March 15, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Porto Pim, Montana, Cat Pianos By The Paris Review I am currently in Missoula, attending a conference at the University of Montana. At a welcome reception last night (in which we were treated to, among other things, some delicious bison meatballs), one title kept cropping up in conversation: John Williams’s Stoner. Why has this 1965 novel of loneliness and small lives acquired such a cult following? As one professor put it, “It captures academia perfectly.” (And since it’s one of my favorites, I felt at home right away.) —Sadie O. Stein Thank you to John Glassie and Writers No One Reads for highlighting Athanasius Kircher, the seventeeth-century Jesuit priest and polymath who gives a whole new definition to “Renaissance man”: author, inventor, curator, Mount Vesuvius climber. While most of his ideas—covering more than seven million words, in Latin—are dead wrong (universal sperm, the hollowness of mountains), his poetic “translations” of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions are masterpieces of expression. On a section of an Egyptian obelisk now in Rome’s Piazza della Minerva, Kircher wrote: Supreme spirit and archetype infuses its virtue and gifts in the soul of the sidereal world, that is the solar spirit subject to it, from whence comes the vital motion in the material or elemental world, and abundance of all things and variety of species arises. Unfortunately, he only wrote one book of fiction (1656’s Ecstatic Journey), and while most of his work is long forgotten, he was an influence on such writers and artists as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and Marcel Duchamp. Not bad for someone who invented an instrument called the cat piano. —Justin Alvarez Read More
March 15, 2013 On the Shelf Chicken Poetry, and Other News By Sadie Stein Sheryl Sandberg: “I probably shouldn’t admit this since I work in the tech industry, but I still prefer reading paper books.” Perhaps this explains why January bookstore sales were up 5.5 percent ($2.1 billion)! KFC is recovering from a Chinese chicken scandal with a Twitter poetry contest. “KFC kicked off a poetry contest on social media. The company asked fans to pen poems that include the phrase, ‘The chickens are innocent,’ laying the blame on illicit drug use at the farms. Best poem wins an iPad mini.” Yes, you just read that correctly. We can’t get enough of Nina Katchadourian and her “Sorted Books” project.
March 14, 2013 On Music Blue Eyes in Watertown By Matt Domino No one under the age of fifty really listens to Frank Sinatra anymore. Like anything else, there may be exceptions to this fact, but overall it’s true. Frank Sinatra is a legendary artist whose work will always be enjoyed and referred to. However, his era of direct relevancy is obviously long gone, and his era of anecdotal relevancy is starting to fade. We associate Frank Sinatra with a bygone era of America, a time of guys and dolls, a time when people would swing and dance and when the lounge singer was king. Sinatra’s unique talent was maintaining this vision even as it eroded away over time—to make you feel old-fashioned feelings in a modern era. Sinatra’s heyday was from the late forties to the late fifties, yet he recorded “New York, New York” in 1977. And “My Way” makes you feel like a proud man looking over the skyline of post–World War II Manhattan, even in 2013. Still, Sinatra’s most overlooked achievement is perhaps the one album he made that did not feel as though it was evoking the era he loved or knew the most. In 1969, the same year that Frank Sinatra recorded “My Way,” he released an album called Watertown. Chances are, even some of the biggest Sinatra fans—like my grandparents and great aunts and uncles—have forgotten about Watertown. But Watertown is Frank Sinatra’s best album and his most enduring contribution to American culture. Read More
March 14, 2013 On Poetry Marks on Paper: Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls By Rachel Hurn At Bluestocking Books, my favorite indie bookstore in Hillcrest, San Diego, I pick up a glorious-looking object. The cover is textured, beige with a blue inside flap—a look typical of the publisher Black Sparrow Press. On the front is a painting by Nicole Eisenman of twenty women in a brawl, or having sex, or both. All over the cover and among the cream pages are hand-scrawled notes. It looks like a literature student once owned the book. Probably someone studying creative writing. Probably someone at UCSD. I hold up the paperback to the woman behind the register, and ask, “What is this?” “That’s Eileen Myles. She’s a lesbian poet. She’s amazing.” That day I read the entire thing. Read More
March 14, 2013 On the Shelf Elements of Style, and Other News By Sadie Stein Classics, Strunk and White style. “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” And other surreal opening lines. Fans rally around San Francisco’s beloved (and endangered) Adobe Books. “How many other books had I been fooling myself about?” When you think you’ve read books … but you haven’t. Get the knives out: any discussion of the best food memoirs is sure to be contentious.
March 13, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac By Sadie Stein “I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.” —Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41