February 19, 2013 Arts & Culture The Worst Poet in the World By Sadie Stein The handwritten manuscript of a poem by the man considered the worst poet in the English language, William Topaz McGonagall, is expected to fetch up to £3,000 at auction. While the doggerel-esque verse, “In Praise of the Royal Marriage,” is certainly no threat to Tennyson, it doesn’t seem worthy of the dead-fish and rotten-egg tributes the Scottish bard’s performances regularly elicited on the music hall stage. His most infamous work is probably “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” commemorating an 1879 bridge collapse in which numerous train passengers were killed; it is either a masterpiece of outsider art or of insensitivity. Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
February 19, 2013 Arts & Culture Hear That Lonesome Gasket Blow, Part 4: Tonight the Sea Is Douce By Evan James On the Saturday closest to my thirtieth birthday, I went out on the town with Andrew and Izzy, two of my Highbury flatmates. With my time in dreamy Wellington drawing to a close—to say nothing of my waning metabolic rate—the need to run a little wild at the end of an afternoon spent contemplating fiction felt realer than ever. To this end our trio wound up, at three in the morning, after hours of dancing, walking toward a Burger King on the corner of Cuba and Manners. This Burger King occupies the ground floor of a heritage building with an Edwardian Baroque façade. Once home to the first Te Aro branch of the Bank of New Zealand, the building now shoulders what the local government describes as “considerable townscape significance.” “My uncle used to be the president of Burger King,” said Andrew, sitting across from me and eating fries. The Burger King before us teemed with loud, drunken revelers. “I can one-up you,” said Izzy. “My grandfather used to be the chairman of the National Front.” “What’s the National Front?” I asked. “You don’t know what the National Front is?” said Izzy. “Are you kidding me? Fucking Americans!” “Look,” I said. “I know about a lot of things outside of America. I can’t know about all of them.” “You know what the Klu Klux Klan is,” said Izzy. “Well, of course.” “It’s like the Klan, but in the UK.” Read More
February 19, 2013 On the Shelf Cake and Pie, and Other News By Sadie Stein 2666, in pie-chart form. (Black, in case you were wondering, represents “dread, unease, foreboding.”) Not merely one book-themed cupcake, but a series. (We look forward to 2666.) “Let us not speak of the cookbooks.” A pair of academics attempt to organize their library. There is no Hilary Mantel–Kate Middleton feud! Mantel just called the duchess “a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung … without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.” And no Anne Boleyn.
February 15, 2013 Look B is for Bookseller By Sadie Stein See the entire 1850 Occupational Alphabet here.
February 15, 2013 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Fictional Memoirs, Unreliable Narrators By The Paris Review As we close our Spring Issue, plan our Spring Revel, and try to find a new office, I’ve been taking refuge in two books at once. At dinner I’m reading Edward Limonov’s outrageous and very funny “fictional memoir” It’s Me, Eddie, about living as a penniless émigré in a New York SRO. In later years, Limonov has had a confusing political career (he may be the only living Russian poet to have raised a private army or campaigned for Zhirinovsky), but back in 1978 he was pure punk. After dinner it’s the new translation of Climates, by André Maurois, an irresistible, micro-Proustian novel about a jealous husband and the woman who tries to save him. I can’t explain why these two books go so well together, except to note that each one broods on a painful breakup, and that I don’t want either one to end. —Lorin Stein I’ve been paging through the late Richard Stern’s Still on Call, a collection of essays, reflections, and general miscellany. In one section, Stern describes his encounters with other writers, including a near-stalking of Sinclair Lewis in Central Park and a leisurely lunch with Thomas Mann, but it was Stern’s meeting with “Japan’s most distinguished poet,” Shuntarō Tanikawa, that especially interested me. Unfamiliar with Tanikawa, I tracked down a translation of his 1980 collection, At Midnight in the Kitchen I Just Wanted to Talk to You, and felt an immediate affinity after reading “My Favorite Things,” Tanikawa’s take on Oscar Hammerstein’s famous lyrics. If you can’t get your hands on a copy of the collection, you can still read the poem here. —Brenna Scheving Who writes a novel-length lipogram, and furthermore, who translates it? Sadists? Cat lovers without a cause? Georges Perec and Gilbert Adair have, respectively, accomplished this feat. A Void (translation of the French title, La disparition) could rescue you from the winter doldrums as a cerebral, cleverly disguised detective tale. Written sans the letter e, it forces you to acknowledge the absence while following the protagonist, Anton Vowl. In this paragraph alone, I have used e sixty-two times. If you need further evidence of Perec’s merit as a writer, look at his author photo. —Kendall Poe I picked up a galley of The Other Typist on a whim, and from the first page was absorbed: I haven’t been able to put it down. Suzanne Rindell’s story of a 1920s police stenographer who becomes increasingly obsessed with a glamorous new typist reminds me at points of Notes on a Scandal and Patricia Highsmith, but has creepy charms all its own. —Sadie Stein
February 15, 2013 On the Shelf America in Love, and Other News By Sadie Stein Amazon.com has assigned a love story to every state. As a New Yorker, I find myself ambivalent about the choice of The Age of Innocence. Although Arkansas, arguably, has more of a bone to pick. “Wife wanted: intelligent, beautiful, 18 to 25, broad-minded, sensitive, affectionate. For accomplished artist and exciting life. NYR box 1432.” On America’s most erudite personals. (Yes, that was the first.) Happy one hundred, Harvard University Press. Comic book vendors around the nation are boycotting D. C. Comics following the announcement that the company has asked Orson Scott Card to write part of an upcoming Superman. Card is an outspoken anti-gay advocate. Meanwhile, a plan to erect a plaque to Enid Blyton in her home town is tearing Beaconsfield, Bucks asunder: some claim it would be wrong to celebrate an authors whose work is now deemed racist and sexist.