September 17, 2012 Nostalgia Freak, Memory By Dave Tompkins Art from the film poster for Where Eagles Dare. The half-mouse—the good half, the half equipped with a smell memory validated by neuroscience, the half mortally known as the half that never saw it coming—shot across the kitchen floor, headed due west with a decent but final glimpse of the front yard. The back half landed somewhere near the sink. My brother had split the mouse in two with a nine-iron. According to witnesses at the scene, the creature’s separation was cartoonishly neat. I recall thinking this was a flawed method of pest control for someone with no short game to speak of. The linoleum gopher hump that rose from my grandparents’ kitchen floor—a distortion from water damage—did place the moment in a Goony Golf warp. But from my understanding, the murder was more reflex than act of cruelty. It wasn’t like my brother teed up and put the mouse through a window. (I imagine a similar instinct overtaking him the time he allegedly potato-slammed a palmetto bug on the kitchen counter, knocking it out of its exoskeleton, quivering.) He just grabbed the first thing within reach—a legendary chemistry teacher’s nine-iron—and let the mouse have it. Having once hurled a toaster oven at a cockroach, I can relate. Read More
September 17, 2012 On the Shelf Rejection, Crime, and Gum By Sadie Stein The three types of stories one editor tends to reject. Meet the Agency Review, devoted to books on advertising. The short, strange story of Gatsby gumballs. Oh, dear. An (allegedly) disgruntled author was taken into custody after (allegedly) attacking a San Francisco literary agent. A school project we wish were real. “It was George Orwell’s golden-eyed toad that made me a writer.” Simon Schama on literary inspiration.
September 14, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Kim’s Video, Grant’s Memoirs By The Paris Review Even if you’ve never read a book about the Civil War, the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant will grip your imagination. Dictated by Grant on his deathbed, championed and published by Mark Twain, celebrated by Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson (who compared it to Walden and Leaves of Grass), the Memoirs were cited by Gertrude Stein as a main influence on her own prose. However you may write, you’ll find their power is contagious. Every page is a lesson in force, clarity, and grace under pressure. To read Grant’s description of a military problem, then to read the orders he gave, is, among other things, to see a great modern writer at work. —Lorin Stein Have you ever imagined a music video as you listen to a song? Sigur Ros asked a dozen filmmakers to do just that with songs from their new album. The results are pretty great, but my favorite—and I’m hardly impartial—is Dash Shaw’s animated (I mean that literally) take on “Valtari.” Penned with Shortbus and Hedwig writer John Cameron Mitchell, the video features backgrounds by Frank Santoro, whose colors are, as ever, divine. —Nicole Rudick If you’re in agreement with a friend of mine who considers most recent American covers of Cormac McCarthy’s novels “oversaturated Windows wallpapers” (why yes, Cormac, that horse is very pretty), then perhaps you will be both pleased and envious to know that the British ones now look like this, and apparently have for some time. Thanks to the now-defunct Aesthetic Book Blog for this gritty eye candy. And check out The Millions’ annualish comparison of American and British book covers for further contemplation. —Samuel Fox Read More
September 14, 2012 Arts & Culture “Thule, the Period of Cosmography”: An Illustrated Panorama By Jason Novak This anonymous love lyric about the polar regions was set to a madrigal by the composer Thomas Weelkes in 1600. Four hundred years ago, poets had the luxury of looking at the horizon and marveling at what might lie beyond it. We’ve since lost that hopeful curiosity about the external world. The natural wonder of volcanic eruption is now classified as a natural disaster, and the once romantic Andalusian merchant is now seen as a capitalist pig. Having run out of physical space, exploration has turned inward. Thule is now the period of an interior cosmography. We go there not as heroes, but as a collection of anonymous users. The point of the poem—and I think it endures—is that the commonplace grime and dirt of our own feelings is still more powerful and exciting than the Thule of either cosmography. Read More
September 13, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 2 By Katherine Bernard Ernest Hemingway goes hunting at the Marc Jacobs Spring 2013 show. I am in range and my hat, which is in this season, is good and on, a damn cute hat, and I can see the entire show and the open runway, which is showing fashion. Afterward, Marc, who is an American man who can wear a skirt and make it look good, will throw a party. Open bar. There she is. That’s a damn fine one, too. The spots are fine, and her hair parts in a fine way, and the dress hangs low and true and near the floor, within the finery. It’s as dark as if it wasn’t light. I could shoot, aim, and get my shot. But then there’s the crowd. Well, the crowd. Yes, the crowd. Hm, the crowd. Come on. Shoot. She’s not going to stand there all day and it’s already dark and in the darkness I can see the next one emerging. Hell, is it a worthwhile head? She’s a small target with a small face and what if the dress got marked? It’s Marc Jacobs, which is too good. Which is too good.
September 13, 2012 Arts & Culture Small, Good Things By Casey N. Cep One of Mary Oliver’s poems begins “Something has happened / to the bread / and the wine.” A most unusual mystery, the comestibles have not gone the way of the plums in William Carlos William’s “This Is Just to Say.” Oliver’s wine and bread, as she explains in the second stanza, “have been blessed.” These two central elements of the Christian faith have been lifted from their ordinariness, isolated in order to show the extraordinariness of even the most ordinary of things. The bread and the wine join water and words to become what believers call sacraments: Eucharist is a sacrament made from staple food and festive drink; baptism is a sacrament made of clean, clear water. One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths. That setting apart is the calling of Christians but also the vocation of the writer. Read More