August 17, 2012 On the Shelf Bookscapes, Book Gardens By Sadie Stein A literary moonscape by Guy Laramée. More amazing book art: a visit to Quebec’s Garden of Decaying Books. “A hundred and twenty five years ago, Oscar Wilde edited a fashion magazine, his first and only office job. We have yet to learn from the experience.” LARB on Wilde’s day job. For the first four decades of competition, the Olympics awarded official medals for painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and music, alongside those for the athletic competitions. If you’re in Boston this weekend, enjoy the Dog Day Poetry Marathon, featuring Dorothea Lasky, Jim Behrle, and Eileen Myles (among many others). “As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.” Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, has won the 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst in writing. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 16, 2012 Arts & Culture Early Writhings By Josh Lieberman Going through my childhood desk recently I cleaned out years of weird detritus (novelty bar mitzvah magnets, Nickelodeon magazines, packets of incense cones) and came upon a copy of The Highland Fling, my high school newspaper. I opened the paper and scanned the newsworthy items of a typical suburban high school, circa spring 2001: various sports victories, a pointless Q&A with a sophomore, the possibility of a new town pool. Then I came to the reason I’d saved this particular paper: in its pages I had reviewed the Dave Matthews Band album Everyday. That’s exciting, I thought. Let’s read what is sure to be some wonderful and delightfully precocious writing. Or the other possibility. Reading the review I cringed. There was light to moderate trembling. Maybe even perspiration. Read More
August 16, 2012 In Memoriam Mrs. Crist By Harry Stein In early July, 1971, just out of journalism school, I took off for Paris. My intention was to spend a year or so freelancing. To this end, I carried with me assignments from two very small magazines and a sealed envelope, which I’d been given by Judith Crist, lately my critical-writing professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism. “Give this to Murray Weiss at the International Trib,” she instructed. Weiss was the editor in chief of that august journal and, she said, formerly a colleague of hers at its long-defunct but still much-admired progenitor, the New York Herald Tribune. “What’s in it?” “Don’t worry, just give it to him.” A week or so later, in the Trib offices on the rue de Berri, I handed it over to Weiss’s no-nonsense assistant. “It’s from Judith Crist,” I said meaningfully—not the twenty-two-year-old nothing standing before her. She walked briskly to the office beyond, and, after a long beat, like in a too-obvious movie, there came a roar of laughter. “Send him in!” Weiss was behind his desk, holding the letter, still looking much amused. He half rose to shake my hand. “Listen,” he said, chuckling, “this is very nice of Judy. But, no, I’m not going to fire our film critic and hire you.” Read More
August 16, 2012 On the Shelf Hemingway, Urdu, Doughnuts By Sadie Stein Mediocre spy Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway’s World War II spying career was less than illustrious. In fact, when it came to one ill-fated Cuban operation, Papa was downright bumbling. Meet The Musalman, a handwritten Urdu daily that has been published continuously since 1927 in Chennai, India. “It hurts to be rejected, and it hurts even more when you walk into a real bookstore, one with chirpy sales clerks and splashy book covers, and see truly godawful books by authors represented by some of these very same agents.” Michael Borne on how to weather the agent-finding process. Generation Y (those born between 1979 and 1989) outspent Boomers in books for the first time last year. Check out Electric Literature’s Single Sentence Animations—in which an artist animates a favorite sentence from a writer’s story—here. Dough Country for Old Men (subtitle: “As I Lay Frying”) is a blog that juxtaposes literary quotes against images of doughnuts. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 15, 2012 On Music Speaking the Language By Michael Spies Occasionally, when my mind is feeling overrun, flickering and buzzing like a dying electric light, I go down to Fat Cat on Christopher Street, in the West Village. Of the standard venues one goes to see jazz in New York City, Fat Cat is not one of them. The club is a huge recreation center, a dark and boozy suburban fantasy basement packed with pool tables, Ping-Pong tables, foosball tables, plush couches, dusty rugs, shuffleboards, chess boards, and booths where skinny NYU students play Backgammon or Scrabble. If the alcohol were removed, it would be a perfect place for a children’s birthday party. Above the music swirl youthful, exuberant screams of delight, punctuating either a winning serve or an eight ball sunk in its intended pocket. And off to one side, like an afterthought, is a makeshift bandstand, and at a certain late hour on most evenings there is a jam session in progress. Most of the drinkers busy themselves with games, but a few hang around and listen to a group of nomadic musicians riff on, say, “Polkadots and Moonbeams.” Nearby, expectant bass players hug their encased, cumbersome instruments, impatiently tapping their feet, waiting to get in on the action—they’ve just come from a low-paying gig across town, seeking a real payoff. It is a high-art frat party, a safe zone where all kinds of New Yorkers can, for a night, indulge in what they may loathe, but perhaps long for: a sense of cultural superiority on the one side, or a bit of dumb Greek fun. No one seems particularly interested in jazz, save for the sidelined musicians, who are restless because they have talent to burn, if only they were given the opportunity. Because I’m myself restless, a writer waiting his turn, I have, more than once, gone to the club alone to stand with them in an improvised support group. Together we watch those musicians onstage take up their instruments. We watch them get acquainted and blunder and stumble into the opening bars of the tune, trading insecure glances, wondering if they’ll find the groove. We watch the trumpet player step forward for the first solo, puff out his chest, and raise the bell of his horn. We hear his first notes, typically tentative, as if he’s dipping his foot in the melody, just testing it out. And we hear him finally dive in, headlong, committing to the sound. Read More
August 15, 2012 Arts & Culture A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects By Joanna Neborsky As Catalogued by M. Lemoel on May 20, 1880, Twelve Days after the Writer’s Death. Read More