December 29, 2017 Best of 2017 The Inventions of Witches By Kathryn Nuernberger We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886. The inquisitors wanted something old from each witch they tortured—a Sabbath orgy or blood oath or cat demon or wolf-faced baby or some other verification of the stories they already believed. They also wanted something new, so they could feel, with each trial and execution, as if they were getting somewhere: With what instruments do you fly? What did the toad in the pot say? Which direction do you turn the horseshoe over the door to summon your demon? Read More >>
December 28, 2017 Best of 2017 On Making Oneself Less Unreadable By Hernan Diaz We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! A photograph of H. W. Fowler in sporting attire from his biography The Warden of English. Grammar enthusiasts either love Henry Watson Fowler or they have yet to encounter his work. It is possible to read his Dictionary of Modern Usage (1926) from cover to cover as a weird, wonderful essay; it is impossible to do so without laughing out loud. A few entries from the second edition, revised by Ernest Gowers: avoidance of the obvious is very well, provided that it is not itself obvious; but, if it is, all is spoilt. [If the reader believes] that you are attitudinizing as an epicure of words for whom nothing but the rare is good enough, or, worse still, that you are painfully endeavouring to impart some much needed unfamiliarity to a platitude, his feelings towards you will be something that is not admiration. The obvious is better than obvious avoidance of it … Read More >>
December 28, 2017 Best of 2017 Drawing Dogs in George Booth’s Living Room By Sophie Brickman Early pages from Here, George! Even with the most contemplative toddler on your lap, a dramatic reading of Sandra Boynton’s Moo, Baa, La La La! will probably top out at two minutes. That’s approximately how long it took Boynton—the beloved children’s author who’s sold more than seventy million books to date—to conceive of her latest board book. It’s called Here, George! and features George, a white dog with a red collar who happens to have a secret: he’s wild about dancing. Read More >>
December 28, 2017 Best of 2017 Salinger’s Nightmare By Bill Barich We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! J. D. Salinger on November 20, 1952. Photo: San Diego Historical Society In 1953, J. D. Salinger fled Manhattan for rural Cornish, New Hampshire, hoping to protect his privacy and find the solitude he needed for his work. The Catcher in the Rye, which spent thirty weeks on the New York Times’ best-seller list, had generated immeasurable publicity and adulation for Salinger, who wanted none of it. Among his new suitors were such Hollywood bigwigs as Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, both vying for the screen rights to Catcher. They failed to secure Salinger’s approval, as did many others, in turn—but that didn’t stop Bill Mahan, an unemployed former child star and devoted fan from Los Angeles, from giving it a shot. In the early sixties, he resolved to claim the film rights himself, even if it meant disturbing Salinger at home. Read More >>
December 28, 2017 Best of 2017 On Basquiat, the Black Body, and a Strange Sensation in My Neck By Aisha Sabatini Sloan We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Jean-Michel Basquiat, Back of the Neck, 1983, silkscreen with hand painting. While visiting Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I strained my back. My mother gave me the name of her former chiropractor. As I stood before him, I listed my symptoms, and in one quick gesture he ripped my pants down, without warning, just below the cheek. He hadn’t really looked at me while I spoke, so I wasn’t sure how to make sense of the way he’d stripped me. It was like he was going to spank or fuck me. He used a TENS machine to electrostimulate my muscles and I left with almost no back pain. A bit ambitious, I walked the several miles back to my hotel. It’s only now that I wonder what else might have prompted that need to wander so far by myself. Read More >>
December 27, 2017 Best of 2017 Unlocking the Unconscious Through Poetry By Matthew Zapruder We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Thiago Rocha Pitta, Heritage, 2007. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Thiago Rocha Pitta On the cover of this pocket-size edition of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the poet stands in a doorway. He wears the somehow simultaneously ill-advised and completely stylish ensemble of a half-unbuttoned patterned shirt and tight beltless pants. Looking closer, the doorway seems to open not to a room or to the outside but to a closet: on a shelf behind him there is a pot or urn, and the flatness of the photograph makes it seem a bit as if he is wearing it on his head, like a bizarre hat. He is looking straight out of the front of the book, with a direct, slightly furrowed expression. He is about to smile beneath his full mustache. Something strange is just about to happen. Read More >>