August 7, 2012 First Person Letter from India: When the Cat’s Away By Amie Barrodale The Pin Valley is near the Tibetan border. In fact it was a part of Tibet. It was given to India in the fifties, to protect it. In winter it is snowbound. In summer, at three miles elevation—above the tree line—it is a stone bowl of dust. Two years ago, I was following a seventeen-year-old around the world, trying to get permission to write about him. I followed him from Kathmandu to India, and that was when I heard of the Pin Valley for the first time. Westerners living in India were going up for the last ten days of a month-long program for the monks in Pin Valley. There were no guest houses there. People who wanted to attend the program would stay in Kaza, the nearest town. They would ride in and out by car daily, an hour and a half each way. This year, 2012, was different. An enterprising Westerner had partnered with a Tibetan tour operator—a trekker by trade—to build a camp a kilometer and a half from the monastery, on a piece of unused farmland with a well. Read More
August 7, 2012 On the Shelf Loving Gorey, Trashing Ulysses By Sadie Stein Eve Bowen on the enduring cult of Edward Gorey. We love Bookdrum’s interactive maps of the real locations featured in famous novels. On his tumblr Newcover, graphic designer Matt Roeser gives books the covers he thinks they should have. At the Atlantic, a discussion of what grown-ups can learn from kids’ books. Paolo Coelho made waves when he told a Brazilian newspaper, “One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.” Should you happen to disagree, here is a free audiobook of the modernist classic. Joshua Cohen, a visiting scribe at the Jewish Book Council, talks the art and business of writing with Justin Taylor. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 6, 2012 Look Benjamin Franklin’s Clippings, Circa 1730 By Jason Novak An illustrated series of short news items written by Benjamin Franklin for The Pennsylvania Gazette. News at that time was fueled by hearsay and favored brief, outlandish anecdote. Where Franklin was running his paper in a wilderness devoid of information, we now operate in a wilderness so granite-packed with information that perhaps we now feel just as isolated, just as in the dark. These represent the dawn of American journalism, but I think in the present climate we’re moving back in that direction. Pause Play Play Prev | Next Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 6, 2012 Arts & Culture Gore Vidal’s Bully Republic By Henry Giardina A few years ago, fresh off a diet of Wilde, Maugham, and Saki, I was beginning to feel disappointed by the gay pantheon. Not the actual writing—no one could find fault with that. It was the example of their lives that depressed me, ending more often than not in loneliness and/or despair, if not complete exile. I remember having a conversation with my father about it. I told him what I’d really have liked to find, in my exhaustive search of the canon, was a gay superhero. You know: fucking dudes, saving the world. Never mind the fact that superheroes, with their notoriously contour-hugging apparel, are usually assumed gay by default. I wanted something that had existed, something from history. My father considered my criteria. “I think what you want is Gore Vidal.” I think it took me all of one day to read Myra Breckinridge in full and possibly a month to process it. The cartoon version of gender deviance it put forth was one that, against all odds, enraptured me. From its famous opening (“I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess”) to Myra’s core, radical aim in life (“the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes…”), to the lengthy rape scene three quarters through, wherein Myra rapes a guy with a strap-on, comparing herself to an Amazon and making him say thank you afterward, the message was clear. She was the ultimate queer bully, taking no prisoners and getting a comeuppance so ridiculous that Vidal gives the reader no choice but to discount any kind of moral implications it might have otherwise had. Read More
August 6, 2012 On the Shelf Man Pulls Sword over Badly Treated Book: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein “Christopher Meusburger, twenty-nine, of St. Paul, Minnesota, allegedly threatened his sixty-two-year-old neighbor with a sword on Monday night after she complained that he mistreated a book she lent him, the Pioneer Press reports.” A list of great lists. “The birth scene is now a staple of film and television, but strangely absent from fiction—sometimes alluded to in passing, but rarely dwelt on in closeup.” “The hardest and most frustrating books ever written.” Meet Bardowl: Spotify for audiobooks. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 3, 2012 Out of Print Sisters of the Night By Jeremiah Moss The bookstore, and especially the used bookstore, is vanishing from New York City. Today there are a few, but there used to be a multitude of them, crammed between kitchen appliance shops and Laundromats and thrift stores. They all had temperamental cats prowling their aisles and they all smelled wonderfully of what a team of chemists in London has called “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” I will miss terribly this stimulating fragrance, and the books that produce it, when it’s washed from the city for good. Luckily, there are towns that still accommodate used bookshops. Lambertville, New Jersey, is one of them. On North Union Street, there are two used bookstores, Panoply and Phoenix Books, one right across from the other. You can spend hours here, and it’s guaranteed that you’ll return with some grassy, musty artifact of the past. On my last visit to Panoply, I came home with a copy of Sisters of the Night: The Startling Story of Prostitution in New York Today by “veteran newspaperman” Jess Stearn. Published in 1956, the book began as an assignment for the Daily News when Stearn’s editor told him to find out what makes prostitutes “tick.” He was told, “Get out and talk to the girls, see the judges, the social workers, the cops, the headshrinkers—you won’t win a Pulitzer Prize but it should be worth reading.” Dragging his feet, the reluctant Stearn complied, going out in search of what one of the book’s reviewers called the “orchidaceous girls” of the city. Read More