAM, Last night, while my favorite human Gary Shteyngart was dripping gherkin juice and pickled cod balls onto his green polyester shirt, I noticed a tear trickling down his face. I peered over his slumped shoulder and saw on the interwebs that in a couple weeks, some famous people are gathering at BAM to make fun of him. Not only that, you monsters are actually selling tickets to the public for this public humiliation of my friend. BAM staffers, I say to you: this small, furry excuse of a human being already suffers terrible asthma, an overabundance of gnarled body hair, and bouts of midnight gas. He has trouble buttoning his own shirts, doesn’t own a comb, and bribes his own MFA students to write his books. His hardship started years ago, first as a young Russian émigré tortured at Hebrew School, when he arrived in America speaking no English with a mere two shirts and a bear coat, and then again at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, when his fellow immigrant teens would sabotage his Bunsen burner to get ahead. He struggled to make money in his 20s by writing grants for programs like “Torah Tots,” attempting to secure foundation money for the important purpose of introducing 3-year-olds to the murders and rapes of the Old Testament. In short I say to you, hasn’t Gary suffered enough? Why must you persecute him more? And also will this be live streamed on the web, so I can watch from the comforts of my luxury dog crate? Sincerely, Felix the Dachshund
November 9, 2012 First Person Making Monuments By John Glassie Library of Congress From the time I was really young, I carried around an excellent fact about my father: he’d once stood on the very top of the Washington Monument. On the pointy tip, on the outside. That was the notion that I grew up with. I remember having some trouble picturing the circumstances in which he might have done this. We lived in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. and so I often saw the monument out the car window on trips downtown. I think I felt some retroactive worry for his safety, and I wondered about his apparently incredible sense of balance, but the truth of the story was never in doubt. It came up casually in conversation. Questions were shrugged off, or maybe I was too young to understand. Apparently it had to do with his job. Later on he told me more. My father was a young engineer involved with the 1934 renovation of the monument. (That’s not a typo: He was born in 1908, and he was fifty-three years old when I was born in 1961.) Scaffolding had been erected all around, and as part of the project the solid aluminum point that sits on the very top was removed for refurbishment, leaving a flat square of marble. My father gave me the impression that he actually stood, or stepped, on that square, about 555 feet off the ground, before the point was reset. Judging from pictures I’ve recently found of other men standing around it, I’m not totally sure about that. Even so I’m not any less impressed than I ever was. I always thought my father was a pretty goddamn cool guy. Read More
November 9, 2012 Books Sinister Fudge, Ecstatic Pickles By Sadie Stein Handwritten Recipes is a wonderful blog devoted to recipes discovered between the pages of unrelated books. Now, blogger Michael Popek has collected his finds in a book that manages to combine social history, literary history, and, yes, recipes. Each image is a story: Did the quotidian demands of dinner intrude on Catch-22, or was the reader’s mind wandering? Did a neighbor drop by with a recipe? Was it solicited, or forced on the cook and consigned to bookmark status? The world may never know, but it’s fun to speculate. Below, just a few favorites. Read More
November 9, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Dune, Anno, Common Prayer By The Paris Review Not long ago I had the honor of officiating at the wedding of a Swede and a Russian Jew. It was not a religious ceremony (unless you count the Universal Life Church), but when the three of us sat down to discuss vows, the bride and groom agreed that the Book of Common Prayer couldn’t be beat; we just had to kill the “obey” clause and the stuff about God. It felt funny, crossing out words in my great-grandfather’s prayer book, but according to a new monograph by Daniel Swift, Shakespeare did pretty much the same thing, repeatedly. Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age makes a case for the Anglican liturgy as a work of politics and art and as a crucial influence on English literature. It made for perfect candelight reading after lower Manhattan lost power. —Lorin Stein Read More
November 9, 2012 On the Shelf A Crime Writer Turns to Crime, and Other News By Sadie Stein A Texas crime writer has been sentenced to thirty years for paying to have her husband murdered. Ten things you may not have known about the Brothers Grimm. Is horror a genre beyond redemption? Or, as The Guardian puts it, damned to literary hell? “Don’t worry about growing up,” and other advice from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter. Behold: the bibliochaise. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]