Author Archives: Jeremy Mercer

The author on the synthetic Euroclay court of his home club.

When I play tennis, I serve with my right hand and generally volley with my left hand, although on occasion, when a deep ball is unplayable with my backhand, I will flip my racquet to my right hand, giving me an extra 50 centimeters of reach and an added chance of making the shot. In reality, this limb confusion means my serve is less powerful than a true right-hander and my volley is less powerful than a true left-hander because neither hand is actually dominant. Which also means I am destined to remain a mediocre tennis player whose enthusiasm (and on-court sartorial elegance) far outpace his actual game.

But in my mind! Oh, in my mind I am an ambidextrous monster who, by magically switching my racquet from hand to hand can bewilder opponents and reach the most unreachable balls. How many times, while rallying at my local club, have I slipped the racquet into my right hand to make a shot and heard the awed announcer at Roland Garros gasp, ‘Mercer has done it again! The amazing ambi-man is on his way to another French Open title!’

So, prone as I am to such fantasy, you can imagine my intrigue when I stumbled across the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory. The test was designed in 1971 by R.C. Oldfield of the Speech and Communication Unit at Edinburgh University. Continue reading →

Pia Copper-Ind writes:

The world sees few men like George Whitman. In the harsh capitalist world of today, George’s morals and his motto “Live for humanity” almost seem a thing of the past. For so many people, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Paris was so much more than a bookstore, it was home for a few months, a place to dream, to write and be inspired in front of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, Notre-Dame, a site Whitman referred to as “Kilometer Zero”, the ultimate address.

Many thousands of twenty-something men and women from all over the world, would-be writers and artists, were served up George’s pancakes and his strawberry ice-cream while they strove to become the next Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce. Whitman would tell people to ‘read a book a day’ and ‘write the next great novel’ upstairs. Everyone had to write their biography and leave it for posterity. And there were writers. Lawrence Durrell was one of George’s greatest friends, Richard Wright was a regular, Henry Miller called the place a “wonderland of books”. His companion-in-arms was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who also came to Paris in the postwar years with POW money and then started his own bookstore in San Francisco publishing the “Beats” who drifted between Paris (Shakespeare and Co.), Tangiers and Big Sur. George was even rumoured to be a “Don Juan” of the arrière-boutique, seducing the mysterious Anais Nin. But perhaps he was more of a Prince Myshkin or a Don Quixote, as he liked to call himself: a man of books and letters more than a man of passions. Anais Nin called him “a saint among his books, lending them, having penniless friends upstairs in his Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows wrinkled shutters.”

Continue reading →

A Kolya-n tapestry?

For those who lurked about the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the early 2000s, Kolya, or Nicholas as many of us knew him, was a familiar face. He was a sans-papiers from Eastern Europe with a entrepreneurial flair that boggled the mind. He devised elaborate hustles to fleece department stores of money, recruiting many an empty-pocketed Shakespearean to abet him along the way. He resold cheap Chinese jewelry to tourists at a 1,000 per cent mark up. He painted henna tattoos on the legs, backs, and breasts of the young and foolish at the Les Halles park for 50 or 100 francs a pop, often using KMZ friends Tom Pancake or Ryan McGlynn as a sidekick. And, yes, suspicions were rife that perhaps he lifted a book or three from Shakespeare and sold them down the road.

Well, like most everybody from that time, Kolya moved on from Paris. He drifted to America where, once again living without papers, he lived for a long time by selling contraband punk rock T-shirts. Now, he has surfaced again with a Kickstarter project that seems to defy logic. Kolya, the man of the thousand scams, has discovered a love for tapestry.

From what we can tell, Kolya hopes to create a series of contemporary tapestries and donate them to modern art museums across the United States. ”Coming to America, I was excited to explore native American tapestry as well as contemporary tapestry,” he writes. “[U]nfortunately I was also disappointed that such great tradition was somewhat shunned away by commercialization of the art scene.” Continue reading →

Onna Solomon has a new collection out with Press 34. Onna’s poetic reputation is prospering; she recently won the Chad Walsh poetry prize. And the concept underpinning Press 34 is compelling: it’s an art book project which produces 34 hand-crafted copies of each title produce.  Read away:

What It Takes

A man who lost his family
—two kids and a wife—
in a blameless accident.

He knows whatever there is
can’t imagine
how we sustain ourselves,

whatever there is must also be
surprised when we are
consumed by senselessness:

Continue reading →

Budweiser : Reminding you how much your weather sucks

Softened as I am by the idyllic weather in the south of France, it was a rude shock for me to experience what the Irish preposterously call ‘summer’.

During a visit to Dublin this June, there wasn’t a single day I could go outside without a sweater or jacket and my partner’s careful pedicure never saw daylight because sandals or open-toed shoes would have meant cold, cold misery. One especially frightful day, the high temperature was a mere 11°C (52°F). And let us not speak of the seemingly constant drizzle.

But beyond this personal suffering, the truly dispiriting part was the naïveté of the locals who appear to have no idea what a proper summer day should feel like. Case in point is what may be the saddest advertising campaign in business history: the American beer giant Budweiser is trying to give away free pints on ‘hot’ summer days. Under the rules of Budweiser’s Ice Cold Index promotion, people are entitled to a free pint of beer any day the temperature goes above 20 °C (68 °F). (People also get discount coupons between 16 °C and 19 °C.)  Think about that for a moment: the weather in Ireland is so gaspingly awful, Budweiser has set the threshold for a ‘hot’ summer’s day at a meagre 20 °C! In Marseille, a 20° C day in summer would be considered a frigid weather catastrophe!

Continue reading →