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
September 27, 2012 On the Shelf Literary Stockings, Keats’s Addiction By Sadie Stein In honor of T. S. Eliot’s birthday, here is a manuscript page of “Virginia.” Beatrix Potter’s family recipes go on the auction block: no rabbit, but she does instruct the reader how to prepare turkey. Wearable words for the bookish dresser. A new biography claims that John Keats was an opium addict. The embattled Rebecca musical is finally starting rehearsals. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
September 26, 2012 On Poetry If You See Wordsworth at the Side of the Road By Eric G. Wilson I once enjoyed a gamboling lamb as much as the next pastoralist, and hiking, too—through forests, over peaks—but Wordsworth, laureate of the Lakes, has maddened me. In life and verse, he set an irresistible but inaccessible standard of contact: of enlivening intimacy with wind, water, earth, and sun—a marriage of mind and matter in which mind never feels abandoned. Depressed and isolated, I have craved this union. I have studied Wordsworth assiduously. I have become an expert in the Romantic school of which he is the prime exemplar. For twenty years, I have taught his poetry. I have memorized the daffodil poem, “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud.” This flower I have pressed into a book of his poems. I’ve already undertaken two pilgrimages to the Lakes. But poet’s abundance has mocked my poverty. When I glimpse the blooms he immortalized, and so gorgeously described—buttery, frilly, dancing in the breeze—they hiss to me: loser. They make the hurt worse, my self-loathing sharper. I’d kill Wordsworth if I saw him on the road. Read More