January 31, 2013 On the Shelf Courier Font Is Improved, and Other News By Sadie Stein Paavo Anselm Alexis Hollo, a prolific and accomplished poet, critic, and translator, has died at seventy-eight. J. D. Salinger once wrote a biographer that he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Luckily for him, he won’t be around for the upcoming biography by David Shields and Shane Salerno, released by Simon & Schuster in September. Courier font has been perfected. Meet Courier Prime, if you dare. Robert Silvers, at lunch with the FT, talks editing, Zadie, and keeping the Pentagon Papers at the NYRB offices. “It became clear that we were building a utopian alternate-universe bestseller list—a syllabus for readers who are curious about the best transgressive, funny, gripping memoir and fiction written by every kind of person other than heterosexual men.” On the founding of Emily Books.
January 30, 2013 Arts & Culture Brother Sun By Michael Signorelli I credit the singer-songwriter Donovan with introducing me to Saint Francis of Assisi. I credit also Franco Zeffirelli, director of the Donovan-scored Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972), and Paolo Belardo, my tenth-grade Italian teacher, who suspended all learning for a week to screen the film. But my low-heat fervor for the saint developed mainly as a result of my response to Donovan’s soundtrack, a gentle, hippie sing-along that became the most durable joke of my sophomore year. In lyrics like “Fish are in love with the water / Birds are in love with the air,” my friends and I had encountered a record amount of sappy earnestness, to which the only appropriate teenage response was ridicule. To make each other laugh, we would assume dreamy looks, loll our heads to one side, and warble about birds, butterflies, and flowers, about personified celestial bodies, while swaying our arms and hips. Were we popular? Not always. But in my barely hidden self, I actually had no problem loving flowers, and the basic facts of Saint Francis’s life held immense appeal. A good-looking party boy, a prince of the popolo, renounces his possessions and societal privilege; embraces nature, poverty, and charity; walks the Umbrian countryside barefoot; clothes himself in a coarse habit bound by a cord; builds quaint churches; preaches penance; does mercy unto lepers—and amazes everyone. What more could a teenager ask than to stun the world with his previously hidden quality of being? Read More
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.