July 14, 2015 Contests #ReadEverywhere, All Summer Long By Dan Piepenbring A highly literate dog. If you haven’t heard, this summer we’re offering a joint subscription to The Paris Review and the London Review of Books for just $70 U.S. Everyone is excited about this deal—people, pets, pigeons. From now through August 31, post a photo of yourself reading The Paris Review or the London Review of Books on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest, and use the #ReadEverywhere hashtag and one of our magazines’ handles. The grand prize is an Astrohaus Freewrite, the hotly anticipated smart typewriter that lets you write virtually anywhere. Need some inspiration? Pinterest users can get a glimpse of the competition here. Subscribe today. And good luck! Bertie Pigeon reads the LRB.
July 14, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Downward Spiral By Sadie Stein It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the Monday-through-Wednesday crossword world, ELO is the most listened-to band in history, Ava the most popular girls’ name, and time divides into eras and eons. Think of it as the blue-plate special, but with Ali instead of meat loaf. There are algorithms and programs that can predict the frequency of these usages. Of course there are. But for those of us who begin our day with the easy jog of a crossword, that’s of no interest. We don’t need to know; we know. It’s not that writing in the answer for “Architect Saarinen” or “Actress Thurman” makes us feel smart, it makes us feel safe. As Stephen Sondheim said, “The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.” Read More
July 14, 2015 On the Shelf Beware the Mineshaft of Books, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Susanna Hesselberg’s ominous library, in Denmark. From 1859 to 1870, Dickens edited All the Year Round, a literary magazine that declined to identify its contributors. But a newly discovered twenty-volume set teeming with Dickens’s annotations threatens to blow everyone’s cover: in pencil, Dickens has noted the authors in each issue, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Lewis Carroll, and Eliza Lynn Linton. The Tale of Genji is a very long eleventh-century Japanese book by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, often cited as the world’s first novel. A new English translation suggests that its stories can still captivate many centuries later, even if those stories were hell to translate. “Every page is sprinkled with poems or phrases pointing to Chinese and Japanese literary sources that an eleventh-century aesthete might have been proud to notice but are lost on most Japanese today, let alone the reader of an English translation … A literal translation of Genji would be unreadable. And the vagueness, so poetic in Japanese, would simply be unintelligible to the Western reader.” Endurance lit—stories of extreme athletic feats in which one daring sportsman survives enormous hardship, et cetera to emerge on the other side a more thoughtful, ethical human being, et cetera—is a thriving subgenre, but what explains its appeal? “Here’s the most revealing facet of endurance lit: most of the best sellers in this genre are about self-imposed hardship. They are about sport, in its widest sense. True endurance is the kind shown by the sweatshop worker who arrives for her fourteen-hour shift, day after day, and is paid buttons … But books about sweatshop workers do not sell by the lorry load.” Public-service announcement: there are libraries and then there are “libraries,” which—watch out—will sometimes turn out to be never-ending pits lined with bookshelves, like this one. New York’s Brazenhead Books, a shop that’s more speakeasy than bookstore, faces an eviction notice, and its proprietor, Michael Seidenberg, is hoping for a billionaire donor. He may get his wish: since the threat of closure has begun to hover, “the secret store has become a ‘secret’ one, with much written about it. The New Yorker has a film crew documenting his exit, as the books begin to get boxed and moved, at least for now, in with his wife and dogs.”
July 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Sunshine Day By Sadie Stein A bank note of the Chung Hwa Republic. Since moving to a neighborhood with a rapidly aging population, it has been my observation that old people enjoy going to the bank. While banking is, for most of us, a necessary ordeal, it’s also easy to see the appeal for someone isolated: you get time and contact and attention—all while conducting some sort of business. Plus, the air-conditioning is generally glacial. The employees of my local branch are a patient bunch. On a recent visit, an old man in a baseball cap burst into the office where I was sitting, arranging a trip and enjoying the air-conditioning. “Where’s Melissa?” he demanded querulously. “I want to see Melissa!” “Melissa isn’t here anymore,” said her replacement. The old man looked bewildered and sad. Then he gathered himself up and said in my general direction, “Don’t expect any service around here!” and left. Read More
July 13, 2015 Correspondence That Swaggering, Bouncing Pronoun By Dan Piepenbring The only known photograph of John Clare, taken by W. W. Law in 1862. From John Clare’s letter to Eliza Emmerson, March 1830. Clare, born on this day in 1793, came from poverty and is sometimes dubbed “the peasant poet”; he’s known for his expansive poems on rural life and for his eventual turn toward insanity. By the end of his life, Clare had escaped from an asylum, and sometimes claimed to be Shakespeare, Lord Byron, or a prizefighter. This note, a polemic against the egotism of the first-person pronoun, was written in the midst of a deep depression seven years before he was hospitalized. By “points,” Clare means punctuation, which he disdained, thinking it an unnecessary hindrance to expression. Original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Read More
July 13, 2015 At Work Good Literary Citizens: An Interview with Ladan Osman By Alex Dueben Photo: Tariq Tarey The past two years have been eventful for Ladan Osman. Last year, her chapbook, Ordinary Heaven, was selected for inclusion in the box set Seven New Generation African Poets, a project of the African Poetry Book Fund, and she received the 2014 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for her manuscript The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, which was published in April by the University of Nebraska Press. “I have rarely encountered a young poet whose work was so completely its own thing,” writes Ted Kooser in his preface to Ordinary Heaven. The speakers in Osman’s poems are often women, and the book tackles themes of love and loss, displacement and authority. At its heart is the notion of bearing witness and what that means both in a larger political sense and in very intimate ways. The language is rich and playful and can be both brutal and transformative—sometimes in the same poem. Osman spoke with me recently by phone from her home in Chicago about metaphor, translation, and family influence. How has your background informed your work? My parents are from Mogadishu, Somalia. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in neighborhoods that were largely populated, if not by Somalis, then by East Africans. So many different elements go into my work, but there’s a very direct link to the way my parents would tell stories—their comfort using parables, making leaps in language, speaking in metaphors. My father would often point to a complex image or something strange and say, Look, it’s a metaphor. But he wouldn’t explain further. My parents speak English and other languages, but they’re most comfortable speaking Somali and they would speak Somali to us. So I always felt like I was doing some kind of translating. And things that are untranslatable—that’s poetry, too. Read More