December 14, 2012 Bulletin “Marley Was Dead: to Begin With.” By Sadie Stein This Saturday, December 15, join Housing Works for the third annual A Christmas Carol marathon reading. Readers include John Hodgman, Eileen Myles, David Wayne, our own dear Lorin Stein, and many other terrific people. See you there!
December 14, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Prohibition, Bourbon, Coffee By The Paris Review When I asked my college advisor how I could learn to write dialogue like Raymond Carver, he told me to study a real master: John O’Hara. Naturally this kept me from reading O’Hara’s novels for twenty years. Then last week I picked up Butterfield 8, the 1935 story of a young woman who steals a fur coat after a one-night stand. Rarely has such a good book had such a bad ending. If not for the last ten pages, you’d have to call it a great book, with an unforgettable heroine, frank insights into sex and sexual abuse, a vivid picture of New York during Prohibition, and panning shots that prefigure William Gaddis. (Yes, great dialogue too.) —Lorin Stein At a library sale, I found a box set of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy in pristine condition. The spines weren’t even broken on the slim, stiff paperbacks, and I wondered whether the previous owner had even read them. But that’s all I’ve been doing the past week, and I’m ready to cast aside familial obligations, work responsibilities, holiday demands, and whatnot if they come between me and these books. —Nicole Rudick Read More
December 14, 2012 On the Shelf New Hans Christian Andersen? And Other News By Sadie Stein A piece believed to be Hans Christian Andersen juvenilia has been discovered. An editorial assistant job listing at Dalkey Archive earns the title of worst job posting ever. The poster gives his side of things. The fracas prompts the obligatory Twitter account. The best parties in literature.
December 13, 2012 Video & Multimedia Musical Notes By Sadie Stein PWxyz has compiled a list of songs inspired by literature, and it’s fascinating! Did you know that “Whip It” was inspired by Gravity’s Rainbow? I didn’t! But good as this list is, there was one glaring omission.
December 13, 2012 On Music They Say It’s Wonderful: Hartman and Coltrane, an Appreciation By Matthew Kassel Over the past month or so, I have listened to John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, one of the greatest jazz vocal albums ever made, about once a day. I haven’t tired of it, which is a testament to its durability. But I think there’s more to it than that. I discovered John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman about four years ago, and it continues to enchant me. The album—composed of six slow yet easily digestible romantic ballads—may contain the most beautiful half hour of music I have heard on one CD. I’m not trying to idealize the record. But I’m not alone in feeling so strongly. Writing in Esquire magazine in 1990, Daniel Okrent named John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman the greatest record ever made. Okrent admitted such a claim “is a fragile limb on which to walk.” But he stood firm. “If you want to argue,” Okrent wrote, “forget it; having listened to John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman for some fifteen years, I simply can’t be moved.” Read More
December 13, 2012 Video & Multimedia A Man Pronounces the Longest Word in the World By Sadie Stein If you so choose, watch one Dmitry Glubovskyi pronouncing the longest word in the world, the 189,819-letter chemical name for titin (which is, appropriately enough, the largest protein in the world). Warning: it takes three hours. To quote the Daily News, “It gets really good at the 1:32:54 mark, when a pack of corgis invades.” We’ll take their word for it.