October 29, 2012 On the Shelf Chaucer Invented the Word Tweet, and Other News By Sadie Stein Geoffrey Chaucer “provides our earliest ex. of twitter, verb: of a bird: to utter a succession of light tremulous notes; to chirp continuously.” See this, and his other contributions to language, on this handy-dandy word cloud. Garcia Marquez takes Mexico City! (He already lives there, but the city is celebrating fifty years of calling Gabo a son with some forty thousand posters.) This flowchart outlines how to publish a book (and makes it look so easy and colorful!). William Faulkner and Woody Allen are in a feud. Okay, it’s actually the Faulkner Estate and Sony Pictures, which used a Faulkner quote in Midnight in Paris. Happy birthday, American Antiquarian Society.
October 26, 2012 Books “The Tell-Tale Heart” in Pictures By Daniel Horowitz “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” Daniel Horowitz takes on Poe’s classic 1843 tale of madness, paranoia, and murder. Pause Play Play Prev | Next Daniel Horowitz Brooklyn-based illustrator. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek.
October 26, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Myth, Legend, Umlauts By The Paris Review A late-night note-to-self scribbled on the flyleaf of Rosemary Hill’s Stonehenge: “Why are you enraged by the idea of progress?” This short work of intellectual history—tracing theories of the megaliths from the seventeenth century to Spinal Tap—will have you reaching for the pencil on your own nightstand. It goes to the heart of English archaeology, architecture, religion, poetry, and politics, as various generations of eccentrics and savants struggle with the evidence of deep human time. By the end of the book, Stonehenge is more mysterious than ever, and so are the people who built it. In the words of David St. Hubbins, “No one knows who they were … or what they were doing.” —Lorin Stein Christine Schutt’s forthcoming novel, Prosperous Friends, is a story about marriage and sex and time in roughly the sense that Wheat Field with Cypress is a picture of a tree. Which is to say that execution is Schutt’s genius: I read her slowly, almost aurally, not out of any confusion or even by conscious choice but because her prose is the kind of euphonic I wish I could hum. —Samuel Fox Read More
October 26, 2012 On the Shelf Marilyn’s Books, Hemingway’s Vacation By Sadie Stein Hemingway sent this postcard to Gertrude Stein from Spain in 1924. A new version of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” has removed all references to Santa’s pipe. Just when you think you are too jaded to enjoy any more book arts and crafts … this. Happy Saint Crispin’s Day. Jonathan Franzen’s essay “House for Sale” has been adapted into a play and opened off-Broadway this week. Marilyn Monroe’s bookshelf.
October 25, 2012 On Sports Quit Thinking, You’re Hurting the Club By Luke Epplin In game six of last year’s World Series, with the Texas Rangers one strike away from clinching the franchise’s first championship, Lance Berkman, the St. Louis Cardinals’ aged first baseman whose thick physique and round face had earned him the nickname “Fat Elvis,” lined an inside fastball into shallow right-center, plating the tying run from second base. Even though he had just fulfilled the childhood fantasy of nearly everyone playing and watching the game that night by rescuing his team from World Series defeat, Berkman betrayed little emotion. Instead, he stoically slipped off his batting gloves and leaned in to listen to the instructions of the first-base coach, as if it were yet another humdrum hit in his distinguished career. Until David Freese lofted a walk-off home run to center in the eleventh inning, Berkman remained in a state of what appeared to be Zen-like empty-headedness, his posture relaxed but attentive, his expressions varying little with each pendulous momentum shift. It was as though he were the only person in Busch Stadium who failed to comprehend the magnitude of the moment. When asked afterward what he was thinking about during his do-or-die at-bat in the tenth inning, Berkman simply replied, “Nothing.” This answer reinforced a central point in David Foster Wallace’s essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”: It is not an accident that great athletes are often called ‘naturals,’ because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one … The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up to the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: Read More
October 25, 2012 First Person Swimming Upstream: A Memoir in Pools By Nathan Deuel Because I loved the water and because I moved all the time—in search of what, I wasn’t yet sure—I found that swimming laps was a good way to get somewhere without booking another ticket. Wherever we were, I’d search out an open lane, and sometimes I’d surprise myself, encountering the person who emerged on the other side. You could learn a lot with your eyes closed. Way back, before we moved to the Middle East, I loved the thrill of swimming at Hamilton Fish, the big outdoor pool on East Houston Street, where the Europeans swam fast in skimpy suits, but where there was always plenty of room for everyone. We lived nearby, in Chinatown, and I rode my bike a few blocks to my first big editor job. We were young and it was hard to imagine anything going wrong. Then my wife got the fellowship in D.C., which sent her to southern Russia, where she was detained for three days by Russian authorities, who took her passport, laptop, and notes, and then threatened to take her to trial in Chechnya. When she landed in Virginia, her friends and I were relieved and waved little American flags. Later, recuperating at a hotel near Dupont Circle, she and I swam laps at the National Capitol YMCA, on Rhode Island Avenue, but all the other swimmers were super aggressive—with as many as ten to a lane, shouldn’t these august people have known better?—and I found the crush of writhing bodies too exhausting ever to go back. Read More