Magazine Review

Hi,

So I also finished up the Fall 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly -- a magazine that contains a number of essays, excerpts and poems by a wide range of authors past and present all meditating upon some theme. It makes for great bathroom reading. Short pieces you can finish in one "sitting" and guests think you're all literary and stuff (vs. copies of the latest Uncle John's or whatever).

This issue's theme was The City. So a wide range of pieces praising or condemning urban centers. While that "City Mouse/Country Mouse" dichotomy got a little tired, there were any number of great pieces in there including:

• Samuel Pepy's diary entries written during the Great London Fire in 1666.
  
• Groucho Marx complaining to the Warner Brothers studio about their refusal to allow the Marx Brothers to title a movie Casablanca. ("...I am sure the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish Ingrid Bergman and Harpo.")
  
• A black man arrives in Harlem from the deep South and is astounded by the change in social climate.
  
• The original poem that "Charlie on the MTA" was adapted from. (Side note, I want to go to a poetry slam and read "Fare Hike" in the manner of a poetry slam poet. But I'm a bit of an attractive nuisance.)
  
• Balzac chronicles a couple's break up during a stroll through the streets of Paris high society.
  
• An essay on the importance of theatre in Vienna during the Austro-Hungarian empire.
  
• An article on how Los Angeles tried to create public spaces that weren't open to the poorer parts of the public.
  
• Any number of pieces on the founding or praising of important cities from antiquity.
  

At the back are some excellent longer pieces. Warren Breckman writes on the way in which cities manage the tension between the visible and the invisible ("What or who gets seen? By whom? Who interprets the city's meaning? What should remain unseen?"). Daniel Mason ponders the botanical garden hiding between the cracks in the sidewalk. Colin Dickey discusses the changes in attitude regarding cities and their cemeteries and Michael Dirda gives an appreciation of Erving Goffman -- a sociologist who studied the little interactions of urban life and built up a picture of the way in which we manage our self-image to other people. All of it is fascinating stuff.

So yeah, I'm curious to see what next quarter's offering will bring (should probably just pick up a subscription when I have a job again).

later
Tom

Magazine Review

Hi,

So I also finished up the Fall 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly -- a magazine that contains a number of essays, excerpts and poems by a wide range of authors past and present all meditating upon some theme. It makes for great bathroom reading. Short pieces you can finish in one "sitting" and guests think you're all literary and stuff (vs. copies of the latest Uncle John's or whatever).

This issue's theme was The City. So a wide range of pieces praising or condemning urban centers. While that "City Mouse/Country Mouse" dichotomy got a little tired, there were any number of great pieces in there including:

• Samuel Pepy's diary entries written during the Great London Fire in 1666.
  
• Groucho Marx complaining to the Warner Brothers studio about their refusal to allow the Marx Brothers to title a movie Casablanca. ("...I am sure the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish Ingrid Bergman and Harpo.")
  
• A black man arrives in Harlem from the deep South and is astounded by the change in social climate.
  
• The original poem that "Charlie on the MTA" was adapted from. (Side note, I want to go to a poetry slam and read "Fare Hike" in the manner of a poetry slam poet. But I'm a bit of an attractive nuisance.)
  
• Balzac chronicles a couple's break up during a stroll through the streets of Paris high society.
  
• An essay on the importance of theatre in Vienna during the Austro-Hungarian empire.
  
• An article on how Los Angeles tried to create public spaces that weren't open to the poorer parts of the public.
  
• Any number of pieces on the founding or praising of important cities from antiquity.
  

At the back are some excellent longer pieces. Warren Breckman writes on the way in which cities manage the tension between the visible and the invisible ("What or who gets seen? By whom? Who interprets the city's meaning? What should remain unseen?"). Daniel Mason ponders the botanical garden hiding between the cracks in the sidewalk. Colin Dickey discusses the changes in attitude regarding cities and their cemeteries and Michael Dirda gives an appreciation of Erving Goffman -- a sociologist who studied the little interactions of urban life and built up a picture of the way in which we manage our self-image to other people. All of it is fascinating stuff.

So yeah, I'm curious to see what next quarter's offering will bring (should probably just pick up a subscription when I have a job again).

later
Tom