January 5, 2012 Bulletin Launch ‘The Fallback Plan’ with Sadie Stein By The Paris Review Join our Deputy Editor Sadie Stein tonight at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn as she discusses The Fallback Plan with the book’s author, Leigh Stein. Champagne and food will be on offer, and a good time will be had by all. When: Tonight, 7:30 P.M. Where: Greenlight Books686 Fulton Street Brooklyn, New York 11217
January 5, 2012 The Poem Stuck in My Head Jennifer Grotz’s “Poppies” By Ta-Nehisi Coates What I love about poems is how they change in the light of repeated readings. Now this is true of most art (and I guess most things), but because poems are (often) so short you can actually experience the change over a series of days or weeks of rereading, or even, still, over the space of years. When I first read Jennifer Grotz’s “Poppies” all I could tell you was that I liked its sound. I didn’t have any idea what the poem was about. I just liked letting the words fall off my tongue when I read it aloud. It was elemental, and I think almost every poem I love is like that for me. At a base level it just sounds good. “That’s how the rain comes” just sounds good. “Black pepper and blood” just sounds good. But then I went back and I saw the philosophy at work. Grotz writes of our constant desire to tame the world, and even the righteousness of that desire (“shouldn’t we love all things equally back?”). She writes of the anguish that ultimately comes from trying (the poppies are beautiful but only “like the feral cat who purrs and rubs against your leg / But will scratch if you touch back”) and then, finally, our sadness at the whole thing. “Love is letting the world be half-tamed,” Grotz writes. I think you could say that about a lot more than just the natural world that she is addressing. That’s a lesson we’re constantly learning. Read More
January 5, 2012 Arts & Culture The Wedding Party By Sophie Pinkham As Kim Kardashian recently reminded us, marriage is no longer the inevitable result of a wedding; the ritual is easily divorced from the institution. This is a source of some comfort to the single person approaching thirty, bombarded by engagement announcements and Facebooked wedding photo albums. Just a few more years of this, you tell yourself, and people will start getting divorced. So this fall I was tickled to receive an invitation to a fake wedding in New Orleans. With all the phoniness announced up front, there was no need for jealousy (I’ll die alone!), anxiety (She’s making a terrible mistake!), or expensive gifts (But I can’t even afford health insurance!). Read More
January 4, 2012 Arts & Culture On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. RIP Josef Skvorecky. The Adequate Gatsby. Jay Caulfield? Actors Anonymous. The strange mystery of Michiko Kakutani’s Twitter. The strange experience of eating with Marianne Moore. “By two o’clock on New Year’s Day in this Dickens bicentennial year, I already found myself wishing that either he or I had never been born.” Reading North Korea. Martin Luther online. “The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.” The world’s most expensive book? A good year for the Good Book.
January 4, 2012 On Music Sodad By Janine de Novais On December 17, Cesária Évora died of respiratory complications following a stroke and heart surgery. Thousands of mourners not only sang but also applauded loudly during the funeral procession. She had said, when announcing her retirement in September, “I’m sorry, but now I have to rest.” Before Cesária Évora, being Cape Verdean meant being from an invisible country. When I was growing up in Europe in the early eighties, the islands I called home did not appear on the maps we studied in school. Little obnoxious Belgian classmates would accuse me of inventing the place. My other friends had it easy. If someone asked where they were from, they could answer, “I am Belgian,” “I am Dutch,” “I am Moroccan.” They could respond, whereas I always found myself giving long-winded answers that included the phrases five hundred kilometers, west coast, and Senegal; and required cutting the air in the shape of Africa and picking a spot somewhere in the middle of an imagined ocean. There—that’s where I’m from. I might as well have said, Nowhere. I distinctly remember how this changed when Cesária Évora became a worldwide sensation. It was sudden and startling; I could now tell anybody I was Cape Verdean and expect them to reply with her name, as if it were a greeting: You’re Cape Verdean? Oh, Cesária Évora! She encompassed all I wanted to say about home: her voice was the easy pace, the maritime air, the raspy beauty, and the full sound of the port city of Mindelo, her hometown and mine. In the summer of 2005, when I was home in Mindelo for the summer, my grandmother took me along to visit Cesária. Read More
January 3, 2012 Nostalgia At the Gettin’ Place By Aaron Gilbreath If someone had asked my granddad where he got the chaps in this photo, he might have replied, “At the gettin’ place.” His speech was rich with colorful phrases. To him, a convincing salesman was someone who “could sell eggs to a chicken,” the relationship between a person’s actions and character best summarized with “Whatever’s in the well comes up in the bucket.” And when dismissing someone unsavory, he preferred the placid “Let ’em peck shit with the crows” to a crass “Fuck them.” So many of his sayings reflected elements of the hardscrabble, rural world that shaped him. The gettin’ place in this picture is a roadside stand in Apache Junction, Arizona. Largely known nowadays for its scenery and suburbs, back in 1947, Apache Junction was a fringe outpost east of Phoenix with a few cafés and tourist traps along the highway. Signs announced: Postcards! Indian jewelry! Pan for gold! Read More