January 7, 2013 Listen Zora Neale Hurston on Zombies By Sadie Stein In honor of Ms. Hurston’s birthday, this fascinating clip from a 1943 interview.
January 7, 2013 The Poem Stuck in My Head “Psalm 139” By Lorin Stein If you grew up going to church, you already know Psalm 139. Even if you didn’t, parts of it are floating around your brain. It is a favorite of pro-life people, because it talks about God recognizing us in the womb, taking care of us, and knowing how we’ll turn out. (It is also—I’d bet money on this—the source of our hundred-year-old American expression “search me.”) Psalm 139 gets my vote for being the most beautiful of the psalms in the King James version. The other day I happened to read it in French and it left me cold—it conjured up surveillance—whereas the high-low diction of the King James translators sings and is intimate, because you would only sing this way to a God you loved: “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me.” It’s like an advertisement for the English language. Read More
January 7, 2013 Arts & Culture CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Preface By George Saunders We loved Joel Lovell’s profile of George Saunders in yesterday’s Times Magazine. Lovell quotes generously from Saunders’s preface to the new edition of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. By special arrangement with the publisher, we bring you the preface in full. 1. This book was written in the Rochester, New York, offices of Radian Corporation between 1989 and 1996, at a computer strategically located to maximize the number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take to see that what was on the screen was not a technical report about groundwater contamination but a short story. I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived. We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): “Thanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.” And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager’s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book. This book. Read More
January 7, 2013 On the Shelf The Fitzgerald-Wodehouse Friendship, and Other News By Sadie Stein Robert McCrum: “In the department of lost meetings, one near-miss that’s always fascinated me is the on-off friendship between F. Scott Fitzgerald and P. G. Wodehouse, both of whom came to prominence in America at the end of the Great War.” And so it begins: hot on the heels of best-of 2012, The Millions brings us the most anticipated reads of 2013. New York digests the latest in self-help (or, as Barnes & Noble would have it, self-improvement) so you don’t have to. Can we separate the work of Ted and Sylvia from the myth? One author dishes the dirt on publishing a book.
January 4, 2013 Windows on the World Harris Khalique, Islamabad, Pakistan By Matteo Pericoli A series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. In the afternoon when the sun is blazing and in early evening when its orange hue allows me to stare into the horizon, I look out of this window in my office that opens into a terrace but offers a wider view. I see the palatial houses and imagine the few who live there in luxury. Then I think of the many who serve them—who hurl rolls of newspapers onto their porches, bring groceries, drive cars, sweep floors, toil in the sizzling kitchens. They dwell in shanty settlements ensconced within the affluent neighborhoods or live in crammed quarters in the backyards of these houses. Before dusk I can look beyond the trees and catch a clear glimpse of the thin-looking white minarets of the Faisal Mosque, one elegant and expansive structure on the slopes of the Margalla Hills. These minarets remind me of the worst dictator we have had. He lies buried in the gardens of this mosque while we still struggle to rein in the beasts of ignorance and bigotry he unleashed. Last week when it stopped raining after several hours, I decided to go beyond the window and walk across the terrace to look over the street from above. I saw a young girl squatting by a small puddle and folding paper into boats. An odd mix of intense sorrow and great hope enveloped my heart. —Harris Khalique
January 4, 2013 Look In Praise of Bookstore Cats By Sadie Stein In addition to bringing the world the glory that is the Weird Book Room (plus, of course, the main site itself), AbeBooks curates a gallery of bookstore cats from all over North America. (We imagine international felines are welcome; the current batch just happens to hail from the U. S. and Canada. Certainly the resident orange cat at Paris’s Tea and Tattered Pages is a notable omission!) While a number of the kitties on display have literary names, Booker Fox, of the Book Nook in Mexico, Missouri, seems to be the only one with her own Facebook page, on which she gives literary recommendations. (The Street of the Fishing Cat was a recent pick.)