May 22, 2012 On Music Endless Endless: Kraftwerk at MoMA By Hua Hsu I always feel a pinch of unease whenever someone begins busking on the subway. Part of this is born of a purely selfish anxiety, a personal calculation of whether I should compensate this performance or merely pretend that I’m not listening. But mostly, my discomfort owes to how strange it is to witness something so naked and earnest in a space that is so broad and impersonal. The riders of a train avoid making eye contact with each other, yet once someone starts singing, we cohere into an audience, if an unwilling one. It feels uniquely cruel to ignore something so heartfelt and unafraid in such close quarters. I was on my way to see one of Kraftwerk’s multimedia performances at the Museum of Modern Art when a middle-aged man with longish hair and a guitar boarded my train and began singing David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.” He strummed his guitar like someone who had been playing since he was a teen, and there was a ragged beauty to his voice, as though the words of this song were not inscrutable but in fact described his own melancholy. I was hypnotized by his impossibly sad rendition of a song I’ve heard hundreds of times but never understood. As the train skidded into the station, I regretted how short this leg of my journey was. I chased down the guitarist and gave him a few dollars. A guy in a hooded sweatshirt remarked to him, “Hey man—you should be on X-Factor.” Searching the crowd for anyone else who had shared in this soulful interlude, he caught my eye. “He should be on, right?” Read More
May 22, 2012 On the Shelf Burning Books, Listening to Just Kids, Casting Fleming By Sadie Stein For those with Spotify, all the songs mentioned in Just Kids, in playlist form. (Perfect for a rainy day!) Duncan Jones has signed on to direct a biopic of Ian Fleming, based on Andrew Lycett’s The Man Behind James Bond. Everyone knows the man himself okayed Sean Connery to play 007, but who should fill the enigmatic writer-spy’s shoes? A letter from Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Josepha Hale, author of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” has sold at auction for $164,000. In it, Poe refuses an offer to publish in Hale’s magazine, explaining, “To send you a crude or hastily written article would be injurious to me, and an insult to yourself—and I fear that I could, at present, do little more.” William Peter Blatty, better known as the author of The Exorcist, is suing Georgetown University in church court, disputing his alma mater’s right to still call themselves Catholic given some of its secular policies. “Frat boys burning textbooks to celebrate graduation burn down frat house.”
May 21, 2012 Bulletin App Time at The Paris Review By The Paris Review As David Carr reported in today’s New York Times, The Paris Review is partnering with The Atavist to bring you an app worthy of the magazine, with complete issues, rare archival material, our entire interview series … and (natch) the Paris Review Daily. Starting late this summer, you’ll be able to read us on your iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, or Sony Reader. Foreign readers, take heart! For four decades we’ve been looking for a cheap and timely way to get the Review to our fans abroad. Soon, whether you’re in Melbourne or Milan, you’ll be able to read our stories, interviews, and poems at the same moment as everyone else. Lovers of print, you take heart, too! Even those of us who hold no brief for gizmos will want to check out this app—for hard-to-find back issues, special anthologies, plus audio and video of your favorite writers. This is stuff we can only bring you digitally—and stuff nobody else can bring you. Stay tuned.
May 21, 2012 On History Special Agents: The Women of SOE By Simon Mawer Christine Granville They ranged from girls barely out of high school to mature mothers, from working-class women to aristocrats, from the plain to the beautiful, from the prim and proper to wild high-lifers. The only women from the Western Allies to bear arms in action during the Second World War, they suffered torture, the misery of the concentration camps, and death at the hands of Nazi butchers. They were a band of sisters such as has not been seen before or since, and the only thing they had in common was language—they all spoke French. Now, sixty-seven years after peace broke out in Europe, all but one or two are dead. They are the women agents of the Special Operations Executive, the special force founded in 1940 on the explicit orders of Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze.” Read More
May 21, 2012 Books A Panorama of The House of the Seven Gables By Jason Novak A ten-foot-tall panel illustrating the classic novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Click in and scroll down for the whole story. Read More
May 21, 2012 On the Shelf Cuckolds and Commutes: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein This writers’ workshop is inspired by the 7-train commute. Feel-good alert! A good samaritan bails out an endangered Vermont bookmobile. One affair, two sides of the story: when both cuckold and cad give their versions, and, by the way, the latter is John le Carré. The Marriage Plot, coming to a multiplex near you. (Okay, maybe not a multiplex.) Jay McInerney: “I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices.”