November 27, 2012 Bulletin Your Holiday Gift Dilemma: Solved! By The Paris Review Just in time for the holidays! Give the gift of The Paris Review to yourself and a loved one! For a limited time, when you buy a one-year subscription with automatic renewal, you can give a one-year gift subscription for only $25. Here’s how it works: Include the addresses for the gift subscriptions in the “notes” field when checking out. Each subscription will start with the Winter issue and, of course, includes access to The Paris Review digital edition. Need more than two gift subscriptions? Just call 866 354 0212 to cover everyone on your list. Offer available for U.S. addresses only. Gift subscriptions will not be automatically renewed.
November 27, 2012 First Person Yanet’s Vintage Emporium By Julia Cooke While I’m at Yanet’s apartment it begins to pour, packs of chubby raindrops in the tropical afternoon that make the dust in her Havana apartment feel thicker than it actually is. I’m trapped until the storm passes. But every surface in Yanet’s home is coated with objects waiting to be lifted, appraised, perused, felt—at least an afternoon’s worth. So I browse the waist-high tables and rich wood armoires with rows of cut-crystal wine and port glasses, mod carafes with faded metallic polka dots, kitschy ceramic table lamps painted with bright pastoral scenes, and patterned blown-glass globes that once held water and fish. Technically, it’s not legal for any of these objects to be sold. Read More
November 27, 2012 On the Shelf Scandal at the (Old) OED, and Other News By Sadie Stein “An eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.” It may be intended to kickstart NaNoWriMo, but we think this Random Line Generator could be put to all sorts of interesting social uses. “They would have loved me to have written fantasy fiction because that would have been easier to sell from a Tolkien, but I wanted to write thrillers.” Simon Tolkien on his famous grandfather’s legacy. “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book. A book is a book is a book.” Maurice Sendak was characteristically wishy-washy on the subject of e-books. Some less vitriolic takes on the state of print.
November 26, 2012 Bulletin What We’re Doing: Double-Bind Tuesday! By Lorin Stein As we have now and then had occasion to point out, Daily editor Sadie Stein and I are not married. Nor is either one of us a parent. But that won’t stop us from competing for your love. Tomorrow at seven: Join Sadie and Doree Shafrir at KGB Bar for an evening of true-life storytelling. OR Join me at 192 Books for a live interview with the poet and novelist Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station. You can’t do both, but we hope you’ll do one! [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
November 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Peaks and Valleys: Leslie Stephen, Mountaineer By Alex Siskin Leslie Stephen is best known today as the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. But in his day, Stephen was a distinguished critic and author in his own right. And, not incidentally, a pioneering mountaineer who made early and important contributions to the literature of what is known as the golden age of alpinism. Leslie Stephen arrived in Cambridge University in 1851 with a fair amount of emotional and intellectual baggage. His father, James Stephen, was the colonial undersecretary, a pretty big job at the height of the British Empire. His older brothers, Herbert and James Fitzjames, had preceded him at Cambridge. Herbert had recently died of a fever in Dresden, on his way home from Constantinople, a tragedy that rocked the family confidence and strength, especially that of the overworked elder James, who began heading down a steady decline. James Fitzjames, meanwhile, quickly stepped with authority into the role of eldest son. He was an Apostle at Cambridge (Leslie was not), and moved swiftly to follow in his father’s footsteps toward a distinguished legal career. James Stephen played a central role in abolishing slavery in the British Empire; James Fitzjames Stephen went on to singlehandedly write the criminal code of India. Leslie Stephen was cut from different cloth: he was a skinny weakling who had become addicted to narrative poetry in early adolescence. Because he was clearly the most sensitive of James Stephen’s sons, his father marked him for the clergy, and he would indeed be ordained in the Anglican Church. Read More
November 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Bond. James Bond. By Sadie Stein James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables—John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. —Colin Burrow, London Review of Books [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]