Haiku-ption Contest #14

Shall we? Yes, let’s.  My haiku is below, add your own in the comments.

Cows are in estrus

Bulls are trumpeting their aims

Time for a new tack

Shakespeare & Co.: Know Before You Go

A few days ago we shared a documentary on the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on Paris’s left bank. Here, just for the heck of it, is a map showing the locations of all three iterations of the famous bookshop (plus some links to the current Google Street views for each).

The first, opened by Sylvia Beach at 8 Rue Dupuytren, is basically just across the street from the Odeon metro stop. And if you want to, you can get your hair cut there. It is now the location of “Easy Cut.”

The second, larger location is just a stone’s throw away, at 12 Rue de l’Odeon. If you want, you can complement your new haircut with duds from "Moi Cani" the small shop that has taken over the space— or browse in the tiny French boostore next door at no. 10. 

The third and current location, originally opened by George Whitman as “Le Mistral” in 1951, and re-named Shakespeare & Co. in 1964 after Sylvia Beach’s death, is just a short walk across the river from Notre Dame Cathedral at 37 Rue de la Bucherie- not on  the river, but one small street beyond it.

The current proprietor? George’s daughter: Sylvia Beach Whitman. Naturally!

The (literal) Snows of Kilimanjaro

One of my all-time favorite Hemingway stories is “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” You may recall this image from the story, from which its title is drawn:

“Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

I stumbled across Google’s satellite time-lapse Earth Engine   the other day, and thought it would be interesting to train the lens on those famous snows of Kilimanjaro. Go here, to see how they’ve evolved from 1984 to today. Hem's metaphor could be lost before long...

DFW's "This is Water"

It’s commencement season, and David Foster Wallace’s somewhat famous commencement address to Kenyon College grads in 2005 has received a YouTube makeover. But it’s not just for recent college graduates or fans of Mr. Wallace. It’s for anyone who’s ever had to deal with “repulsive, stupid, cowlike, dead-eyed and non-human” people, or boring jobs, or any of the other crap that real life hands you. Enjoy:

-H/T, a whole bunch of people.

Another Month in the Can

Over the weekend our staff worked to diligently put another month into the Shelf Actualization archives. Above are the authors covered in the past 30 days, and below are our 5 most popular posts from that period:

• A Ramling Riff on Rememberence in Swann’s Way
• Short Story Club: “How the Devil Came Down Division Street”
• Author Look-Alikes Vol. 13
• (Fictional) First Line Friday: Chuck Stone spy novel
• WhatThey Were Reading: Clive James

Finally, the nutty search terms that brought readers this way:

• Edward Hirsch  >>  A basketball poem for tourney time.
• Delta Wedding  >>  The review, or the Paul Simon lyrics
• How to write like Kerouac  >>  Easier than you would think
• White whale metaphor  >>  And a little Three Amigos for good measure
• Significance of the dog in vast hell  >>  Search me. But the story was good.
• Arthur miller and Eudora welty  >>  Was there a connection? Hmmm.
• How are they alike Grapes of Wrath and Cry the Beloved Country  >>  It's the intercalary chapters, stupid.
• Fictional geography  >>  That didn't end up being fictional
• Map of don quixote’s travels  >>  Ours are as good as anything out there.
• Is being unathletic bad?   >>  Well, it worked for Joyce.

Thanks for stopping by! You’re always welcome back.

Feature Film Friday: Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Paris twice, but for whatever reason, neither visit included a stop by the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. <cue the sad trombones>

Thankfully we can all take a virtual visit to this fabled bookshop by watching the documentary below, “Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man,” which takes a look at George Whitman’s re-incarnation of Sylvia Beach’s left bank book boutique, including the Tumbleweed Hotel, where travelers can overnight amidst the stacks in return for a little day-time labor and the promise of plowing through some good books while a guest. Here’s part 1:

What They Were Reading: Haruki Murakami

"When someone asks, “Which three books have meant the most to you?” I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby , Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov , and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye . All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

"Whatever the case, you can sense the level of my infatuation with The Great Gatsby . It taught me so much and encouraged me so greatly in my own life. Though slender in size for a full-length work, it served as a standard and a fixed point, an axis around which I was able to organize the many coordinates that make up the world of the novel. I read Gatsby over and over, poking into every nook and cranny, until I had virtually memorized entire sections."

—from the Columbia University Press blog, H/T GalleyCat

A 2013 Reading Check-Up

I’m baffled by this, but it’s already May, if you can believe it. I have yet to do a reading check-up to see how I’m doing on my resolutions for 2013, but now is as good a time as any. Here’s what I set out to do this year:

• Read something old-school
• Read something contemporary
• Re-read a favorite
• Finish (and most likely re-start) a “Did not finish”
• And tackle at least one of the big boys

And here are the twelve and two-half volumes vanquished so far:

   
        
           
         

So, Read something old-school— I think both King Lear  and Don Quixote  qualify— check!

Read something contemporary—The Orphan Master’s Son , The Paris Wife , Nemesis, and Leaving the Atocha Station  —I left nothing to chance on this one— check!

Re-read a favorite—Have not done this yet. Goose egg so far.  L

Finish (and most likely re-start) a “Did not finish” —Babylon Revisited and Other Stories  got me over the line, but there will probably be others— check!

And tackle at least one of the big boys—If Quixote  doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what does. 640 Pages down, another 300 pages to go— almost  check.

Three and a half out of five aint bad for early May. How's your reading coming?

Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

So when the title sounds like chick-lit, and the cover looks like chick-lit, you expect chick-lit, right? But I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised when I opened up Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife  a few weeks ago. It’s a view of Hemingway’s Paris years through the eyes of his first wife Hadley, and I’m happy to report that anyone with a predilection for the writer, and for Paris in the 20’s, will probably enjoy the book.

Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t read it like a novel, though the writing is fine and the story is certainly strong enough to carry the reader along. Rather, I read it like a Hemingway biography. Call me a pig, but that’s what I was interested in. And say what you will about McLain as a novelist, the woman did some pretty serious research to get the thing off the ground.

I was looking for fresh angles on familiar characters (the Fitzgeralds do not come off well, Joyce barely shows up at all), new tid-bits I’d never heard before (did you know it was almost Rome, and not Paris, for example?) and Hadley’s take on some of the bigger plot points (how would she handle the tragic loss all of Hemingway’s early work at the Gare de Lyon? Or the affair with Pauleen Pfeiffer?).

There were no huge surprises, but there were a few eyebrow raisers. I think we’re all fully prepared to see Hemingway revealed as a bit of an ass, but McLain makes Hadley out to be far more athletic, lythe and attractive than she really was. I mean, not to be mean, but we do have pictures after all. Here’s Pfeiffer, Hemingway and Hadley together in Pamplona:

At the same time, she portrays Hadley as such a weak, accepting, milquetoast of a character, who lets Pfeiffer walk all over her marriage and even right into her bed. (A diligent Googler will find some evidence of Hadley’s easy acquiescence, but no hard proof that the three ever shared the same bed— outside the plot of Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden , which contains a similar episode.)

Regardless of the Hemingway-McLain ‘he said-she said,’ you almost get the impression that you could read The Paris Wife  alongside A Moveable Feast , and between the two of them, start to arrive at some version of the unvarnished truth behind Hemingway’s first marriage. But it was an interesting read, and I’d recommend it to others who suffer from Hemingway "aficion."

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 13

Georges Perec and Daniel Stern: “All the great ones leave their mark. We’re the wet bandits.”

Someone get Honore de Balzac a perm and a luchador mask. He’d make as good a Nacho Libre as Jack Black:

Orhan Pamuk and Rick Steves aren’t an exact match, I’ll admit, but they have enough in common—the semi-shaggy “dad” haircut, the “don’t notice my glasses” glasses, the affable and harmless expression—for the one to remind me of the other.

George Eliot. Not exactly a looker, huh? Sadly, the closest match I could find for that schnoz was F. Murray Abraham:

The hair, the dramatic pose, the fact that she’s a little past her prime… alright Mr. DeMille, Katherine Anne Porter’s ready for her close-up.