January 30, 2013 Video & Multimedia All the Difference By Sadie Stein We were excited to learn, on this the fiftieth anniversary of his death, of the new cache of Robert Frost documents that has come to light. The letters, photographs, and recordings come from the personal collection of Jonathan Reichert, a friend of the poet’s, and will be on display at State University of New York at Buffalo starting Thursday. Just to whet your appetite, here’s Frost reading “The Road Not Taken.” It’s good, for those of us who have come to take the poem for granted, to take the words out of the yearbook context and rediscover its forthright beauty.
January 30, 2013 Notes from a Biographer Southern Holiday, Part 1 By Sam Stephenson Maude Callen’s clinic in Berkeley County. On Tuesday morning, December 11, I drove a rented 2013 Chevrolet Impala out of Chapel Hill on I-40 East, the first miles of a twenty-two-day road trip around the South, with points as far west as New Orleans and Shreveport. These were the first Christmas plans I’d made on my own in forty-six years. I have no children, and my holidays, since 1995, have alternated between my parents’ house in eastern North Carolina and my in-laws’ in Pittsburgh. Over a nearly identical duration, I’ve been researching the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith. Now I’m working to finish my last book on him. The first stop on this Southern-holiday journey is Berkeley County, South Carolina, a former slave-plantation region near the coast where Smith photographed his 1951 Life essay, “Nurse Midwife.” The truth is that I’m tired of Gene Smith. Read More
January 30, 2013 On the Shelf Chatterley Sex Advice, and Other News By Sadie Stein In today’s adaptation news, Campbell Scott will be helming Didion’s Book of Common Prayer. Remember these words: sub-compact publishing. You are witnessing the future. Not ready for the future? Here’s Virginia Woolf’s bread recipe! Ten things not to say after sex, according to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Finnegans Wake is selling like gangbusters in China.
January 29, 2013 First Person Going Soft By Nathan Deuel In Rome, I was cocky and competitive and altogether my usual self because the apartment we’d rented for the night was completely white—sheets, pillows, towels—and much bigger than expected, with a cow’s head mounted on a wall and great, familiar coffee and I might as well have been in Istanbul or Moscow or New York or the many other places I had lived and worked, and I was thinking, after all that, how hard could Italy be? What’s the big deal? Yet that concern about experience or mastery or difficulty was to miss an essential point. That a good thing doesn’t have to be hard. At the pub downstairs, the guy my wife knew knew from Baghdad was telling my wife how to get into Syria. I sighed, feeling everything retighten. A light rain fell as we passed through the piazza, and I saw cops and I stared at their guns. Under heat lamps, we hefted tall glasses of blood-dark wine and when we ordered the final carafe, all this big talk about the usual terrible things, there was nothing to do but float home on a red river. Read More
January 29, 2013 Video & Multimedia Nevermore By Sadie Stein On this day in 1845, “The Raven” was published in the New York Evening Mirror. It obviously follows that we should bring you a recording of Christopher Walken reading Poe’s poem.
January 29, 2013 Department of Tomfoolery The Worst Best Coloring Book Ever By Sadie Stein For the literary child—or inner child— in your life! Pause Play Play Prev | Next