February 13, 2013 Arts & Culture Questions of Travel By Sadie Stein Growing up in Tonga with her grandmother, Kato Ha’unga loved books. She explains, “That was the only thing to expose me beyond the beach to the world outside of Tonga.” After moving to Anchorage, Alaska, for college, Ha’unga started sending books home. But after the 2009 tsunami destroyed the family’s library, she decided to rebuild on a larger scale. With help from range of organizations, including much of the University of Alaska Anchorage community, Senator Lisa Murkowski, and the U. S. Navy, Ha’unga has made great headway in opening what will be Tonga’s first public library, Northern Lights Library in the Ha‘apai Group. A location has been secured, fifty thousand books donated, and shipping costs covered. Says she, “Grandma never left the island. Through books, me and Grandma could travel. She can see the Eiffel Tower. She sees the Northern Lights of Alaska.”
February 13, 2013 First Person Second Chances By Tupelo Hassman My husband hung up the wind chimes today. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, as my husband is a competent man and gravity is working as it should. It is a big deal, though, because these are big wind chimes, eight feet tall, made of steel tubes that gong when the wind catcher catches. They aren’t beautiful to look at, nor beautiful to hear, unless you really dig church, but they are beautiful to me, and now that they’re up, after two weeks at our new house, I know we are home. Again. This is our third move in five years. I inherited the wind chimes from my folks. My parents had the sort of love affair that required them to marry each other twice. This would be more romantic if there wasn’t a divorce in the middle of that, say, or if they weren’t in the process of a second divorce when my mother died. Where some couples have trial separations, my parents had trial marriages. The family agrees that if these two were still alive today, they would be going for yet another round. On the second try, they moved to Washington state, to a house overlooking the Hood Canal, a tiny, perfect part of the Puget Sound. For the nine months they managed to keep their romance together this time, the house was alive with the magic of second chances. Where the first album I ever remember hearing is Paul Simon’s Greatest Hits loud on Pops’s eight-track, the Washington trial marriage, fifteen years later, was perfectly timed with the release of Simon’s Graceland. The house rang with Pops’s voice singing along to you “You Can Call Me Al,” a pointed reference to a past love of Mom’s. This Al had died years before, but death brings no end to competition in marriages such as this, and Pops took more pleasure from it than he should have. Mom loved Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” and would insist the song was about me, one of the prettier riddles I inherited. Read More
February 13, 2013 On the Shelf The Maurice Sendak School, and Other News By Sadie Stein Pablo Neruda’s body will be exhumed in search for answers to his suspicious death, in 1973. Was he poisoned by the Pinochet regime? As he said, forgetting is so long. U.S. and U.K.: two nations separated by slightly different cover art aesthetics. Which do you prefer? Three buyers are vying for Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books; all three contenders are apparently local. Brooklyn’s PS 118 will henceforth be known as the Maurice Sendak Community School. We were going to share with you the Craigslist posting for an attractive copy editor, but it has been flagged for removal.
February 12, 2013 Arts & Culture Notes from a Bookshop: February, or the Folly of Love By Kelly McMasters Sitting alone in my tiny bookshop on a cold February morning, I have the sensation that I’ve conjured a dream into reality. The light is crisp and blue through the door. A flight of red paper swallows—a Valentine homage to Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Fowls”—hangs from the ceiling, fluttering quietly from the heat whooshing out of the floor grate. The room is small, just shy of two hundred fifty square feet, and an old pickled farm table sits squarely in the middle. The top of the table is covered with books, and the shelves lining two of the room’s walls also contain a patchwork of brightly colored spines. Valentine-themed woodblock prints handmade by my husband line the farm table and a grid of nature-inspired prints hold a wall. We live on an old dairy farm up in northeast Pennsylvania, and instead of cows in our three-bay English barn, we have two etching presses. He carves the images into blocks of clear pine, inks them up, and sends them through the press, cranking the smooth silver wheel like a captain on a ship. This is our store together, a kind of celebration of works on paper. We live on Moody Road, and so we call the shop Moody Road Studios. An artist and a writer, respectively, my husband and I had both been teaching and working in the city for more than a decade, until a little over a year ago. The idea of running a bookshop never entered our consciousness while in New York, mostly because it never could have happened. Space and funding were impossibilities—as one might guess, a writer and an artist in business together don’t quite make for a crack commerce force. But here, on Main Street in the small town of Honesdale, everything clicked into place. Read More
February 12, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln By Sadie Stein “My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.” —Abraham Lincoln
February 12, 2013 First Person Letter from Berlin: In the Cut By Zeke Turner Fabian One morning my first summer in Berlin, I woke up alone in a park with a piece of sweaty plastic wrap around my forearm. I still had the tattoo. I still didn’t have my keys. Fabian had given me the tattoo lying in his bed the night before. We met in a club thirty-six hours earlier, on Sunday afternoon, after I tried to pick up his roommate, a brooding Austrian boy with shoulder-length blond hair who was sitting alone away from the dance floor. He had a homemade tattoo of a sword on his wrist. His roommate had made it, he said, and did I want to meet him? They both turned out to be straight, and we spent the rest of the day dancing together and sharing our drinks and our cigarettes and whatever else we had. Another Sunday afternoon dancing at the same club, a Portuguese friend stopped me and asked, “Americans come here for the freedom, right?” Another Sunday there, a Scottish boy asked me if I moved to Berlin “just to have fun.” Usually in these situations I say, “I guess so.” Nobody with pupils that size could have patience for a real answer. Read More