April 23, 2012 Bulletin Remembering Margaret Weatherford By Sadie Stein It is with deep sadness that we note the passing of Los Angeles writer Margaret Weatherford, who died this month at the age of forty-six. Her beautiful, miniature “Green Car, Nightfall” ran on the Daily last November. Friends remember Margaret on Zyzzyva and Little Star.
April 23, 2012 On Poetry Secrets Are Lies By Bonnie Nadzam A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a bright young writer who’s having some success: “You can keep a secret,” she wrote. “Right?” And my heart sank. Earlier that day, discussing a gift for her brother, I’d asked my eight-year-old niece, “Can you keep a secret?” She put her hands on her hips and sagely reminded me, “I don’t keep secrets. Secrets are lies.” In her family, “secret” is distinguished from “private.” My sister has taught her children that secrets hurt. Privacy protects. That very same evening, a woman who knowingly passed on an STD to a partner without disclosing it (privately defending her action with my spouse and me because, she says, the STD is so common), publicly “liked” on Facebook a page called “The Respect and Dignity Campaign,” whereby all likers will “treat everyone with respect and dignity.” The following morning, two poems about secrecy, lies, and public and private matters crossed my desk. My attention was roused. Read More
April 23, 2012 Arts & Culture How to Sharpen Pencils: A Demonstration By Sadie Stein If you’ve yet to hear about David Rees’s manifesto How to Sharpen Pencils, perhaps you’d enjoy a demonstration? Here, the author exhibits proper technique. (Pencil snobs will surely rejoice.)
April 23, 2012 Studio Visit “The Rat Is a Hero”: In the Studio with Emily Mayer By Daisy Atterbury Children are posing near Damien Hirst’s large intestine. A young couple is engaged in a shoulder rub, the recipient with a bracing hand on what may be the sigmoid colon. Upstairs, caterers put flowers on round tables, and cameramen survey Tate-goers ignoring For the Love of God encased below in a black box. In the gift shop, The Incomplete Truth anamorphic cup and saucer is on sale for £2.50. Between the Tate and Emily Mayer’s Norfolk studio is a gap of British countryside that from a train car feels like an hour-and-a-half stretch of live cows. I sit down and immediately hear that Emily hates instant coffee and loves rats. The Norfolk Wildlife Trust celebrates the area’s presence of weasels and more unusual species, but Emily prefers dogs to Chinese water deer. She has several dogs, some animate, some either frozen or cast in resin. “The electricity board are coming at 8 A.M. tomorrow to cut trees,” she had written in an e-mail the night before, “and our power will be off all day. I do have a generator in our woodland cabin, so maybe I could drag that in.” It turns out that the water is out with the power, and the phones don’t work. We still manage to have coffee. Read More
April 23, 2012 Arts & Culture Bookmobiles of the World By Sadie Stein 1949 Chevy Bookmobile I’ve had a soft spot for bookmobiles ever since I read 1964’s career romance for young moderns, The Girl on the Bookmobile and learned how much pleasure and knowledge these roving libraries could provide! It was a trimly built van-like conveyance. At the rear, the doors swung open to show a miniature room equipped with shelves already stocked with books, a tiny desk, and racks clipped wherever a stray space presented itself. (Romance and the dissemination of books ensue.) You can imagine how thrilled we were by the 1928 Bookmobile Boing Boing showed us a few days ago and, now, by Flavorwire’s roundup of mobile books around the world! Check out the whole thing, but here are a few of our favorites. We don’t see why bookmobiles shouldn’t join food trucks as a twenty-first-century craze! Read More
April 23, 2012 On the Shelf Corrections and Test Questions: Happy Monday By Sadie Stein He counted both Einstein and Hitler as fans. Rediscovering Karl May. “We were breaking down Dad’s library.” What Lena Dunham is reading. What Olivia Newton-John is reading. What, exactly, is YA? A passage given to New York’s eighth graders on a standardized reading exam is either a masterpiece of postmodernism or completely incoherent. A brief history of the New Yorker’s notable corrections.