August 30, 2012 Arts & Culture Bullet Points By Joseph Bernstein 1. You will likely have noticed by now the writerly fashion of building an essay by numbered sections. These sections can vary from just a single sentence to many pages. Sometimes a section will bear one or more indentations or line breaks and will stretch into a mini-essay. Sometimes there will be as few as three sections and sometimes there will be more than a hundred. Writers, such as God, have been numbering sections for a very long time indeed, and I do not wish to suggest that this technique is new, rather that it is increasingly used. My proof is a general sense that this is happening, nursed into conviction by a robust confirmation bias. Two Quite often these sections comprise a series of declarative sentences, near aphorisms, sayings that, breathed from the lips of drunks, would by most of us be taken in, swished around and then spat out. III These sections comprise wild declarative sentences, aphorisms, sayings that, belched from the throats of drunks, would be swished around and then spat out. To take one example, “The only picture that it seems appropriate to paint in 2012 is a painting of people having their picture taken by famous paintings.” Read More
August 30, 2012 On the Shelf The Dark Lady, Potter Gowns By Sadie Stein Ten books that will never be Penguin classics (except in this mock-up). The John Updike Society has purchased the author’s childhood home, with an eye to creating a museum. Politicians’ favorite books. A new candidate for Shakespeare’s mysterious “dark lady” has emerged: a prostitute called “Lucy Negro,” an “arrant whore and a bawde” who worked in Clerkenwell. A dress made of Harry Potter. Naturally. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 29, 2012 Weird Book Room English Smocks By Sadie Stein Selected from the AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.
August 29, 2012 On Poetry The Dead Preside By Brian Gittis A few months ago, the first poetry reading I ever attended in New York came back to haunt me, almost literally. I was folding laundry on a Sunday night, listening to iTunes on shuffle, when a ghostly, familiar voice issued out of my speakers, interrupting the music. Soft, deeply resonant, and a little like Boris Karloff—or more precisely, Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s impersonation of Boris Karloff on “The Monster Mash”: Samuel Menashe here. On June 19, in the year two thousand and one. In the city of New York, where I was born on September 16, in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-five. I am reading a selection of my poems from a book called The Niche Narrows.” This time capsule–like announcement introduced a series of poems recorded by Menashe in some hermetic sound booth for the CD New and Selected Poems, released by Rattapallax Press in 2000. And listening to them gave me the most wonderfully uncomfortable feeling I’ve had since—well the last time I’d heard Samuel Menashe read. Which was more than five years ago. Read More
August 29, 2012 In Memoriam In Memory of Daryl Hine By Sadie Stein We were saddened to learn of the death of Daryl Hine last week at the age of seventy-six. Over the years, his work appeared with regularity in our pages, and his voice will be greatly missed. The following poem appeared in issue 155. A Rebours Time’s one-way traffic won’t reverseSummer’s sentimental courseOr force the headlong universePerversely backwards to its source. Reverting to the title pageCannot erase a book once read;What echo of a golden ageGilds an eternity of lead? All the spontaneous happeningsOf the erotic pantomime.Precipitate, straightforward loversIntimate that certain thingsAre irreversible as time. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 29, 2012 On the Shelf Bradbury’s File, The Unified Field By Sadie Stein Seattle band Fleet Foxes is launching an arts and literary journal, The Unified Field. Quoth the L, “Round one features a journal entry penned by recently freed West Memphis 3 member Damien Echols on adjusting to life after eighteen years on death row, an excerpt from Gloria Steinem’s forthcoming book, a photo essay on adolescence by noted rock photographer Autumn de Wilde, a contribution from SPIN’s Charles Aaron, and another from Animal Collective sister/visual collaborator Abby Portner, among 30-plus other pieces.” Proceeds benefit nonprofit 826 National. During the sixties, the FBI kept a file on suspected communist sympathizer Ray Bradbury. According to the bureau’s then-source, “some of Bradbury’s stories have been definitely slanted against the United States and its capitalistic form of governmental.” Kindles don’t have a soporific effect according to one study: “a two-hour exposure to light from self-luminous electronic displays can suppress melatonin by about 22 percent … Stimulating the human circadian system to this level may affect sleep in those using the devices prior to bedtime.” The Marriage Plot hits the small screen. Across languages, “the fundamental colour hierarchy, at least in the early stages (black/white, red, yellow/green, blue) remains generally accepted. The problem is that no one could explain why this ordering of colour exists. Why, for example, does the blue of sky and sea, or the green of foliage, not occur as a word before the far less common red?” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]