November 15, 2012 Arts & Culture Introducing the Biblio-Mat! By Sadie Stein The Monkey’s Paw dubs itself “Toronto’s most idiosyncratic secondhand bookshop,” a mix of antiquarian treasures, oddities, art installations, and eccentricities of all kinds. Their latest innovation? The Biblio-mat, a vending machine that dispenses random used books. As owner Stephen Fowler told Quill & Quire, “The books in the machine are two dollars each—that’s not enough to make any profit, but the nature of the secondhand book business is that I end up with a lot of books that are interesting and worth keeping and disseminating, but have no practical retail value.” For more on why we love this place, check out this 2010 short film:
November 15, 2012 First Person Daydream Believer By Pamela Petro The daydreaming thing was my brother’s fault. He went to Virginia Tech from 1970 to 1975. The fifth year wasn’t because he was dim; as an architecture major he was required to stay ten semesters. Sometime in that span, on one of our eight-hour family trips from New Jersey to drop him off or pick him up, my parents took me to Luray Caverns. I must’ve been about eleven years old. God almighty! Who knew they kept all that stuff underground? I was agog! Great dripstone formations that looked like melting candles. Stalactites and mites the shades of fall vegetables and seashells. If Luray wasn’t exactly the hidden world I’d been looking for, it was something close: it was the key that freed my imagination from my own experience. (About three or four years earlier I’d sat straight up in bed one night, shaking from the sudden, unwished-for understanding that one day I would die and there would be no more me on earth. I understood this not only as a personal catastrophe but a tragedy for the world as well. What would it do without me? That moment, I think, paved the way for my imagination to gallop ahead of my life in the here and now. It prepared me for Luray.) Read More
November 15, 2012 On the Shelf When Poets Cook, and Other News By Sadie Stein “Few poets, it would seem, are willing to claim as favorite any old run of the mill standard recipe.” When poets cook. Dream homes built for books and the nerds who love them. The Institute of Egypt in Cairo, which suffered damage and losses last December, has been given four thousand rare books. “The reason we decided to do handmade books, sewing them instead of having them stapled, is because we wanted to make durable books that would be precious. When you get a Crumpled Press book, you can feel that it was handmade by somebody, you can feel slight irregularities in it. It’s a precious object that you’re not going to throw away. So if I make 250 or 1,000 copies, those books are going to carry on.”
November 14, 2012 Bulletin Act Fast: Offer Will Not Last! By Sadie Stein This Friday, November 16, is your last chance to take advantage of our special mug deal! If you’ll recall, one side of this classic diner mug displays our logo. The other side (not pictured here): “The first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental writing in a long time.” —Newsweek, 1953 It’s yours with a one-year subscription or renewal; your subscription will begin with our winter issue. Order now! Offer good for U.S. addresses only.
November 14, 2012 On Poetry Refusing Heaven By Drew Bratcher The fall I moved to Washington from Nashville, Tennessee, the poet Jack Gilbert gave a reading at the Library of Congress. During my first days in the city, Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven had become for me something of a vade mecum. On wobbly Metro rides to and from work (my first experience with public transportation), I read and reread the book, drawn to its fierce, lapidary verses as a kind of antidote to homesickness and the political blather emanating from Capitol Hill. The poems trembled in my hands on the train yet somehow steadied me. Gilbert’s lines might have come from any continent in any century. They wouldn’t have seemed so out of place scrawled on papyrus or etched in stone. Read More
November 14, 2012 Look In Dalí’s Surreal Home By Sadie Stein In January, Open Culture ran this terrific tour of Salvador Dalí’s house on the Costa Brava, where he lived from 1930 to 1970 and hosted much of the modern world. As author Joseph Pla described it, The decoration of the house is surprising, extraordinary. Perhaps the most exact adjective would be: never-before-seen. I do not believe that there is anything like it, in this country or in any other…. Dalí’s house is completely unexpected…. It contains nothing more than memories, obsessions. The fixed ideas of its owners. There is nothing traditional, nor inherited, nor repeated, nor copied here. All is indecipherable personal mythology…. There are art works (by the painter), Russian things (of Mrs. Gala), stuffed animals, staircases of geological walls going up and down, books (strange for such people), the commonplace and the refined, etc.