August 8, 2012 On the Shelf Psychos, Pencils, and Fines By Sadie Stein This terrific German blog gives the pencil its due (and, perhaps, then some). In a time when e-books outsell their paper counterparts, NPR wonders whether cover design is a dying art. In a gesture of either great magnanimity or great desperation, the Chicago Public Library waives all fines. Movies you may not have known were inspired by books. (In the case of Psycho, probably because Hitchcock tried to buy up all the copies so there’d be no “spoilers.”) On the one hand, we take issue with some of the rankings on this list of the hundred greatest young-adult novels. On the other, it’s encouraging to know kids are voting. (At least, we hope that’s the explanation.) In obligatory Fifty Shades of Grey news, author E. L. James is curating an album of the classical music featured in the trilogy. (For the uninitiated: in addition to being the world’s youngest billionaire and most accomplished lover, Christian Grey is also a world-class musician.) [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 7, 2012 Arts & Culture Your Eyes Deceive You: Claire Beckett at the Wadsworth Atheneum By Drew Johnson Marine Lance Corporal Nicole Camala Veen Playing the Role of an Iraqi Nurse, Wadi Al-Sahara, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, CA, 2008 In Hartford overnight for reasons that would take too long to explain, my wife and I visited the Wadsworth Atheneum, the city’s art museum, where she had interned a number of years before. Hartford is one of those midsize American cities, like Cincinnati or Worcester, dominated by Chris Ware cityscapes. The Atheneum is a small, good museum and interesting in that way that Hartford is interesting: on a comparatively small stage the choices are more evident, the collections more particular. Things that would be pushed into the storeroom at another museum are given fascinating pride of place. What is less well known is not so consistently edged out by what is too well known. We walked past the museum’s two Balthuses into a room full of photos of men in headdresses, dusty streets, namelessly Middle Eastern scenes. A man fiddling with a bomb. Something was off, however: there was too much unfinished plywood and the people staring into the camera were clearly … what? We slowed down, read wall text. This woman is a Marine lance corporal. Read More
August 7, 2012 First Person Letter from India: When the Cat’s Away By Amie Barrodale The Pin Valley is near the Tibetan border. In fact it was a part of Tibet. It was given to India in the fifties, to protect it. In winter it is snowbound. In summer, at three miles elevation—above the tree line—it is a stone bowl of dust. Two years ago, I was following a seventeen-year-old around the world, trying to get permission to write about him. I followed him from Kathmandu to India, and that was when I heard of the Pin Valley for the first time. Westerners living in India were going up for the last ten days of a month-long program for the monks in Pin Valley. There were no guest houses there. People who wanted to attend the program would stay in Kaza, the nearest town. They would ride in and out by car daily, an hour and a half each way. This year, 2012, was different. An enterprising Westerner had partnered with a Tibetan tour operator—a trekker by trade—to build a camp a kilometer and a half from the monastery, on a piece of unused farmland with a well. Read More
August 7, 2012 On the Shelf Loving Gorey, Trashing Ulysses By Sadie Stein Eve Bowen on the enduring cult of Edward Gorey. We love Bookdrum’s interactive maps of the real locations featured in famous novels. On his tumblr Newcover, graphic designer Matt Roeser gives books the covers he thinks they should have. At the Atlantic, a discussion of what grown-ups can learn from kids’ books. Paolo Coelho made waves when he told a Brazilian newspaper, “One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.” Should you happen to disagree, here is a free audiobook of the modernist classic. Joshua Cohen, a visiting scribe at the Jewish Book Council, talks the art and business of writing with Justin Taylor. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 6, 2012 Look Benjamin Franklin’s Clippings, Circa 1730 By Jason Novak An illustrated series of short news items written by Benjamin Franklin for The Pennsylvania Gazette. News at that time was fueled by hearsay and favored brief, outlandish anecdote. Where Franklin was running his paper in a wilderness devoid of information, we now operate in a wilderness so granite-packed with information that perhaps we now feel just as isolated, just as in the dark. These represent the dawn of American journalism, but I think in the present climate we’re moving back in that direction. Pause Play Play Prev | Next Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 6, 2012 Arts & Culture Gore Vidal’s Bully Republic By Henry Giardina A few years ago, fresh off a diet of Wilde, Maugham, and Saki, I was beginning to feel disappointed by the gay pantheon. Not the actual writing—no one could find fault with that. It was the example of their lives that depressed me, ending more often than not in loneliness and/or despair, if not complete exile. I remember having a conversation with my father about it. I told him what I’d really have liked to find, in my exhaustive search of the canon, was a gay superhero. You know: fucking dudes, saving the world. Never mind the fact that superheroes, with their notoriously contour-hugging apparel, are usually assumed gay by default. I wanted something that had existed, something from history. My father considered my criteria. “I think what you want is Gore Vidal.” I think it took me all of one day to read Myra Breckinridge in full and possibly a month to process it. The cartoon version of gender deviance it put forth was one that, against all odds, enraptured me. From its famous opening (“I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess”) to Myra’s core, radical aim in life (“the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes…”), to the lengthy rape scene three quarters through, wherein Myra rapes a guy with a strap-on, comparing herself to an Amazon and making him say thank you afterward, the message was clear. She was the ultimate queer bully, taking no prisoners and getting a comeuppance so ridiculous that Vidal gives the reader no choice but to discount any kind of moral implications it might have otherwise had. Read More