May 29, 2012 Video & Multimedia Watch: The Great Gatsby, 1926 By Sadie Stein While Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby trailer is on everyone’s lips, it’s far from the first time F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel has been captured on celluloid. Everyone remembers the 1974 Robert Redford vehicle, but there was also the 1949 adaptation and, before that, a silent 1926 version scripted by Fitzgerald himself. All that survives—to anyone’s knowledge—is the footage that follows.
May 29, 2012 In Memoriam In Memoriam: Marina Keegan By The Paris Review It is with deep sadness that we note the death of our reader Marina Keegan. Marina graduated last week from Yale, where she was a finalist for the Wallace Prize in creative writing, a leader of the Occupy Morgan Stanley protest, and a staff writer for the Yale Daily News. One of her most popular articles, on the path from Yale to Wall Street, earned her a guest column in The New York Times Dealbook. A musical she wrote, Independents, is set to be performed this summer at the New York Fringe Festival. She died Saturday afternoon in a car accident at the age of twenty-two. Marina came to the Review recommended by her classmates, who described her as the star writer of their class. She was funny, self-assured, blazingly bright, full of mature dedication, and passionate for life. In her final column for the Daily News, she exhorted her readers to “make something happen to this world.” Our hearts go out to her family and friends.
May 29, 2012 On the Shelf Singing Babushki, Bartending Poets, Cupcakes By Sadie Stein Cupcake invasion: American terminology replaces fairy cake among British children. At 62 White, we’re a bit obsessed with the Buranovskiye Babushki. Nature lovers? Meet the weekly Bookbirder report. The Bard of McSorley’s. Saddam Hussein’s daughter seeks a publisher for her father’s memoirs.
May 25, 2012 Bulletin A Little Vacation from Writing By Sadie Stein The most obvious attraction of quotation is that it gives you a little vacation from writing—the other person is doing the work. All you have to do is type. But there is a reason beyond sloth for my liking of quotation at length. It permits you to show the thing itself rather than the pale, and never quite right, simulacrum that paraphrase is. —Janet Malcom, The Art of Nonfiction No. 4 Happy Memorial Day! Enjoy the long weekend.
May 25, 2012 This Week’s Reading What We’re Loving: Bejeweled Ostriches, Robot Dancers By The Paris Review I know it’s dumb to bet on which novels—which anything—will endure and which won’t. So why, reading Endless Love, Scott Spencer’s 1979 novel of romantic obsession, do I keep thinking, This will outlast us all? Maybe because it reminds me of other novels that have stayed fresh over the decades without the benefit of “classic”—or even cult classic—status: books like Victory, or Rebecca, or The Transit of Venus or The White Hotel or, in a funny way, Mating. You could make a much longer, even more random list, but there’s something they all have in common, something to do with technical sophistication, urgency, and shamelessness, as if the plot came welling up out of a nightmare. They are, you might say, too strong to be classics; they don’t need champions or explaining. People will just keep making each other read them. —Lorin Stein After my most recent binge at Westsider Books, I found myself holding a copy of something titled The Minikins of Yam. Maybe it’s all these rainy afternoons, but lately I’ve missed the middle school era of my reading life, when “guilty pleasure” was the only category. I freely admit that I chose this paperback by Thomas Burnett Swann, an almost entirely forgotten 1970s author of “neo-romantic fantasy,” solely on account of its awesome cover art, in which a horned lady sallies forth atop a bejeweled ostrich. But Yam delivers exactly what George Barr’s cover art promises: basilisks, subterfuge, and beast-headed gods. If you, too, are an adult human still coping with the end of Harry Potter, look for one of these gorgeous DAW paperbacks to help fill the void. —Allison Bulger Happy Memorial Day Weekend! If mysophobia (or better options) keep you from the opening of public pools this weekend, I suggest reading David Foster Wallace’s “Forever Overhead,” a story from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in which a pubescent boy celebrates his thirteenth birthday at a local public pool. You get splash fights, diving-board lines, too-tight suits, Marco Polo—the stuff of poolside dreams—and the fierce awkwardness and exposed, liquid thoughts that public pools and puberty bring forth. Wallace tells the story with manic detail and emotional exactitude, and, as always with dear DFW, it’s at once playful and meditative, unlikely and perfect. —Elizabeth Nelson I’ve been home sick for the past two days and have found that Space Oddities: A Compilation of Rare European Library Grooves from 1977–1984 is the perfect sound track to a fever. Not a ringing endorsement? Well, you may just have to listen to this collection of carefully culled (by French DJs, naturally) clips from commercials, movies, and TV shows for yourself. I still have my ’08 CD, but good news: the whole album is on Spotify! Try “Robot Dancer.” —Sadie Stein My experience with Egyptian art is limited mostly to the blockbuster stuff—I remember seeing traveling shows in Texas, where the heavy eye makeup and big jewelry of the statuettes and masks seemed to make a certain kind of sense—and it’s impressive, to say the least. But now I’m finding myself wowed by the smaller, less overtly extraordinary objects in the Met’s “Dawn of Egyptian Art” show (I’ve spent a lot of time with the catalogue as well). The flash of gold and scale is replaced here with the innate beauty of natural materials and form, like a frog carved from a black stone flecked with white; a basket filled with tiny fish, all incised into a single piece of powdery steatite; and the head of a bovid chiseled from clay-hued flint. I’m also unduly impressed with the various hippopotamus-shaped objects—not surprising, since I’ve long been the proud owner of a tubby blue “William.” —Nicole Rudick
May 25, 2012 On the Shelf Sexy Typewriters, Wodehouse Nonsense By Sadie Stein Apparently, typewriter erotica was a thing in the 1920s. (NSFW-ish.) The most influential lyricist in music? T.S. Eliot. Philip Roth writes in to the Atlantic to set the record straight on his mental health. The Wodehouse random quote generator is a glorious time-waster. The New Yorker tweets Jennifer Egan’s new story, 140 characters at a time.