May 1, 2012 Arts & Culture Bookitecture By Sadie Stein Kansas City Public LibraryIt was Thomas à Kempis who wrote, “I have sought rest everywhere, and have found it nowhere, save in a little corner, with a little book.” Would Flavorwire’s slideshow of book edifices have provided the ultimate in serenity, or the reverse? What if the corner were itself a book? Whatever else your reaction, we imagine awe will figure in somewhere. Below, a few of our favorites. Argument #2, by Tom Bendtsen Marta Minujin's collaborative Tower of Babel Matej Kren’s Scanner Book Igloo, by Miler Lagos
May 1, 2012 At Work Something Out of Something: Talking with Etgar Keret By Rebecca Sacks In 2006, the great book-blurber and novelist Gary Shteyngart called Etgar Keret’s The Nimrod Flipout “the best work of literature to come out of Israel in the last five thousand years—better than Leviticus and nearly as funny.” Keret may indeed be the most loved and widely read Israeli writer working today. He is known for his very short short stories, which are often described as “surreal” and “absurd.” It’s certainly the case that they do not adhere to the laws of the physical universe. In his most recent collection, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door (published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a talking fish grants wishes; a woman unzips her boyfriend to reveal the German gentile inside; a middle-aged man is kidnapped and taken to his childhood. But at the heart of Keret’s writing is a deep compassion. His characters may be enmeshed in paradoxes unique to Israel—with its fraught borders, fragmented populations, and newly ancient language—but it’s always their humanity that shines through. Keret is also a filmmaker. With his wife, Shira Geffen, he directed Jellyfish (2009), which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and has had his work adapted to film, including Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006). Over the course of two weeks, during which his father passed away from cancer (he has written about his father for Tablet), Keret generously corresponded over e-mail for this interview. Read More
May 1, 2012 On the Shelf ‘Walden’ the Video Game, Merwin the Movie, Space-Age Books! By Sadie Stein Walden: the most contemplative video game ever created? W. S. Merwin: the movie. The dog from The Artist has a book deal. Gertrude Stein’s bad war record. This is your kids on books. The Casablanca e-book: the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Predictions from 1962 on the future of book publishing: “Books will be smoother, faster and slicker, and will be strongly influenced by space travel.” New York Public Library, Monday afternoon.
April 30, 2012 Arts & Culture Flannery O’Connor and the Habit of Art By Kelly Gerald Illustration from The Spectrum. “For the writer of fiction,” Flannery O’Connor once said, “everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.” This way of seeing she described as part of the “habit of art,” a concept borrowed from the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. She used the expression to explain the way of seeing that the artist must cultivate, one that does not separate meaning from experience. The visual arts became one of her favorite touchstones for explaining this process. Many disciplines could help your writing, she said, but especially drawing: “Anything that helps you to see. Anything that makes you look.” Why was this emphasis on seeing and vision so important to her in explaining how fiction works? Because she came to writing from a background in the visual arts, where everything the artist communicates is apprehended, first, by the eye. She had developed the habits of the artist, that way of seeing and observing and representing the world around her, from years of working as a cartoonist. She discovered for herself the nuances of practicing her craft in a medium that involved communicating with images and experimenting with the physical expressions of the body in carefully choreographed arrangements. Her natural proclivity for capturing the humorous character of real people and concrete situations, two rudimentary elements she later asserted form the genesis of any story, found expression in her prolific drawings and cartoons long before she began her career as a fiction writer. Read More
April 30, 2012 On Music The Magnetic Fields Tour Diary, Part 3 By Emma Straub There comes a point on every tour—very early on, after about the third show—when I completely forget that my traveling companions play music. We sit in airports together, we ride in crowded minivans, we play games, we eat both terrible and amazing meals. I think of them as my older siblings, some of whom are grumpy in the morning, others who always want to chat. What happens onstage is so separate from the rest of the experience that I really do forget that they all speak this other language—when I duck into the crowd every night, for just a few minutes here and there during the down times at the merch booth, it’s like waking up and realizing that the rest of my family is fluent in Japanese. When all together, we talk about the merch more than the music. That is not a joke or an exaggeration. Is that because it’s easier to talk about T-shirts (a quantifiable object) than the experience of playing music? I don’t know. But it was bothering me, this distance, so I decided to ask the band what they enjoy about the act of playing music. The first three responses came to me live, while we were all sitting in our hotel’s lobby bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Because they were (sick? warm? perverse? besotted?) individuals, the people in charge of the hotel sound system played nothing but the Magnetic Fields for the entire first day of our stay, and so while we were talking, we were also listening to their albums, played on shuffle. When there was an unusually long pause between songs, Stephin Merritt said to me, “We are listening to the absence of ourselves.” Read More
April 30, 2012 On the Shelf Futures, Fiction, Tigers: Happy Monday! By Sadie Stein Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, at 150. The Wall Street Journal examines the curious appeal of serial novels. The New York Times examines the future of publishing. The Millions examines the popularity of tiger lit. With e-books, fiction reigns supreme. James Franco as Hart Crane. iPhone chargers disguised as books.