May 15, 2012 On Television Dear Betty Draper Francis, Stop Weighing Your Food By Adam Wilson Dear Betty Draper Francis, As I write this I’m live-streaming President Barack Obama’s Barnard College commencement speech on my laptop. What’s a laptop? Imagine a typewriter that’s also a Sears catalogue that’s also a post office that’s also a high school yearbook. Oh, and in the dark before dawn, when the wind howls like a pack of rabid Dire Wolves and thunder claps like a thousand canon balls colliding in the ether, you can log on and look at pictures of cats wearing Halloween costumes. As for Obama, it’s true: he’s of African descent. More importantly, he’s brilliant and beautiful and a supporter of gay marriage. I wish you were with me, Betty, watching the president tell the women of tomorrow that, yes, you can close the gap between life as it is and life as you want it to be. Read More
May 15, 2012 Look Susan Sontag in a Teddy Bear Suit By Sadie Stein Photo by Annie LeibovitzWe recommend Flavorwire’s entire, inspired list of “Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Writers,” but this is really the must-see.
May 15, 2012 Arts & Culture Watch This: Telling Tales By Sadie Stein Here in New York, it’s dreary and gray. What better weather to enjoy a little Poe? No, not John Cusack. We were thinking more of this terrific 1954 animated version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” narrated by the incomparable James Mason. (Thanks, Page-Turner!)
May 15, 2012 First Person As Ever By Sadie Stein To paraphrase Mr. Bennett, my life holds few distinctions, but I do have a really good sign-off. Since I was twenty-one, I have ended all correspondence As ever. I’ll give credit where credit is due: I stole it. I first saw the valediction at the bottom of a professor’s e-mail. This professor was something of a legend at the university I attended, a gregarious scholar who had trained generations of burgeoning linguists. By the time I knew him he’d been teaching at the university for some fifty years and was as known for his periodic open houses as for his engaging lectures. I was a senior before I was invited to one of these parties, although really, anyone could go. But that year, I was taking the professor’s seminar and so was added to the guest list. It was a pleasant e-mail to receive by any standards: warm, welcoming, and written with just enough informality to suggest friendliness while maintaining dignity. And there, at the end, “as ever” and the professor’s name. I was immediately enchanted. Read More
May 15, 2012 On the Shelf Garcia Márquez Lives, Clockwork Orange Is Fifty By Sadie Stein Norwich, England, earns the title of a Unesco City of Literature. The curse of the New Yorker profile? Happy golden anniversary, Clockwork Orange. Perhaps happy isn’t the word? Copyediting Copyediting. Angela Garnett, daughter of Vanessa Bell, who chronicled her Bloomsbury childhood in a memoir, has died at ninety-three. Rumors of Gabriel García Márquez’s death were greatly exaggerated.
May 14, 2012 On Poetry At the Grave of Richard Hugo By Alice Bolin It is an indisputable fact that the memory of poet Richard Hugo haunts Missoula, Montana. This notion might first strike us as innocuous, obvious, falling within the simple domain of legacy. Thirty years after his death, he leaves equal endowments in Missoula, as the most important “Montana poet” and as a teacher of poetry: he was one of the first directors of the University of Montana’s renowned creative writing program and the author of a classic handbook on creative writing, The Triggering Town, that is filled with excellent, weird, and practical advice. Further related to the activity of haunting: Hugo’s poems famously concern places. He is known primarily as a regional poet, and many of his most famous poems are named for Montana towns or landmarks, like “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” “The Milltown Union Bar,” and “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir.” One can use his book of collected poems, Making Certain It Goes On, as a guidebook to Montana’s bleakest and loveliest destinations; titles of his poems will lead you to Garnet ghost town, St. Ignatius, Turtle Lake, Wisdom, and Fort Benton, finally winding back to what was once Hugo’s actual address in Missoula, 2433 Agnes Street. When Hugo wrote a poem about a place, he made the place a part of himself, and now that he’s gone, a part of him remains in those places. Read More