The Lonely Island - “Semicolon (feat. Solange)” (from 2013’s The Wack Album)
Relevant to alllllll of my interests.
May 22, 2013
“The first time I read it, I was in school, and I remember being confounded by two facts: 1) That it was originally published in 1941 and 2) That it first appeared in Irish as An Béal Bocht. And if there was one thing that was less funny than anything written before, say, 1975, it was anything that was written in Irish.”
It’s true: this book is unbelievably funny. It’s also a flaming, barbed, poison-dipped arrow through the heart of Irish hard-scrabble sentimentality. Every country on the planet should hope for such a skewering.
May 22, 2013Ranking Aira
Phew—finally all caught up on my César Aira. (Just ignore, for a minute, that he’s got two more novels due out in English this year.) If you’ve never read any of his books, and aren’t sure where or how to start, here’s how I’d rank what’s already out there:
- How I Became a Nun (1993, trans. Chris Andrews)
- The Literary Conference (2006, trans. Katherine Silver)
- Ghosts (1990, trans. Chris Andrews)
- The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira (1998, trans. Katherine Silver)
- Varamo (2002, trans. Chris Andrews)
- An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000, trans. Chris Andrews)
- The Seamstress and the Wind (1994, trans. Rosalie Knecht)
Note that 3-5 are pretty well interchangeable. And even Seamstress has its moments. Really, you can’t go too far wrong. The guy is good.
May 21, 2013Hingston: Publishing tour boosts Edmonton writer’s optimism
Sure, big guns like Random House and HarperCollins have the kind of elegant downtown tower offices you’d expect—but did you know that Coach House Books, also in Toronto, operates out of a real coach house? (It took Sevigny a minute to realize the entrance was through the alleyway.) And houses like Frontenac House and our own University of Alberta Press run out of, well, houses. The U of A’s abode has untold numbers of hidden crawl spaces and a set of narrow servants’ stairs, while Frontenac’s, in Calgary, doubles as the actual residence of its husband-wife founders. Both look cosy.
This week’s column is about Erinne Sevigny, an Edmontonian who spent a month travelling across Canada, visiting 20+ publishers and seeing what she could glean about the publishing industry at large.
May 17, 2013
New Yorkerin’: April 2013
Only 16 days late this time! Great work. As usual, here are some of my favourite stories in the magazine of magazines from the month before this one. Some are behind a paywall. Sorry about that.
- Various, “The Talk of the Town” (April 1): Agh, my favourite section of the magazine by far is extra good this week. Read Jeffrey Toobin on same-sex marriage, Reeves Wiedeman on a sports-announcers convention, Adam Gopnik on a fancy French cooking sauce, Alec Wilkinson on the Hip Hop Word Count, and, uh, Rebecca Mead on high-heel podiatry, I guess (four out of five ain’t bad).
- Emily Nussbaum, “To Stir, With Love” (April 8): In Iron Chef, food is “a perpetual emergency.” Perfect.
- Nick Paumgarten, “The Last Book” (April 15): I just like this opening, where a family slowly realizes that their neighbour, “hale, collected, self-assured” James Salter, has written a novel about them. And it’s not flattering.
- Burkhard Bilger, “The Martian Chroniclers” (April 22): A pair of fascinating and eccentric scientists cannot distract from the sheer intergalactic lunacy/beauty that is space travel.
- John McPhee, “Draft No. 4” (April 29): Look, you don’t have to tell me the difference between further and farther, or which and that. (Or what a “Haligonian” is, for that matter.) But I’ll be your hype man any day.
Culture! Check back in a month for May’s report. Or maybe six weeks. I’m doing my best over here.
May 16, 2013
May 16, 2013When I contacted the designer, Elizabeth Alice Crum, to get a closer look at her creations, she explained that they were inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: more specifically, the theme of chance, how the narrative is woven and broken, how tension is created, and where fate takes you.
Why do they even try? my 7-year-old self would wonder as I watched Alan Alda flounder helplessly through yet another failed rerun of M*A*S*H. Why is every single Korean-lady extra so much funnier than he is?Ellie Kemper: Can Men Be Funny?: Humor: GQ May 15, 2013
Dan Brown’s “Inferno" Translated in an Underground Italian Bunker
The “translators 11,” two months, NO CELL PHONES. Also, this:
And although the translators were “allowed to take their meals at the Mondadori staff canteen, they were each given an alibi and a cover story, just in case someone showed the slightest hint of curiosity about what they were doing all day (and a large part of the night) in a locked-down bunker. ”
Intense.
These co-workers sound awfully nonchalant about the fact that their office has a lockdown-able bunker in it.
May 13, 2013