November 7, 2012 First Person Letter from Coney Island By Mark McPherson I spent the night in Coney Island and there are no mermaids on Mermaid Avenue right now, but the machinery of New York’s recovery from Hurricane Sandy is everywhere to be seen. The streets teem with Con Edison and Verizon workers fixing overhead wires. One out of three buildings has some kind of light—from either portable generators or power lines. Relief workers, professional and volunteer, hand out goods to needy residents. A FEMA distribution center in a church parking lot includes a bank of Chase ATMs that shine like blue and white corporate beacons. Police cars sit, blue and red lights flashing, at almost every intersection, on the look out for looters and other bad actors. The weather remains on everyone’s mind—another storm is predicted today, less severe than Sandy but not insignificant, with a four- or five-foot swell. Ordinarily, that would not breach the seawall, but the fear is that the damage from Sandy has left this neighborhood much more vulnerable to another flood. In fact, the FEMA center and the temporary police headquarters packed up and moved in anticipation. Coney Island, the sharp southwestern corner of Brooklyn, was hit hard by Sandy. Read More
November 7, 2012 Books In Proust’s Library By Anka Muhlstein Whether they follow an established tradition or rebel against it, whether they are authors of classics or are considered innovators, rare are the writers who were not also great readers. Proust was no exception to this rule; reading had always been his earliest and most important source of pleasure and stimulation, and it remained as such. He is distinguished from his colleagues, however, by the immense role that literature plays in his oeuvre. Proust seemed incapable of creating a character without putting a book in his hands. Read More
November 7, 2012 Look Election Night, in Sketches By Sadie Stein Artist Wendy MacNaughton’s election-night sketch liveblog was terrific. Check out the whole chronicle; below are just a few highlights. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
November 7, 2012 On the Shelf A Man Walks into a Voting Booth, and Other News By Sadie Stein This. Election-themed poetry, whatever your mood. Teams anyone can get behind: author-editor pairings. The epic Moby-Dick marathon reading is nigh. Paul Dano, who kicks it off, obviously gets the money line. As Sandy aftermath continues, a list of more ways you can help. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
November 6, 2012 Arts & Culture On This Day By Sadie Stein “Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.” ―George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life On November 6, 1856, thirty-six-year-old Mary Ann Evans, a well-regarded intellectual and essayist, submitted a manuscript to Blackwood’s Magazine. It would run, in three installments, throughout the next year. And under the title Scenes of Clerical Life, the three stories would become George Eliot’s first published work of fiction. Her rationale for adopting the pen name was manifold; she both wished to avoid the stigma of the saccharine “lady novelist” and divorce the work from her own reputation. Evans, after all, was an outspoken agnostic and lived with a married man. The latter point was especially crucial given the subject of her fictional debut. These precautions notwithstanding, the book―which takes place in a country village over the course of fifty years―was the subject of some controversy amongst those who feared they had been lampooned. And while sales were respectable, if not brisk, and it won the praise of such luminaries as Dickens, today it is regarded more as a key part of the author’s development than as a masterpiece in its own right.
November 6, 2012 Arts & Culture Walker Percy’s Hurricane By Spencer Woodman As Sandy lashed my bay windows last week, I, like much of the northeast, spent my days mostly staring outside. Trees nodded and bowed in their ancient submission. Debris sped past. On the radio, the mayor said to stay inside. The outdoors became outer space. My world shrunk to the boxy confines of my living room. Across my region, houses washed into the ocean, a subway system filled with water. Lives and livelihoods shattered. The hope of coastal urbanization flickered. Thousands of people were thrust into hardships heartbreaking and humbling. It is with some shame and reluctance, then, that I admit to the ease of my own experience. I read by candlelight. Keeping me company during those days was Walker Percy. I had picked his second book—The Last Gentleman—off my shelf after I recalled its strange depiction of hurricanes as philosophically rich events that visit mass existential relief upon entire populations crushed under modern malaise. For Percy, the transformative power of a hurricane lies not just in the immediate excitement, the break in routine it brings, but more so in a storm’s capacity to limit the range of human choice, its ability to deliver a whole city from the chaotic realm of the Possible back the unquestioning mode of the Necessary. Perhaps I was feeling some of this myself. For the first time in years, I could remain utterly idle in good faith. No pangs of guilt for my laziness, no urgencies of becoming—nothing. It seemed that gusty Sandy had summoned some powerful force from my early youth, a lightheartedness that sent me into a blissful stupor that lasted through the storm. Which is not to say that everyone in Sandy was lucky enough to be forced into reflection. Many were forced from their homes. There was nothing theoretical about Sandy’s destruction. And Percy was, essentially, a philosopher. Read More