April 23, 2012 Arts & Culture How to Sharpen Pencils: A Demonstration By Sadie Stein If you’ve yet to hear about David Rees’s manifesto How to Sharpen Pencils, perhaps you’d enjoy a demonstration? Here, the author exhibits proper technique. (Pencil snobs will surely rejoice.)
April 23, 2012 Studio Visit “The Rat Is a Hero”: In the Studio with Emily Mayer By Daisy Atterbury Children are posing near Damien Hirst’s large intestine. A young couple is engaged in a shoulder rub, the recipient with a bracing hand on what may be the sigmoid colon. Upstairs, caterers put flowers on round tables, and cameramen survey Tate-goers ignoring For the Love of God encased below in a black box. In the gift shop, The Incomplete Truth anamorphic cup and saucer is on sale for £2.50. Between the Tate and Emily Mayer’s Norfolk studio is a gap of British countryside that from a train car feels like an hour-and-a-half stretch of live cows. I sit down and immediately hear that Emily hates instant coffee and loves rats. The Norfolk Wildlife Trust celebrates the area’s presence of weasels and more unusual species, but Emily prefers dogs to Chinese water deer. She has several dogs, some animate, some either frozen or cast in resin. “The electricity board are coming at 8 A.M. tomorrow to cut trees,” she had written in an e-mail the night before, “and our power will be off all day. I do have a generator in our woodland cabin, so maybe I could drag that in.” It turns out that the water is out with the power, and the phones don’t work. We still manage to have coffee. Read More
April 23, 2012 Arts & Culture Bookmobiles of the World By Sadie Stein 1949 Chevy Bookmobile I’ve had a soft spot for bookmobiles ever since I read 1964’s career romance for young moderns, The Girl on the Bookmobile and learned how much pleasure and knowledge these roving libraries could provide! It was a trimly built van-like conveyance. At the rear, the doors swung open to show a miniature room equipped with shelves already stocked with books, a tiny desk, and racks clipped wherever a stray space presented itself. (Romance and the dissemination of books ensue.) You can imagine how thrilled we were by the 1928 Bookmobile Boing Boing showed us a few days ago and, now, by Flavorwire’s roundup of mobile books around the world! Check out the whole thing, but here are a few of our favorites. We don’t see why bookmobiles shouldn’t join food trucks as a twenty-first-century craze! Read More
April 23, 2012 On the Shelf Corrections and Test Questions: Happy Monday By Sadie Stein He counted both Einstein and Hitler as fans. Rediscovering Karl May. “We were breaking down Dad’s library.” What Lena Dunham is reading. What Olivia Newton-John is reading. What, exactly, is YA? A passage given to New York’s eighth graders on a standardized reading exam is either a masterpiece of postmodernism or completely incoherent. A brief history of the New Yorker’s notable corrections.
April 20, 2012 Ask The Paris Review Reading in New York; Reading of London By Lorin Stein My apartment is infested with evil roommates and sad vibes. Being unemployed, I have no refuge. But I refuse to be depressed! Mornings I pack a small bag of books, take to the streets, wander around. But one can only sit on so many benches. Am curious about comfy food places where the management smiles kindly (or just not unkindly) on quiet, unassuming customers who occupy space for many hours, ordering only coffee, or perhaps (eventually) some delicious pie … Suggestions? Sincerely, Ex Libris (oh and Manhattan only please) Dear Ex, We have one of the world’s great reading rooms–at least for now–at the Forty-second Street Library. Having spent years in tiny, often overcrowded apartments, I promise that you will sit longer and read more there than in any café. If you get hungry, there’s a Pret à Manger across the street, not to mention the restaurant and sandwich kiosks in Bryant Park. Enjoy it while you can. Other good reading places—on weekdays especially—are the side room at Cafe Pick Me Up on Avenue A, the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights, and Tarralucci e Vino, either the one off Union Square or the one on East Tenth Street. For weekends, I highly recommend the bar at Vandaag on Second Avenue. No pies, but excellent coffee, strupwafels, and poached eggs. Read More
April 20, 2012 This Week’s Reading Things We Love: Apollinaire, Office Chairs, Flabbergasting Vulgarity By The Paris Review On the newly redesigned Los Angeles Review of Books, Hua Hsu’s review of a rather fascinating microhistory of office chairs has me wondering whether Charles Darwin invented the wheeled version. It seems he “replaced the legs of his armchair with ‘cast-iron bed legs mounted on casters’ so that he could glide freely throughout his office.” He’s known to have taken daily walks along his “thinking path.” Could it be that the chair’s motion likewise aided him in formulating the theory of natural selection? —Nicole Rudick I’ve been on an Apollinaire kick, starting with Francis Steegmuller’s chatty 1963 biography, plus the new translation of Apollinaire’s love letters from the trenches and Louis Zukofsky’s strange bilingual homage, Le Style Apollinaire. —Lorin Stein “The Bible is, for the first time, being translated into Jamaican patois. It’s a move welcomed by those Jamaicans who want their mother tongue enshrined as the national language,” reported the BBC in December. Led by the Bible Society of the West Indies, the translation initiative began with the Gospel of Luke and is scheduled for completion in August of this year. The patois translation has many excited followers, including me, and, though I can’t understand a word, I’m moved by a truth revealed at the heart of this effort: that language shapes and solidifies a people’s identity and sense of belonging. It’s kind of as real as it gets. —Elizabeth Nelson “There’s one thing I want to make clear right off: my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.” I’ve been wanting to read 1961’s The Big Love (Mrs. Florence Aadland as told to Tedd Thomey) ever since I saw Patricia Marx recommend it years ago. You can imagine my delight when I opened my mailbox to find my copy, and I devoured the story—a bizarre tell-all by the mother of the fifteen-year-old who had an affair with the middle-aged actor—within a day. Even to connoisseurs of the lurid, this is jaw-dropping stuff: “When the time came she told me everything she did with Errol Flynn … Everything. And in detail, because she and I love details and get a kick out of sharing things like that.” (It’s all like that.) After Flynn’s death, the liaison came to light, and Mrs. Aadland, convicted of contributing to the corruption of a minor, lost custody of seventeen-year-old Beverly. But she regrets nothing; the tone is as resolutely defiant as it is inappropriate. William Styron called the book “flabbergastingly vulgar.” —Sadie Stein