FEBRUARY MIX by Emma Straub

Songs That I Play Really Loud So No One Else Can Hear Me Cry

Is there anything better than a sad love song? I’ve checked–there isn’t. Here is a brief list of some of my all-time favorites to get you through Valentine’s Day, whether or not you’ve got a date. Each and every one of these songs is vetted (by me) as a song that you can listen to on repeat, either pining for a lost love, being sad about being lonely, or still being mad at that guy who cheated on you in high school. Extra points go to anyone who burns this onto a CD and listens to it in their car and/or lives in a dorm room and/or with their parents, places were self-indulgent sadness is best appreciated. This mix includes songs that I know I’m supposed to be embarrassed to love, but hey, this is an irony-and-coolness-free zone.

1. Al Green — Tired of Being Alone
So plainly stated, so perfectly sung.

 

2. Otis Redding — Try A Little Tenderness
My love for this song began with Duckie lip-syncing in Pretty in Pink, which still makes my heart skip a beat.


3. The Beach Boys — God Only Knows
I usually like to keep God out of my personal life, but in this case, I make an exception.

 

4. Belle and Sebastian — My Wandering Days Are Over
For when you’re ready to settle down.

 

5. Big Star — Thirteen
If this song doesn’t give you middle school flashbacks, you have no soul.

JAMES KIRKWOOD: mythical…but maybe not murderer

The story of James Kirkwood demonstrates how easily and inexplicably the acclaimed can fall off the critical radar.

In 1975, he had two shows playing on Broadway, while his latest novel Good Times/Bad Times saw reviewers comparing him to Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller. One of those shows – A Chorus Line – won him a Pulitzer Prize for his co-writing contribution. Yet the reaction of most people today to the mention of Kirkwood’s name would be a crinkled brow. Almost none of his works remain in print.

Kirkwood became my favourite writer in the 1980s. I was enchanted by the vulnerability and effervescence of novels like Good Times/Bad Times, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead! and Some Kind of Hero, and even more by the fact that neither of those qualities ruled out streetwise grittiness in his prose. Yet though he was my favourite writer, he for a long time remained a myth to me. His books were not in print in my native UK and for an impoverished young man were only obtainable by scouring second-hand shops, a veritable tilling-for-gold process that produced indescribable joy on the rare occasions when an out-of-print or imported paperback turned up. In those pre-internet days, I could discover nothing about Kirkwood beyond what was conveyed on book flyleaves and covers. The first time I ever saw his name mentioned in a British newspaper was in a list of AIDS fatalities. Needless to say, I hadn’t known he was dead.

LITERARY ARTIFACTS: Merry Christmas, Charles Dickens

Each month in the Literary Artifacts space, writer Kristopher Jansma writes about his encounters with rare books, writerly memorabilia, and other treasures in New York City and around the world, hoping to discover how the internet age is changing the face of literature as we know it.

Without Charles Dickens, Christmas today might well be a relatively minor holiday with no gift-giving, no large family-gatherings for turkey dinners, no Bing Crosby songs on the radio…perhaps even no Macy’s Santa, Swarovski-Crystal-topped tree, or kick-lining Rockettes.  All this and more we owe to a slim stack of messy manuscript pages that came to be known as A Christmas Carol, currently on display at the Morgan Library in midtown Manhattan.

In the early 19th century when Dickens was a boy, Christmas was barely celebrated at all.  In his introduction to A Christmas Carol, Professor Richard Michael Kelly explains that farther back, in medieval times, peasants and lords alike celebrated Christmas with a twelve-day rager, glomming the Nativity onto the pagan feasts of Saturnalia and the Winter Solstice to create a super-holiday full of carol singing, gift-giving, raucous game-playing, the burning of Yule logs, and a whole hell of a lot of drinking.  But by the 17th century, Puritans in England and America had all but outlawed these sinful celebrations and Christmas had dwindled into a relatively-minor holiday.  It was the publication of A Christmas Carol that prompted the widespread public celebration of the holiday we know today.  Yes, that’s right.  Without Dickens, buzzkill-Christmas might have persisted to this very day, with no Black Friday pepper-spraying, no insane mega-watt home decorations, no terrifying Target 2-Day Sale commercials, no Paula Deen “Mama’s Eggnog” (it starts with a pint of heavy cream…), no ironically ugly Christmas sweaters… well, you get the picture.

Dear Lad Mags: Sex Sells, But At What Cost?

As a woman who has appeared on the cover of Maxim, been in FHM, Loaded, Stuff, and Gear, I am not ashamed of my body. But British “lad mags” have made me think twice about the consequences of gracing their pages with my image.

Last week, Jezebel reported on a study that asked a group of men and women to compare quotes from the UK lad mags FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo with excerpts from interviews with actual convicted rapists originally published in the book The Rapist Files. The results show that it was often impossible to tell the difference between plucky journalism and the words of sociopathic deviants. Yes, this is disheartening. Teeth grinding. Gag-reflex inducing.

In the comments section of the Jezebel piece, there was a particularly insightful reflection: “’Women’ do things, ‘girls’ have things done to them.” The writers of lad mags look at women in a certain way. They are part of an idiomatic genre that denigrates women, reducing women to mere objects with male sexual gratification as their primary focus. Are they in turn conditioning their readers? Is one naturally predisposed to this or does one come to it via social and visual cues? (The same argument has been made for violent video games; does fantasy violence beget actual violence?)

Reading this study I can’t help but think of Nabokov writing Lolita in the same time frame as The Kinsey Reports were revealed. Was Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert born the way he was, or were his sexual proclivities a result of his environment? To me Kinsey seems to be hunting for this same information. Chicken or the egg? Perhaps the answer is both.

The Most Beautiful Books of the Year: a Holiday Gift Guide

It’s the holidays, time to unleash the year-end lists and let loose the hyperboles…

The greatest book of all time is now one of the most beautiful books of the year. The first part of that statement comes from me (and many others), the latter half comes from the NY Daily News (and many others, including me).

Artist, librarian, and mensch, Matt Kish reinterpreted every glorious page of Moby-Dick, generating well over 500 leviathan-inspired illustrations. The artwork was bound into a handsome and surprisingly affordable volume by Tin House. Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page is available for under $30 from Powell’s and other independent bookstores.

Amid the eBook boom, publishers are investing more into book design to turn physical books into collector’s items (insert comparison to the reprise of vinyl records here). If you’re in the business of judging books by their covers, here are some options for stocking your bookshelves or stuffing stockings this holiday season.

Authors on Amazon’s “Bare-Knuckle Approach” to Christmas Sales

In case you haven’t overheard the outrage, Amazon is endorsing the nefarious practice of “showrooming” by offering discounts to holiday shoppers who essentially undermine brick-and-mortar stores (you can read our post about the controversy here).

Yesterday at the NY Times, Richard Russo asked some of his writer friends (including Stephen King, Andre Dubus III, and Ann Patchett) to respond to the news.

“These writers all derive considerable income from Amazon’s book sales,” writes Russo. “But when the responses to my query started coming in it was clear Amazon’s program would find no defenders in our ranks.” Basically, it’s all shock and awe at Amazon’s “scorched-earth capitalism.”

Hipster Hero: Who Was Really Behind Buddy Holly’s Glasses?

buddy holly in glassesJ. Davis Armistead changed the face of cool by hiding it behind a thick pair of glasses. Armistead, now retired, was Buddy Holly’s optometrist back when the musician was struggling to establish his identity (and struggling to see).

Holly’s vision was apparently so poor that he couldn’t read the ‘E’ at the top of the vision charts, but the nondescript glasses he wore weren’t helping his image. While watching an episode of “The Phil Silvers Show” (AKA Sergeant Bilko), Armistead discovered the iconic frames that would distinguish Holly and make it hip to be square.

At the Wall Street Journal, Charles Passy says the frames paved the way for other legendary celebrity accessories (Elton John’s goggles and — somehow — Lady Gaga’s meat dress). But Passy overlooked a few other notable credits to the spectacles: Weezer; bizarre literary crime; and, most importantly, a way for un-bearded hipsters to hide their faces.

Symbols in Literature

In high school and a few undergraduate literature classes, I remember my professors would instruct the class to identify and analyze the symbols in the texts we read. Poems, especially, were apparently so packed with symbols that I’d stumble through looking for meaning: was that parrot really a parrot, or was it actually the squawking spirit of America? Now, in graduate school, however, professor after professor has proclaimed that there are no symbols—or that if there are symbols, they are more the work of the reader than the writer.

At the Paris Review, literary archivist Sarah Funke Butler looks at a young writer who’d hoped to resolve the question of whether symbolism actually exists in literature and whether it was indeed the intention of the writer. “In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. … Each responder offers a unique take on the issue itself—symbolism in literature—as well as on handling a sixteen-year-old aspirant approaching writers as masters of their craft.”

Amazon: How the Grinch Stole Christmas Sales

Last weekend, Julie Bosman at the NY Times addressed a nefarious shopping trend that’s plaguing bookstores: “showrooming.” The term means browsing in a brick-and-mortar store, finding a book you like, and then using your smartphone to buy it online, and “probably at a steep discount from the bookstores’ archrival, Amazon.com.”

Bosman isn’t just pointing fingers at the e-commerce giant; she’s got figures to back her up.

“According to [a] survey, conducted in October by the Codex Group, a book market research and consulting company, 24 percent of people who said they had bought books from an online retailer in the last month also said they had seen the book in a brick-and-mortar bookstore first.

Thirty-nine percent of people who bought books from Amazon in the same period said they had looked at the book in a bookstore before buying it from Amazon, the survey said.”

POSTSCRIPT: A Letter from Groucho Marx

Each month, Anna Knoebel revisits letters from prominent writers and other artists to revive the dying art of letter writing. Anna is the editor and co-publisher of Abe’s Penny, a magazine of arts and literature delivered in the form of postcards.

 

One day in 1961, Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx (whose famous wit is evidenced in quips like, “A man’s only as old as the woman he feels,” and, “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”) received a portrait request from Thomas Stearns “T.S.” Eliot (a man whom, though not known for his sense of humor, many consider to be the most important English-language poet in the 20th Century). Groucho was understandably surprised, but game, and sent the photograph of himself along with a request for one of T.S.

The letter that follows is Groucho’s response to T.S. after having received his portrait in return: