January 24, 2013 Arts & Culture Edith Wharton by Design By Jason Diamond The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts. View from Edith Wharton’s bedroom. Photograph: Magicpiano. People who live in New York might agree that there is very little reason to find yourself between Fourteenth and Forty-Second Streets unless you absolutely have to. Go past Union Square, and you’re liable to bump into everything from confused tourists to people selling knockoff Louis Vuitton and Fendi bags worse than the ones you can purchase on Canal Street in Chinatown. The twenties into the thirties can look like a never-ending row of scaffolding at certain stretches, with C-grade delis and fast food chains hidden beneath, leading you finally to the terrifyingly bright lights of Times Square. For the better part of the decade in which I’ve lived in New York, this experience is probably what has kept me from the middle of the city. But when I moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan, and started taking daily walks up the various avenues from the West Village to an office on Twenty-Eighth, I began to learn the history of certain buildings I passed along my way: admiring the townhouse at 28 E. Twentieth Street where President Theodore Roosevelt was born; the splendor and history of Gramercy Park; the row of buildings in the Flower District that seems unremarkable, until you realize that this block of Twenty-Eighth between Fifth and Sixth was once known as Tin Pan Alley, and filled the American Songbook. With each block, the twenties became more and more magical, especially on the days when I managed to avoid the crowds scuttling down the sidewalks—those less hectic New York days when I could look up and admire the various gargoyles and the golden dome of the Sohmer Piano Building. The architecture of the twenties distracted me from my daily grind, but it was on an evening trip to the grocery store that the area I once shunned suddenly took on an entirely new meaning. That night I noticed the red plaque on a doorway next to a Starbucks at 14 W. Twenty-Third Street that read, “This was the childhood home of Edith Jones Wharton, one of America’s most important authors.” Read More
January 24, 2013 On the Shelf Orwell at the BBC, and Other News By Sadie Stein It was all the rage! On the eighteenth-century literary vogue for suicides. “It’s pretty much all hopeless,” and other advice on writing a memoir. (Personally, I would say: throw in a few recipes.) Nineteen Eighty-Four has never been dramatized by BBC Radio 4 before now. Why? Maybe this has something to do with it: “Orwell partly based the book’s torture area, Room 101, on a meeting room in the building he remembered from his time at the BBC.” “The day will come when there’ll be private publishing houses in the Soviet Union.” A previously unpublished interview with Joseph Brodsky.
January 23, 2013 On Sports Offsides, Part 1 By David Gendelman Mirko Vučinić showed up to the first day of soccer season this summer with a mustache. It was a thin one, and it made him look like a character out of an Italian neorealist homage to the dignity of the working class—handsome and proud, and heroic because ultimately he is up against forces that are far too great for him to succeed. Vučinić is the starting striker for Juventus, Italy’s Serie A defending champion. To date, though, he may be most famous for dropping his shorts, placing them on his head, and running around the pitch in his underwear after he scored a goal in an international match against Switzerland in 2010. You likely wouldn’t see that in an Italian neorealist film. But that’s all right, because Vučinić isn’t Italian. He’s Montenegrin, and Montenegro has a story of its own. The country, once a part of the former Yugoslavia, is one of the tiniest in all of Europe. Incredibly, its population of 657,000—about the size of Baltimore’s—is the same as the number of registered soccer players in Poland, Montenegro’s first opponent in its 2014 World Cup qualifying campaign, which began in September. In order to automatically qualify for the World Cup, Montenegro has to finish first in its group of six, or make it to a playoff match and finish second. The team’s other opponents in the group include Ukraine, whose population of forty-five million is a mere seventy times larger than Montenegro’s, and England, whose team is ranked sixth in the world and is the group favorite. Read More
January 23, 2013 Video & Multimedia What Do We Have In Our Pockets? By Sadie Stein Author Etgar Keret and journalist and editor Dov Alfon have started a new intiative called storyvid, an attempt to create the literary equivalent of a music video. We bring you storyvid’s first production, a four-minute pilot based on Keret’s story “What Do We Have In Our Pockets?” Goran Dukić of Wristcutters: A Love Story (also based on a Keret story) directs. The short was selected to screen in the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, which runs through the end of this week.
January 23, 2013 Arts & Culture Caveat Emptor By Jason Novak I was at Moe’s Books in Berkeley looking for material on seventeenth-century shape poems with my not-yet-two-year-old daughter when a wizened man with mutton chops spotted me reshelving the books she was piling in the corner. “What are you looking for?” he asked. I quickly learned that he’d spent his entire scholarly life immersed in the study of shape poems. Moe’s must be rich with encounters like this; it’s a four-story bookstore just three blocks from the University of California, Berkeley campus. He told me about a contemporaneous vogue for something called emblem books. Perhaps the best known emblem book is Hans Holbein the Younger’s beautifully decorated The Dance of Death, in which woodcuts of various scenes and settings depict a skeleton reminding us of time’s wicked work on our health and aspirations. Beneath each woodcut is an epigram in verse. The best-known English practitioners of emblem books, Francis Quarles and George Wither, are hardly known at all, possibly because it’s hard to anthologize poems that are incomplete without an accompanying picture. Read More
January 23, 2013 On the Shelf Gertrude Stein, Monster Hunter, and Other News By Sadie Stein Gertrude Stein, Gelatinous Cube Wrangler, and other possible monster hunters. The Brazilian government has allotted $35 million dollars toward promoting their literature internationally. Amazon’s fingerprints can be found, if one is of a suspicious frame of mind. “Some years ago, I found myself, to my surprise, the victim of a campaign of malicious e-mail stalking and online defamation by a former M.F.A. student.” We’ve heard of M.F.enemies, but one man’s tale takes the cake. “There are a lot of books out there that there is no particular reason on Earth why money should have been spent on them.” Barbara Meade, the longtime owner of Politics and Prose Bookstore, is retiring, and reflects on a life in books.