October 1, 2012 On the Shelf Hobbit Mythology, Classics Reinvented By Sadie Stein Artists from all over the world reinterpret covers for The Observer’s list of the hundred greatest novels. The Ransom Center’s Pale King archive is now open to the public. Look through some of DFW’s extensive notes. Good news for Louie C.K.: the Puzo estate can’t prevent any future Godfather films. “The Hobbit, published seventy-five years ago, is not a fantasy-adventure as it is being described, but a myth, or part of a mythology.” On the novel’s scholarly underpinnings. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 28, 2012 Arts & Culture Song of Roland: An Illustrated Panorama By Jason Novak La Chanson de Roland is one of the major epic poems of the Middle Ages. It centers around one of Charlemagne’s adjutants, a prefect named Roland. Though billed as a “song,” it is a blood-soaked screed against paganism. What strikes me most about this story is how truly medieval the medieval courts were. I would patch this up with a happy ending—but how? The happy ending is that we don’t live in medieval France! Pause Play Play Prev | Next Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.
September 28, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Simultaneity, Latin Lovers By The Paris Review I’m not really a fan of family-drama novels—I make exceptions for Lionel Shriver and Jane Smiley—but when one is set in your home state and the author teaches at your alma mater, it seems like required reading. Now I can make Andrew Porter’s In Between Days an exception, too. This story of a family’s collapse begins after the falling apart—infidelity, divorce, coming out, leaving for college—has already taken place. There’s more dysfunction to come, but the real treat is Porter’s plainspoken treatment of his characters, quiet and intense, and the revelation of fine but substantive fractures that are impossible to repair. —Nicole Rudick Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delauney published The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France in 1913, calling it “The First Book of Simultaneity.” Cendrars’s poem, recounting a journey he may or may not have taken from Moscow to Manchuria, was accompanied by Delauney’s scroll of abstract forms in bright colors. The idea was that the reader should take in the text and painting simultaneously, and the poem strives gamely toward the same goal: “So many associations images I can’t get into my poem / Because I’m still such a really bad poet / Because the universe rushes over me / And I didn’t bother to insure myself against train wreck.” A facsimile edition of the original book—a gorgeous, unfolding paper accordion—has been published by Yale, and I’ve been staring at it all afternoon. —Robyn Creswell Read More
September 28, 2012 On the Shelf Tiny Books, Wuthering Napa By Sadie Stein Behold! The world’s smallest book! Teeny Ted from Tunip Town was etched on a microchip with an ion beam and can only be read via scanning electron microscope. Presented without comment: “This time, we’ll be finding the dapper but doomed lovebirds, Heathcliff and Catherine (or will it be Heath and Kate?) in modern day Napa Valley. Greg Berlanti, the creator and writer of Everwood, Jack & Bobby, and Arrow, and Tom Donaghy of The Whole Truth are developing a pilot for the hour-long drama, currently titled Napa.” Barnes & Noble goes … paperless? The reviews for J. K. Rowling are in, and they’re … tepid. Except when they’re not. Except when the reviewer hasn’t actually read the book. “A Chicago high school guidance counselor and former girls’ basketball coach filed a lawsuit against his school district for firing him after the release of his graphic book on relationship advice. He claims that his First Amendment rights have been violated and is seeking $1 million from the district.” Enough said, really. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 27, 2012 Weird Book Room How to Live with an Idiot By Sadie Stein Selected from the AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.
September 27, 2012 At Work Magic Hour: An Interview with Gregory Crewdson By Elisabeth Donnelly Still from Beneath the RosesIt’s difficult to quantify the strange magic of Gregory Crewdson’s photography, but here’s a stab: his photos, mostly of American towns that could be any dead mill town (the colors too bright, the light too spooky) create such an evocative mood that the viewer becomes part of the story. His work has to the power to linger in the brain long after seeing it: on days when the light filters just so through the trees, when an average, mundane moment takes on the qualities of eerie, ethereal beauty, it’s very easy to identify it as a Gregory Crewdson moment, a particular alchemy of the earthbound and the spectral. The documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is a beautiful and contemplative look at Crewdson’s process, focusing on when he was working on Beneath the Roses, a multiyear project that brought film crews of sixty or so people to small towns in the Berkshires of Massachusetts to help produce his large-format photos. The film, a ten-years-in-the-making work directed by Ben Shapiro, is an intimate look inside Crewdson’s artistic process. Since that’s covered in the documentary, I wanted to talk to Crewdson about one of his big inspirations, the cinema. Crewdson invited me to his studio and home in the Berkshires, a former church hidden behind a fence, where we (along with another writer, Stu Sherman) had a free-ranging conversation starting with the movies and edging over into his work. We started, of course, with Mad Men, which Crewdson calls “the greatest work of sustained art in the past ten years, and I’d include any movie or book or art work, so that shows you what I think of it.” When it comes to Mad Men, do you like the set design and period detail? I think it’s perfect in so many different ways, but it’s so beautiful to look at, so exquisitely detailed and rendered. The light’s so beautiful and the decor all fits together like a complete, perfect set piece. It’s funny that you love Mad Men so much. I have to admit that when I watch Breaking Bad—or even just seeing stills of characters, like of the wife, Skylar, on the bed—they’re very reminiscent to me of your work. My pictures are very much influenced by movies, but it’s weird because now it seems like the opposite happens, and now it’s like the movies use my pictures as reference. It’s a dialogue or something. I guess it just happens. Read More