April 26, 2012 Arts & Culture Black and White and Red All Over By Sadie Stein Last year, Benjamin Marra released a series of zines based on the 2000 American Psycho film adaptation. Now, the artist, along with Portland’s Floating World Comics store, is reproducing American Psycho as a limited-edition broadsheet. From paper to celluloid to paper and now newsprint! (To say nothing of the remake.) And given protagonist Patrick Bateman’s seemingly routine existence, a newspaper feels especially apropos. (To say nothing of Christian Bale’s work in Newsies.) It’s all especially striking given the novel’s initial reception: as Bret Easton Ellis says in his recent Paris Review interview, Read More
April 26, 2012 On the Shelf Good-bye Doris Betts, Remembering Guy Davenport By Sadie Stein RIP Doris Betts. Our very own Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, on Guy Davenport, on the Rumpus. The case of Lena Dunham’s literary internship. Things you (maybe) didn’t know about E. B. White. Quoth the Globe and Mail, “A Prince Rupert elementary teacher has been told a quote from Dr. Seuss’ ‘Yertle the Turtle’ is a political statement that should not be displayed or worn on clothing in her classroom. The teacher included the quote in material she brought to a meeting with management after she received a notice relating to union material visible in her car on school property … The quote in question—“I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights”—comes from … the tale of a turtle who climbs on the backs of other turtles to get a better view. In the midst of a labor dispute between the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and the province, the quote was deemed unsuitable.”
April 25, 2012 On Television Dear Peggy Olson, Nice to Meet You By Adam Wilson Dear Peggy Olson, I haven’t heard back from Don, so I thought I’d try you instead. Draper might be a lost cause anyway, hormonal and unhinged, prone to mood swings and irrational behavior. One minute he’s weeping with wussy regret, and the next he’s attacking Megan with the cold-eyed ferocity of a grizzly bear or a Law and Order villain. I don’t know what’s gotten into the guy, but I suspect it might be my fault, these missives from the future fucking up his fragile worldview. He’s starting to remind me of this basketball player, Ron Artest. Artest was a baller for a while and a tough bastard, fighting fans in the stands and whatnot. Then he went through a spiritual awakening, did Dancing with the Stars, and legally changed his name to World Peace. A new man, or so we all thought. Until Sunday, when he elbowed some dude in the face just for having a sweet Mohawk. Maybe Heraclitus was right about character being fate. Read More
April 25, 2012 Arts & Culture The Pilgrim Trail By Sadie Stein Literary tourism is as old as time (or at least as old as the Lake District), but, due to a combination of new technology and easy travel, we seem to be living in its Golden Age. Last year, Wendy McClure reported from the Little House pilgrim trail, and Oxford, Mississippi, has drawn fans of Southern Gothic since Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel. On this site, you’ll recall Margaret Eby’s paeon to Eudora Welty’s Jackson garden. If you want to reenact The Canterbury Tales, well, you can. In recent years, readers have flocked to the Pacific Northwest to get a taste of Twilight; lovers of The Help have tried to get a taste of the 1960s in Greenwood, MS; and now, you can even experience the survivalist thrill of The Hunger Games in North Carolina. Over the weekend, the FT reported live from Germany’s “Fairy Tale Road,” on which one can walk in the steps of Pied Pipers (Hamlin), the Musicians of Bremen, and the sites where Grimm scholars believe Sleeping Beauty might have actually pricked her finger and Rapunzel let down her hair. (More easily verifiable are locales that figured in the brothers’ lives.) Of course, in real life, all is not fairy-tale perfect. Explains Günther Koseck, the German noble who inhabits Dornröschenschloss (“Sleeping Beauty’s castle”) during the castle’s weekly Sleeping Beauty reenactments, his enchanted princesses “have to always be young and beautiful, and that means they have to be replaced occasionally.”
April 25, 2012 In Memoriam A Singular Southern Gentleman Goes Out “Biting” By Gary Lippman Whenever I rang the phone at a certain house in the kudzu-covered college town of Gainesville, Florida, I knew what I was likely to hear: not a polite “hello” or “good afternoon,” but a gruff-voiced, rural Georgia-accented statement of self: “Harry Crews.” And whenever I visited my friend Harry, the notorious American novelist and essayist who died (“bit the big bagel,” he’d say) in March at the age of seventy-six, I knew what I’d likely find: a great boulder of a man in a bathrobe sunk into a brown recliner chair in a living room filled with books, photographs, and, on one wall, the framed quilted image of a typewriter. “Come on in, blood, grab a seat, how ya been?” Harry would call to me as I stepped inside. He took pride in rarely locking his home’s front door, just as he prided himself on keeping his number listed in the Gainesville white pages. “All’s good,” I’d say, dropping into a chair that faced his. “New York’s fine, how you been?” “Well, I’m hurting.” Read More
April 25, 2012 On the Shelf Crowdsourced Books, Twenties Muses, the World’s Worst Word By Sadie Stein Reckless, glamorous It Girls of the Jazz Age. The strange tale of Bram Stoker. For the first time since 1945, there will be a new German edition of Mein Kampf. Perhaps inevitably, a crowdsourced book written by the Internet. This Philip Larkin tribute was fantastic. The people have spoken, and they loathe the word moist.