• March 27, 2013

  Look

  Cat’s Meow

  By Sadie Stein

  

  “We’re definitely lending this book to the crew of kitten toughs who like to hang around the Myrtle JMZ stop talking about praxis and reminiscing about the days back when New York meant something, man.” (Good) book reviews, by two cats.

   

• March 27, 2013

  First Person

  Car Trouble, Part 1

  By Pamela Petro

  

  I had a car in Wales.

   I know what you’ll say. Really? A car? That’s amazing!

   Don’t be snide. You’ve had cars too, I realize that. But when I lived in Wales as a graduate student, in the early 1980s, a creature came into my life for which the term “car” is unsatisfactory. Calling Gimli a car would be like calling your mother a mammal. Which is true, but in most cases insufficient.

  On the outside, Gimli was the color of a week-old mushroom. His interior was bright red. He was a 1967 Morris Mini, and his relation to the Mini Coopers of today—those flashy, sturdy, burly bugs that tool confidently across our highways—is semantic at best. The ancestral Minis of the 1960s and seventies looked like starved versions of today’s cars. They were smaller, skinnier, frailer in every way; if they’d had lungs they would’ve been consumptive. I’m not tall, but I could look down on Gimli’s roof. Driving him on the motorway, my line of vision corresponded to the top of a tractor-trailer’s tires.

  Even within the breed, Gimli was the runt of an automotive litter. He was rickety with rust. Every now and then he’d sputter, and I’d have to get out, crawl underneath, and bang his petrol pump with my shoe. The driver’s door didn’t close properly, which meant that in rain he took on water. And it rains a lot in Wales. Going uphill, backseat passengers’ feet got wet; going down, the tide shifted to the front. And yet Gimli and I undertook trips that other Mini owners never dared dream of, let alone embark upon (this may have been a function of my foolhardiness and naïveté, but it reflected well on Gimli). He served many; he flew like a wayward wind along the ringletted roads of West Wales. Read More

• March 27, 2013

  Bulletin

  A Prize for Isol

  By Sadie Stein

  

  Argentinian children’s illustrator Isol has won the 2013 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, an international prize given by the Swedish government in memory of the Pippi Longstocking author. With a purse of five million Swedish kronor (almost $800,000), it is the world’s biggest children’s literature prize, and has been awarded in the past to Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, and Katherine Paterson. The stated mission is to expand interest in children’s books and causes and, somewhat more confusingly, to “safeguard democratic values.” However you interpret that, we can all agree that Isol’s work is terrific: whimsical, fun, and sinister in only the best ways.

   

• March 27, 2013

  Arts & Culture

  Kafka, Literally

  By Spencer Woodman

  

  Earlier this month, after it was reported that several prominent dictionaries had expanded their definitions of literally to include “figuratively” as an informal usage, grammar-sensitive commentators launched into another wave of condemnation of the word’s expansive use.

  “The dictionaries have begrudgingly bowed to the will of the grammar-averse public,” wrote The Week. “As anyone who paid attention in grade school knows, ‘literally’ means ‘in a literal or strict sense, as opposed to a non-literal or exaggerated sense,’ and is the opposite of ‘figuratively,’ which means ‘in a metaphorical sense.’”

  Criticisms of the word’s unorthodox use are, strictly speaking, accurate. They reflect well-founded fears that society is coming to care less about clear and beautiful linguistic expression. So I often worry that I might be alone in my enjoyment of the nonsensical images created when the word is misapplied. For me, the usage can introduce gratifying little flashes of surrealism into everyday conversation.

  Just think of Joe Biden’s remark last September: “We now find ourselves at the hinge of history, and the direction we turn is not figuratively, it’s literally in your hands.” Here Biden is ambitiously making two metaphors concrete: both that history can have an actual hinge and that this can be in someone’s hands. This remark conjures, for me, an image of the vice president heroically grappling, both hands (perhaps amid a howling thunderstorm), with a mighty vaulted door glowing iridescent with the sum of human destiny. It gives me a tickling look at the vice president’s imagination and his sense of the palpability of something as abstract as world history. Read More

• March 27, 2013

  On the Shelf

  #Librariansasteenagers, and Other News

  By Sadie Stein

  

  Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that every celebrity has a children’s book in him, Jim Carrey is penning How Roland Rolls, a metaphysical story about a wave.

  French cultural minister Aurélie Filippetti says the government is creating a fund to help struggling independent bookstores to ensure that France “never suffers the same fate as the United States.” Fair enough, France.

  We all know the stories of authors who abhor the crass Hollywood commercialization of their work. Here are some happier outcomes! (Susan Orlean’s approbation is especially generous, considering!)

  Encouraging or dismaying? Books on bullying are big business. Or, in the Times’s somewhat unfortunate parlance, “hot and profitable.”

  #Librariansasteenagers is a hash tag.

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