August 23, 2012 Arts & Culture The Iliad, Improved: An Illustrated Panorama By Jason Novak These panels tell the story of Ajax, as related in the Iliad and by Sophocles. I’d originally intended to treat the story without embellishment but just couldn’t allow poor Ajax to fall on his own sword at the end. Homer’s world is populated with people driven by mad and almost childlike uncontrollable passions. They did not reflect deeply on their actions. When I think social media has just about driven me bonkers and start lamenting modern times, I need only consider the senseless, sensation-drunk world of the Iliad and Odyssey to realize that every age on record has been frantically moving toward self-destruction. Read More
August 23, 2012 On the Shelf The Most-Wanted Books of 2012 By Sadie Stein Madonna’s Sex is the most sought-after out-of-print book on Bookfinder’s 2012 report. And a signed Where the Wild Things Are is the year’s most expensive. A video on it here. Are women underrepresented in poetry criticism? Sina Queyras, Elisa Gabbert, Shanna Compton, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, and Danielle Pafunda tackle the question. “In 1840, the skull of Sir Thomas Browne was removed from the St. Peter Mancroft church, where it had reposed since 1682.” Alexander Nazaryan on the life of the polymath. Where writers are rock stars: author David Mitchell is mobbed in Shanghai. What fun, fearless female will be the voice of the Sex and the Single Girl audiobook? “The true distinction, however, is not between novels and poems, but between poems and storytelling. The novel is a specific but not fixed form of storytelling, in the same way as the romantic lyric, or the sonnet, is a form of poetry.” [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 22, 2012 Arts & Culture Books and Bodies: On Organs and Literary Estates By Casey N. Cep The New Yorker made headlines this month by publishing “new” work by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Thank You for the Light” had been rejected by the magazine in 1936 when Fitzgerald first submitted it, but editorial judgments—like love, pain, and kitchen knives—have a way of dulling over time. “We’re afraid that this Fitzgerald story is altogether out of the question,” read the original note spurning the story. “It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him, and really too fantastic.” Resubmitted by Fitzgerald’s grandchildren, “Thank You for the Light” was, at least by Fitzgerald’s own standards, ready for publication. Its condition differs greatly from his final work, tentatively titled The Love of the Last Tycoon but published as The Last Tycoon in 1941. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack before he could finish the novel, so what went to press was a version of his incomplete draft, notes, and outlines pieced together by the literary critic Edmund Wilson. In his preface to the novel, Wilson wrote, “It has been possible to supplement this unfinished draft with an outline of the rest of the story as Fitzgerald intended to develop it.” Read More
August 22, 2012 First Person Letter from India: The Permit, Part 3 By Amie Barrodale The story so far: Clancy and Amie continue to struggle to obtain the elusive permit that will allow them to find accommodation in a remote mountain area. We stayed one night in McLeod Gange. It might be called the woo-woo capital of the world. Woo-woos everywhere—frustrated, blissed out, on drugs—unwashed woo-woo land, with lots of coffee shops. In the morning, we passed a black street dog with white paws. He limped on a hind leg. Clancy said, “Hey, White Socks, how’s it going?” Read More
August 22, 2012 On the Shelf My Little Pony, Typography Humor By Sadie Stein “What did the horse say to Bordeaux?” Typographic humor. Bravery, boldness, folly: six insane acts of writing. (Some more literally so than others.) “I took little snippets of text and ideas from some of my favorite authors, and let the words be a springboard for an illustration. The illustrations incorporate and interact with the text and hopefully add up to something that engages the mind as much as the eye.” “Twilight’s libraries are profoundly disorganized.” A human librarian gives a professional critique to Ponyville’s My Little Pony librarian, Twilight Sparkle. Nothing you didn’t already know: books can indeed treat depression and anxiety. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 21, 2012 In Memoriam Prabuddha Dasgupta, 1956–2012 By Sadie Stein We were saddened to hear of the death of legendary Indian photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta last week at fifty-eight. As Geoff Dyer wrote in issue 200, with Dasgupta’s work, “we are in the realm of dreams and memories—exactly whose is never clear.” Pause Play Play Prev | Next [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]