the daily review

Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation by Martin Millar

By Jed Lipinski

An air of comical amphetamine dependence pervades Martin Millar’s debut novel, Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation. The protagonist, Alby, is a twenty-six-year-old paranoiac and small-time sulphate (i.e., speed) dealer convinced that both Chinese gangsters and the Milk Marketing Board have contracts out on his life. The book’s plot is chopped into raucous little sections that seem to reflect the

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in print

June/July/Aug 2009 Contents

Omnivore

6:00PM
JUL 3 2009

No need to mourn

Christopher Phelps (OSU): A Neglected Document on Socialism and Sex. The disembodied book: The age of the printed book is drawing to a close — but there's no need to mourn its passing. A review of Until It Hurts: America's Obsession with Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids by Mark Hyman. A review of The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens by Malina Saval. The age of diminishing endowments: An interview wwth Yale president Richard Levin on campus politics and the future of higher education. What place does Economics hold in the liberal arts university? (and part 2) Stefanie Sobelle reviews Picasso and the Allure of Language, edited by Susan Greenberg Fisher. Living on Canada's oil: Must we really choose between energy security and a climate disaster? Taking sides in the revolution: A review of Greg Kot's Ripped and Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism (and more and more). Robot babies: Can scientists build a machine that learns as it goes and plays well with others? (and more and more from Cosmos). A review of Pieter Spierenburg's A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. Animals can tell right from wrong: A review of Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff (and more and more and an excerpt).

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outposts

Jul 4 2009
Chicago

Saturday, July 18 7:00pm

Ruins by Achy Obejas and The Show That Smells by Derek McCormack

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syllabi

Jun 30 2009

Sheila Heti: On Being an Artist

Dali Atomicus, Photograph by Philippe Halsman, 1948

There are certain books that all young artists read. For example, the other night I met a young woman at a bar. She said she was a cartoonist, so I asked to see her studio. Going over the next night, I noticed on her shelves a book I cherished when I was eighteen: Salvador Dalí’s Diary of a Genius. It was interesting that she had glommed onto Dalí—just as I once had. But what lessons was it

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SHELF LIFE

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Comics Relief

It is a shopworn stereotype that comics shops are dank holes of nerddom, in which flabby, ponytailed men argue the finer points of Spider-Man’s relationship with Mary Jane over a game of Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering. More recently, though, there’s a new breed of shop on the scene, one that offers a selection of indie comics and graphic novels—books that have been appearing with increasing regularity in literary-minded publications. The established fact of this transition in comics retailing is best illustrated by its appearance on television (for when, in recent memory, has a trend first been introduced on network TV?). In a 2007 episode of The Simpsons,

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REWRITE

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Obscurity Now

Poetry has been obscure as long as Vikings have worn helmets and emperors have worn nothing. This is not terribly surpris-ing. Poetry is language refracted, metaphor tuned to an inner music. And ever since the nineteenth century, when the novel brought reading to the masses, most of us have preferred to read prose. Still, every few generations, a shiver of anxiety ripples through the literate world that poetry has become too obscure—that it has retreated to its palace yard, content to be

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