Book Markers 08.30.12
It’s a Book, It’s a Periodical . . .
No, it’s the new Southampton Review, volume VI, number 2, summer 2012, 232 pages, retailing for 15 bucks and coming to you fresh and glossily printed courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.
This one’s different. It’s got a lecture by Richard Leakey, the eminent anthropologist, on the development of language. (He also drops in that Europeans alone in the world have Neanderthal genes — explains a lot, doesn’t it.) The lecture was given in January at the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, where Julie Sheehan, the Review’s poetry editor, led a workshop emphasizing the oral tradition in the birthplace of human language. A selection of poems from that workshop runs here with photos of the place and the native people.
From cartoonists to memoirists to fiction writers to a maker of fire drawings on paper, the contributors number an impressive 51. Call it vitality.
Dan, Being Dan
If you’re wondering how it’s going at what looks like a vast and industrial new headquarters for Dan’s Papers on Country Road 39 in Southampton, a chance to ask Dan Rattiner himself will present itself on Saturday at 4 p.m. when he appears at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.
Beyond browsing the funky shelves, he’ll be reading from his new book, “Still in the Hamptons: More Tales of the Rich, the Famous, and the Rest of Us,” from SUNY’s Excelsior Editions. A follow-up to “In the Hamptons” and “In the Hamptons Too,” it profiles the famous, all right, from Peter Jennings to Frank Perdue, but also the merely locally famous, like the late lamented Paul Sidney of WLNG and Bridgehampton’s Charlie Vanderveer. And of course there are Mr. Rattiner’s trademark whimsical tributes to the old charms of the South Fork, like a Christmastime visit in 1986 to Lillywhite’s, the toy store that was on Job’s Lane in Southampton. How can you beat a 69-cent hockey stick?