May 3, 2012 On the Shelf Beautiful Bookshelves, Rule Breaking, and More! By Sadie Stein The Tehran International Book Fair cracks down on “harmful” titles. “Poets break all the rules. When other writers take their photos outdoors, poets stay inside. They’re the only ones who wear hats or leather jackets with nothing underneath.” Target will no longer be in the Kindle business. (A sentence that would have mystified our forebears.) “The passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.” A gallery of beautiful bookshelves.
May 3, 2012 First Person Memories of the Lakeside By Lorin Stein To East Villagers of a certain age, it came as a blow: after sixteen short years on Avenue B, the Lakeside Lounge has closed. For many of us, that bar was like our living room. I don’t mean that my friends and I spent a lot of time there—I mean it was a lot like our apartments. The Steve Keene acrylics on the walls, the mismatched bench and tables, the overflowing ashtrays. The fug. The great advantage of the Lakeside over one’s living room was the music. This isn’t the place to talk about jukeboxes in general, much less the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, but that jukebox was a big deal. I remember making a special trip to the Lakeside one night, alone, in the snow, just to hear “Sitting on Top of the World” as performed by the Mississippi Sheiks. I also remember stopping there for a beer by candlelight the night of the blackout. It was strange to sit there in the silence. Every other night the place was full of music. I never saw Iggy Pop or Dee Dee Ramone at the Lakeside, but I did hear Jason Morphew and the Reachers play whenever they came to town. It was there I first heard that verse, from Geoff Reacher’s “Paranoia Is Fame,” worthy of the Louvin Brothers: Slowly my mind opens more and more And when I’m dead it will be a beautiful flower Blooming, choking out the weeds Photosynthesizing starlight in the garden’s darkest hour The other great attraction of the Lakeside was its photo booth. That machine took magically good photos, photos for the photo averse, as, for example, the poet Frederick Seidel (shown here with my sister, Anna O’Sullivan). One of the pictures was so unflattering, so off-putting, so deeply dour, that Seidel put it on the cover of his collection Ooga-Booga.
May 2, 2012 Fiction An Event in the Stairwell By Clancy Martin The Milan Review—or, to give it its proper title, The Milan Review of the Universe—is an egregiously handsome literary magazine published in English, in Milan, under the editorship of the improbably named Tim Small. The second issue includes work by some of our own favorites, among them Amie Barrodale, Chiara Barzini, Francesco Pacifico, Lynne Tillman, and, not least, Clancy Martin, whose story the Milanese have kindly let us reprint below, in a spirit of international fraternità, and in light of the patchy trans-Atlantic distribution that our two journals have in common. Auguri! —Lorin Stein Randy knocked on my door and when I opened it I expected he would attack me with the tennis racket in his hand. I had only bought pot from him before. He had no reason to hate me. But in his mind I am a rich white person. “Emily’s not home,” I said. Emily is my girlfriend and I suspect, though do not know, that she has had sex with Randy at least once, or perhaps lots of times. He is younger and lither than I am. Probably better hung. “She’s not home?” “Right.” I kept my eyes on the racket. Also on his eyes, because you can anticipate a blow that way. Everyone narrows his eyes and looks where he’s going to hit you before he strikes. This is the first lesson of boxing. “She promised she’d buy this racket from me. I got this racket special. From my daughter.” Randy, Emily had told me, had a high school–age daughter who was expected by many people to be the next Serena Williams. She lived with her mother in the Bronx and was sponsored by Puma. I noticed the tennis racket had a broken string. Emily was hiding in the bedroom all this time and had instructed me to tell Randy that she was out. I could not decide whether that was reassuring or suspicious. Emily had had her infidelities. “How much does she owe you for the racket?” I took the racket from his hand which he gave me without hesitation, although he looked down and away from me when he said, “Thirty dollars,” which meant he was lying. Probably he had told her he would give her the racket for free. But who knew what more tangible price she had promised to pay. Perhaps eagerly. I briefly considered beating Randy on the face, head and shoulders with the very light and surely durable racket. We have tile in our stairwell and blood would mop up easily without staining. Randy was not the type to come back with a gun. That would be the last we’d ever see of him. I should have done it. Read More
May 2, 2012 Arts & Culture Literary Paint Chips: Gallery 2 By Leanne Shapton and Ben Schott Paint Samples, suitable for the home, sourced from colors in literature. As seen in our two-hundredth issue. See Gallery 1 here. Havisham’s Complexion Anti-Sex Scarlet Plum Purple Closed Eyelid Green Paste Rain Stone Nothing Esther’s Sauce Anthracite Brazier Dove Encrimsoned Foul Mood Snot Eyes Aschenbach’s Youth Saffron Silk Elm Shadow Paris Paper Smell England Rat Brown 20,000 Dorian Scarlet Lilac Ocean Basking Pear March Morning Sour Apple Gulag
May 2, 2012 On the Shelf ‘Bartleby,’ ‘Star Wars,’ and Animal Authors By Sadie Stein May Day viewed through the prism of Bartelby the Scrivener. In Afghanistan, women are risking their lives for poetry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s wall text will now reflect Gertrude Stein’s complicated war record. Controversial almost-ran New Yorker covers. The Star Wars cookbook. Last but not least, books authored by famous animals.
May 1, 2012 Arts & Culture Subway Photography By Blake Eskin Working with words is how I’ve made my living, but becoming a photographer has been a longtime fantasy, fed by the vinaigrette smell of the chemistry in the college darkroom, the monographs in the library upstairs, and all the museums and galleries and bookstores I’ve visited in the decades since. The more amazing work I saw, the more shy I became about picking up a camera, so this fantasy was sublimated into writing about photography, even writing about writing about photography. The pictures that speak to me most are street photographs. I wanted to be a surreptitious chronicler of urban life, like Henri Cartier-Bresson or Helen Levitt or Elliott Erwitt. Street photography took off with the Leica, a groundbreaking portable camera introduced in 1925 that used the same 35-mm film manufactured for motion pictures. By the time I became aware of street photography, its golden age—its culturally decisive moment, so to speak—was behind us. To practice street photography at the end of the twentieth century seemed like nostalgia. Read More