September 27, 2012 On the Shelf Literary Stockings, Keats’s Addiction By Sadie Stein In honor of T. S. Eliot’s birthday, here is a manuscript page of “Virginia.” Beatrix Potter’s family recipes go on the auction block: no rabbit, but she does instruct the reader how to prepare turkey. Wearable words for the bookish dresser. A new biography claims that John Keats was an opium addict. The embattled Rebecca musical is finally starting rehearsals. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 26, 2012 On Poetry If You See Wordsworth at the Side of the Road By Eric G. Wilson I once enjoyed a gamboling lamb as much as the next pastoralist, and hiking, too—through forests, over peaks—but Wordsworth, laureate of the Lakes, has maddened me. In life and verse, he set an irresistible but inaccessible standard of contact: of enlivening intimacy with wind, water, earth, and sun—a marriage of mind and matter in which mind never feels abandoned. Depressed and isolated, I have craved this union. I have studied Wordsworth assiduously. I have become an expert in the Romantic school of which he is the prime exemplar. For twenty years, I have taught his poetry. I have memorized the daffodil poem, “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud.” This flower I have pressed into a book of his poems. I’ve already undertaken two pilgrimages to the Lakes. But poet’s abundance has mocked my poverty. When I glimpse the blooms he immortalized, and so gorgeously described—buttery, frilly, dancing in the breeze—they hiss to me: loser. They make the hurt worse, my self-loathing sharper. I’d kill Wordsworth if I saw him on the road. Read More
September 26, 2012 First Person The Jewish Vicar By Jon Canter An old Jewish man is hit by a car. As he lies in the road, dazed and bleeding, a woman rushes over, takes off her jacket, folds it, and puts it under his head. “Are you comfortable?” she asks. “Meh. I make a living.” I was eight when my father told me this joke. I wasn’t sure I understood it. Jews worried more about making a living than being run over. Was that it? One thing I was sure of was that the road was in Golders Green, in northwest London, where I grew up and was bar mitzvahed. Golders Green made me. Jews made me, with their jokes and their food and their pride and their warmth and their anxiety and their love of scholarship. I cannot be unmade, even though I haven’t been inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah. How far can you go from Golders Green and still be Jewish? Read More
September 26, 2012 On the Shelf Of Bloggers and Book Clubs By Sadie Stein Brilliant: book club in a box. Writers defend their favorite punctuation marks. Tao Lin is selling his stuff on Twitter. This gent has the largest collection of primary Hemingway works in existence. The head judge of the Man Booker Prize claims book bloggers are harming literature. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 25, 2012 Arts & Culture In Which the Author Reads the Works of Albert Cossery: An Illustrated Essay, Part 2 By Nathan Gelgud Pause Play Play Prev | Next See Part 1 here. Nathan Gelgud is an illustrator who lives in Brooklyn. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 25, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 4 By Katherine Bernard Italo Calvino Attends the Prada Spring/Summer 2013 Show. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s review of Miuccia Prada’s new collection for Spring/Summer 2013. Relax. Concentrate. Close out all other Internet windows. Set your Gchat status to Busy. Tell your friends right away, “No I don’t want to chat with you about the UN General Assembly right now, I am reading about fashion!” Type it in all caps—they won’t know that you’re yelling otherwise—“I AM READING ABOUT PRADA’S SUBVERSIVE FLOWERS ON COATS!” Or if you prefer, send them a GIF; just be like: here. Read More