From the Stacks: June 29, 2007

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Utne Reader's library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,500 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, zines, and other lively dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found at big-box bookstores, newsstands, or even online. So we share the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what's landing in our library each week in 'From the Stacks.' Check in every Friday for the latest edition.

In her funny one-shot zine Nuns I've Known, Prunella Vulgaris presents a series of vignettes recalling the habit-clad instructors who shaped her Catholic-school upbringing. Nuns I've Known is very short -- 12 pages on 5.5' x 5.5' paper -- but each nun gets her own lengthy paragraph or two. Sister Clement, the school's 'Disciplinarian,' had an unusual penchant for spike heels (as opposed to the 'nurse-type shoes' universally preferred by the others). This oddity, Vulgaris writes, 'belongs in a smutty novel, or as a character I portray in a one-woman spoken-word anger-comedy show.' Many of these often grouchy nuns fit my public-school-cultivated stereotypes: Sister Susie was a 'crackpot,' Sister Mary was 'honestly evil,' and Sister Germaine 'should never have been allowed to work with kids.' Maybe my high school wasn't so bad after all. -- Danielle Maestretti

The July issue of Sight & Sound, the monthly magazine of the British Film Institute, features a special report on this year's Cannes Film Festival in which writer Nick James offers a blow-by-blow list of the film mecca's highlights and lowlights. A photo of directors Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo and Barton Fink) adorns the issue's cover, teasing a review of the brothers' upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men. Bertrand Moullier's essay recounts how the late Motion Pictures Association of America chairman Jack Valenti was never the American imperialist scrooge that European cinema thought him to be. And Variety's Mideast correspondent Ali Jaafar interviews German filmmaker Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas; Wings of Desire), who laments the death of the American dream. Sight & Sound serves up a healthy blend of industry and art, finding nothing too Hollywood nor too art-house for its own taste. -- Eric Kelsey

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