May 10, 2012 On the Shelf Browning at 200, Publishers at 83 By Sadie Stein Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Lethem are among the seven hundred writers and cultural marchers who signed a letter protesting the planned revamp of the New York Public Library. Dickens isn’t the only one turning two hundred! Wishing a happy bicentenary to Robert Browning. Madame Bovary, the pie chart. The James Joyce papers go digital. Maurice Sendak’s books thrilled children and terrified adults. And speaking of Sendak, more memories and tributes. Rock 27 is publishing eighty-three.
May 9, 2012 At Work Family Matters: Alison Bechdel on ‘Are You My Mother?’ By Peter Terzian Alison Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, Fun Home , told the story of her small-town Pennsylvania childhood, which was dominated by her often tyrannical father. An obsessive home restorer and closeted homosexual, he died a possible suicide just as his college-age daughter was coming out as a lesbian. Six years after Fun Home, Bechdel has published a second memoir in comics form, Are You My Mother? , but it’s more than simply the maternal counterpart to its predecessor. Thrillingly discursive, it’s framed by the artist’s struggle to create Fun Home and broker her mother’s acceptance of its public unearthing of family secrets. Bechdel recounts episodes from her romantic relationships, her beginnings as the cartoonist of the long running Dykes to Watch Out For strip, and her struggles, through fruitful years of psychotherapy, to come to terms with her sometimes difficult relationship with her mother. (The book may be one of the truest accounts of what it’s like to be on the therapist’s couch today.) Throughout, Bechdel plumbs the life and writings of Donald Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst who pioneered the field of object relations and stressed the importance of early mother and child bonding. Over lunch at New York’s Via Emilia, Bechdel confessed her childhood affection for “silly children’s comics like Little Lulu and Richie Rich,” which shows in the clarity and warmth of her artwork. Read More
May 9, 2012 Out of Print The Man Who Saw Tomorrow By Rachael Maddux For a while after college, one of my husband Joe’s best friends worked at a used books–and-CDs store in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we all grew up. It was called McKay but everyone called it McKay’s—a tiny but somehow crucial distinction—and it was a wonderland of dog-eared pages and scratched ninety-two-cent discs and ineffable smells of humanity. Michael was always bringing home strange treasures that he’d eventually sell back for the exact amount he’d paid, but sometimes things would be too good not to hold onto. One summer Joe’s birthday merited a particularly special gift: a slim black paperback with a creased cover bearing a photo of a goateed man staring out from the center of a pink orb. Flaming rainbows flanked him on either side, and rays of light shot out from underneath his likeness. If anyone ever warranted such a wonder of post-midcentury graphic design, it was surely this man, Doc Anderson, who was, as his book cover proclaimed in yellow caps, THE MAN WHO SEES TOMORROW. The book was published in 1970, its spine proclaiming it a “Paperback Library Occult Original” (retail price: seventy-five cents). It’s part biography and part defensive exegesis of Anderson’s psychic pronouncements, all researched and compiled by Robert E. Smith, which seems to be a pseudonym for one Warren B. Smith, who penned dozens of books on paranormal and cryptozoological subjects during his decades-long career. (A sampling from his bibliography: Let’s Face Facts About Flying Saucers, 1967; Strange Abominable Snowmen, 1970, Lost Cities of the Ancients—Unearthed!, 1976; and, inexplicably, The Sensual Male, 1971.) Read More
May 9, 2012 On the Shelf Remembering Sendak, Gaining Honors By Sadie Stein Book sales around the world in real time. America’s Next Top Writer? The Columbia custodian turned Columbia honors grad! Maurice Sendak’s life in pictures. Sendak speaking on his eightieth birthday.
May 8, 2012 On Poetry A Great Stag, Broad-Antlered: Rediscovering Hyam Plutzik By Edward Moran and Phillip Witte Plutzik as a professor at the University of Rochester, around 1950. This photo was taken by one of his students.The conclusion of Hyam Plutzik’s 1962 poem, Horatio, provide an apt commentary on Plutzik’s own unobtrusive presence in the world of American letters: A great stag came out of the woods, Broad-antlered, approaching slowly on the moonlit field, And looked about him like a king and re-entered the dark. The seismic shifts in American culture since 1960 have made footing precarious indeed for those broad-antlered poets who wrote in a hieratic and philosophic diction. Eschewing the more vernacular excursions of the Beats or the confessional poets of the 1970s, Plutzik published three full collections of poems, the last, Horatio, an eighty-nine-page dramatic poem in which Hamlet’s friend grapples with the charge to “report me and my cause aright.” Read More
May 8, 2012 Contests Win Two Tickets to See John Irving, Live By Sadie Stein As fans of John Irving know, interviews with the legendary writer are rare indeed. So the chance to see Irving interviewed live don’t come around every day. But this Friday, he’ll sit down for an hour-long radio chat with Ron Bennington, and you could be in the audience. (Provided you can get to Manhattan!) Here’s how it works: write the jacket copy—no more than five sentences—describing Irving’s imaginary next novel. Topics may include, but need not be restricted to, bears, wrestling, New England, sex workers, writers, and Vienna. (Probably at least two would be a good idea.) Please submit all entries to [email protected] by noon EST, Thursday, May 10.