“Anyone who has lived in a city recognizes the mask of defensive impassivity commuters typically wear. A change comes over passengers’ faces when they hear that more recent announcement. In those moments every single person has the same hope: that he be found, that he be unharmed.”
Sadie Stein on the search for missing teen Avonte Oquendo.
Photography Credit Paul Katcher.
Table of contents illustration by Peter Halley, “Untitled,” 1986, Kodalith print.
Considered by many film historians to be the very first animated cartoon, Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) is one of the earliest examples of hand-drawn animation. The animation was drawn on paper, then shot onto negative film. According to the Public Domain Review, the title is in reference to the “fantasmograph,” a mid-nineteenth century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images on to surrounding walls.
The National Book Awards have listed their finalists, including Jhumpa Lahiri, George Saunders, and recent contributor Rachel Kushner for fiction.
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here. Read an excerpt from Kushner’s The Flamethrowers here.
“If you could see a movie of yourself you would realize that this is true. Movies show us ourselves as we had not yet learned to recognize us—something in the nature of daily being or happening that quickly gets folded over into ancient history like yesterday’s newspaper, but in so doing a new face has been revealed, a surface on which a new phrase may be written before it rejoins history, or it may remain blank and do so anyway: it doesn’t matter because each thing is coming up in its time and receding into the past, and this is what we all expect and want.”
—John Ashbery, from “The System”
Art Credit Gilbert & George.
“There are parallel lives we inhabit of those who share our name, echoes of people we could have been.”
“I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we’re a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.”
“I don’t know why spats went out! The actual name was spatterdashers, and you fastened them over your ankles, you see, to prevent the spatter dashing you. They certainly lent tone to your appearance, and they were awfully comfortable, especially when you wore them in cold weather. I’ve written articles, which were rather funny, about how I used to go about London. I would borrow my brother’s frock coat and my uncle’s hat, but my spats were always new and impeccable. The butler would open the door and take in my old topcoat and hat and sniff as if to say, ‘Hardly the sort of thing we are accustomed to.’ And then he would look down at the spats and everything would be all right. It’s a shame when things like spats go out.” —P. G. Wodehouse, the Art of Fiction No. 60
