April 5, 2012 Out of Print LOL Cats By Sadie Stein Out of Print is a new series in which we feature our favorite library discards, used-bookstore finds, and family hand-me-downs. Circa 2002, I forced my eighteen-year-old brother to drive me to a church basement in the outer suburbs of Chicago to watch a community-theater production of a play about the life of poet Stevie Smith. As I recall, we got into a screaming fight on the way there, and he further enraged me by falling asleep during both acts and leaving the theater several times for cigarette breaks. In truth, the show was abysmal, and in retrospect–given the number of soliloquies by a lead with a highly unconvincing British accent and very distracting Dutch-boy wig–his behavior was downright saintly. All of which is to say, I was obsessed with Stevie Smith. I liked her idiosyncratic verse and her strange novels; I was interested in her latter-day career as a beatnik cult figure; I loved the book of her collected sketches, Some Are More Human than Others. But the root of my obsession was a little-known text I’d picked up in a London charity shop, 1959’s Cats in Colour. Read More
April 5, 2012 On Television Dear Don Draper, Relax Already By Adam Wilson Dear Don Draper, I just got off the phone with my mother, and she’s a bit upset. This is not your fault, I know. Mothers! You never really had one, so let me explain. They’re a complicated bunch, prone to outbursts of emotion. Always clutching their chests like their hearts are exploding; always assuming any discoloration is cancer. For example, your ex-wife, one of the worst mothers around. One minute she’s slinkily horny, and the next she’s screaming at Sally for no reason. One minute she’s stuffing her face with Bugles—they still have those by the way—and the next she’s convinced that she’s dying, ruining your fun by forcing you to face mortality. See what I mean? And Betty’s not even Jewish! Speaking of Jewish: my mother. “Daddy and I almost plotzed,” she tells me, “when that Jewish father said that ridiculous prayer. I mean, they could have had a normal Jewish person. You know, someone who went to NYU or Parsons even. Not some schlub in a madras jacket.” Read More
April 4, 2012 Bulletin Vote for TPR in the Tournament of Lit Mags! By Sadie Stein Final 4 Bracket Dear readers, This is a matter of honor. If you love and believe in The Paris Review, now is the time to show what our fans are made of. We are currently in the Final Four of the Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour Tournament of Literary Magazines. As they explain, “[Oxford American] will now take on another program with a shining pedigree, The Paris Review, in what promises to be a battle of titans. The surprises this year are all on the other side of the bracket. Many thought that the Georgia program had grown too old and could never return to its glory days under coach Lindberg, but their execution has been flawless, and they play a measured style that has everyone buzzing about the old days. The real Cinderella story of the tourney, however, has been Ecotone, a tiny program that, thanks in part to the recruiting pull of recent grad (and power forward) Edith Pearlman, has made a surprising run, littering the courts with higher seeds.“ You know what to do. (If you don’t, it’s vote in comments.) You gotta believe.
April 4, 2012 On the Shelf Walk Like Updike, Live Like Lowell, Eat Your Words By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. RIP illustrator John Griffiths. A slideshow of his Penguin covers. Speaking of covers, Meg Wolitzer asks whether male authors garner better ones. The best spokesman for an Ernest Hemingway novel? Papa himself. The world’s first edible cookbook is printed on sheets of fresh pasta, blueprints for its own destruction that, when baked, turn into a lasagna. Perhaps not shockingly, members of Russia’s Public Chamber have criticized a school notebook, part of the Great Russians series, the cover of which features an image of Stalin in military regalia. The publishers, defiant, point out that in a recent TV contest, Stalin placed third in a vote on the country’s “greatest historical figures.” The Awl’s number-one tip for writing the Great American Novel? “Move out of Brooklyn.” The big news in Salt Lake City was not that yours truly was there (although I was): luminaries of the horror genre converged on the Beehive State for the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards, where writers Joe McKinney and Allyson Byrd won big. In which Ian McEwan helps his son with an essay on one of his own novels … and gets “a very low mark.” Sylvia Plath slept here (and take a peek into fourteen other writers’ bedrooms). Robert Lowell wrote here—on Manhattan’s West Sixty-seventh Street—and it can be yours for $685,000. The Little House books are canonical—literally. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical series join the Library of America. John Updike predicted New York’s newly announced 6 1/2 Avenue in a 1956 New Yorker article: “As a service to readers who are too frail or shy for good-natured hurly-burly, we decided to plot a course from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that would involve no contact with either Fifth or Sixth Avenue.”
April 3, 2012 Arts & Culture “An Egoless Practice”: Tantric Art By Lauren O'Neill-Butler Bikaner, 2002, 14 It could be a cult classic: the debut edition of Siglio Press’s Tantra Song—one of the only books to survey the elusive tradition of abstract Tantric painting from Rajasthan, India—sold out in a swift six weeks. Rendered by hand on found pieces of paper and used primarily for meditation, the works depict deities as geometric, vividly hued shapes and mark a clear departure from Tantric art’s better-known figurative styles. They also resonate uncannily with lineages of twentieth-century art—from the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism to Minimalism—as well as with much painting today. Rarely have the ancient and the modern come together so fluidly. For nearly three decades, the renowned French poet Franck André Jamme has collected these visual communiqués, and it hasn’t been easy: in 1985 he survived a fatal bus accident while traveling to visit Hindu tantrikas in Jaipur. In Tantra Song, Jamme assembles some of the most pulsating works he’s acquired, while unpacking his experiential knowledge of Tantra’s cosmology. Western views of Tantra tend toward hyperbole. (The New York Times recently published an article, “Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here,” noting, “Early in the twentieth century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain.”) Jamme’s book serves as a corrective to this slant and sheds significant light on the deep historical roots—and fruits—of the practice. Siglio will release a second edition of the book on April 19. Jamme and I recently discussed these anonymously made paintings, the altered states they induce, and their timeless aesthetics. Read More
April 3, 2012 Arts & Culture On Tour with the Magnetic Fields: Part 2 By Emma Straub The People Behind the People This tour is the biggest the Magnetic Fields have ever done, in terms of the number of people traveling. In addition to the five members of the band and one eighteen-month-old baby, there are five members of the crew: me and my husband (merch, blog, Twitter), Jason Thompson (tour manager), Mike Yesenosky (sound), and the very lovely Julia Knapp (nanny). That brings the grand total to eleven people, and with all the suitcases, instruments, and gear, we are a small society all our own. Someone is always holding the leftover snacks from the previous night’s greenroom, and someone is always holding assorted painkillers and stomach remedies. We are all getting very good at traversing airport terminals and hotel lobbies en masse, like a pack of nomads, or zombies, depending on the amount of sleep achieved the night before. The Hotel Life This tour is more grueling than the last few I’ve done with the Magnetic Fields, and we are rarely in one place longer than a day. This means less time for exploring the cities and more confused moments in the middle of the night when one wakes up and needs to pee. Stephin Merritt (vocals, harmonium, melodica, kazoo) told me a story about their last European tour, during which he was staying in a room so small that when he opened what he thought was the door to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he in fact had opened the door to the hallway and promptly locked himself out. In the last ten days, we’ve stayed in six different hotels, and so in addition to having no clue what day of the week it is, I also now have no clue where the bed is in relation to the door or what floor my room is on. Of course, there are perks to staying in so many hotels. At heart, I am not a kleptomaniac, but when it comes to hotels, I can’t help myself. Read More