April 18, 2012 On the Shelf Sylvia Plath, Robot Librarians, and Lickable Wallpaper By Sadie Stein How to write a best seller? “If you are like me, you must always have something to read in the bathroom. Anything will do.” Meet identical-twin writers. Amazon to reissue James Bond. “Is it taboo to write about baking and Sylvia Plath?” Paper and Salt proves that whatever else, the results can be delicious. In a Roald Dahl image come to life, meet the world’s first lickable wallpaper. Building a library of jokes, hoaxes, and literary frauds. Libraries jump through hoops (and hire book robots) to stay alive. Dwight MacDonald and the art of the essay.
April 17, 2012 On Film White Noir By Jane Yager A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone booths for cryptic conversations. The man, Mr. Holz, is a geophysicist of unknown origin. He has come here to work for the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. City-A is mesmerizingly bleak, a grid of concrete high-rises set between a brackish sea and a wintry industrial wasteland, all of it reeking of environmental contamination and failed utopia. Many things, Holz notices, are amiss here. Clocks don’t run sixty seconds to the minute in City-A. The drinking water is spiked with lithium, a shadowy entity has confiscated his passport, language is rationed, and what exactly is this New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, anyway? As the bewildered-looking Holz moves through the city, is he piecing together clues to solve these mysteries or just being shuttled around by a powerful unseen force? This, roughly, is the storyline of whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, the new film by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. But because this noir is, as the title promises, algorithmic, the film has no beginning, middle, or end. Read More
April 17, 2012 First Person On Gruck By Sadie Stein Stout toby jugs are gruckimish. So are the giant baby-head sculptures on the lawn of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Lollipop Guild, Hogarth cartoons, Captain Beefheart, and many parts of Petronius’s Satyricon, especially the verse about the insipid eunuch. Gruckimish is a word my best friend Elaine and I invented when we were approximately four years old, and one we’ve used ever since. To our minds, then and now, it fills a gaping void in the lexicon. Gruckimish lies somewhere between funny, grotesque, and cute. There is no exact equivalent in English; if there’s one in another language, I would like to know it. Gruckimish things are often anthropomorphic, but by no means exclusively. The main thing about something gruckimish is that gruck (the noun form) is always the unintended byproduct of the creator’s intention. Things that are supposed to be funny are rarely gruckimish. On the other hand, to call something gruckimish is never a value judgment: it is a simple statement of fact. Read More
April 17, 2012 On the Shelf Pulitzers, Saints, and Camera Obscura! By Sadie Stein Pulitzer winners are announced. For the first time since 1977, fiction is snubbed. HuffPo wins its first in its seven-year history. Speaking of winners, Matilda sweeps the Oliviers. Picador’s list of Lit Deep Cuts is actually a pretty good workday sound track! The British Library has acquired St. Cuthbert’s Gospel, the oldest known complete European book, discovered more than nine hundred years ago in a saint’s coffin. Seventy-seven years of (amazing) Romanian comics. Rupert Murdoch versus Harry Evans: The Movie. Today’s question: Wharton or Girls?
April 16, 2012 Books Winston Churchill, Man of Style By Jason Diamond One could hardly call the area around Fifty-second Street, between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan, off the beaten path. The sleekly designed New York City Ferrari dealership sits two blocks away on Fifty-fifth, the Cartier American flagship store is one block down in a six-story neo-Renaissance style, and the archbishop of New York conducts holy business at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral just a few skips down the road. Midtown West isn’t exactly a destination for book shoppers—not flush with indie shops like Brooklyn, bereft of the used-paperback vendors who line the streets along various parts of Greenwich Village. But 55 East Fifty-second’s marble lobby, inside the triangle-shaped office building with a Gotham-style green-glass facade, conceals an equitably valuable treasure in the world’s only standing bookstore dedicated to the works of England’s former prime minister, Winston Churchill—Chartwell Booksellers. And while the tiny bookstore might seem at odds with its location, it actually makes perfect sense that one of history’s best-dressed leaders would have a store in one of the world’s most upscale shopping districts. Read More
April 16, 2012 Books The Language of Men By Thomas Mallon The New York Times made its first mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs on June 14, 1914, when the paper’s Book Review included Tarzan of the Apes among “One Hundred Books for Summer Reading.” Having asked publishers to supply the hundred titles, the Review editors did “not pretend to say what consideration has inspired each . . . particular selection”—a note of caution that veers toward alarm in the editors’ capsule assessment of Burroughs’s recent creation: “The author has evidently tried to see how far he could go without exceeding the limits of possibility.” The plot description that followed made it clear that, “possibility” aside, plausibility had certainly been breached: Lord Greystoke and his wife are marooned on the African jungle coast, build a cabin, and become accustomed to the wild life there. A son is born and the mother dies. A herd of giant apes invade the cabin, kill Lord Greystoke, take away the child, and rear it as their own. When the child has become a man he possesses the habits, the language, and the great strength of the apes. One day a white woman is put ashore from a ship, and the ape man falls in love with her, and rescues her from many perils. He also plays the part of instructor to a scientific expedition. The scene then shifts to Wisconsin, where the heroine is rescued from more perils. Meanwhile the ape man has been educated in the culture of his kind, and he finally proves that he has a soul as well as superhuman strength. Burroughs was surely unfazed by this. Read More