April 21, 2020 Arts & Culture Out of the Cradle Endlessly Revising By Mark Doty Walt Whitman in 1891. Photo: Samuel Murray. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention. One reason for this is perhaps the speed at which Whitman composed. He said he’d been simmering, before Emerson’s New York lecture of 1848, then Emerson’s passionate call for a distinctly American poet had set him to boil. Nonetheless, it was seven years before the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared, containing twelve poems. Fired by the book’s publication, Whitman began to work faster; his second edition, only a year later, contained twenty new poems. One of them, “Sun-Down Poem,” later to be retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” is one of the great poems written in English in its century or any other. The new look of the second edition is telling. The oversize production of the first, destined for the parlor, its intricately wrought title stamped in gold, gave way to a more streamlined look, perhaps because he was no longer bound to use the large paper his first printer had provided. But I suspect he had recalibrated his sense of audience in a way more suited to his mission; the green book was now sized to fit in a pocket of one of those work jackets Whitman liked to wear, meant to be carried everywhere, and read in the open air every season of every year of your life. Hefty, encyclopedic in its proportions, the book came more to resemble the new gospel that Whitman intended, a book that would convince us that the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. Read More
April 21, 2020 Off Menu The Celebrity Chef of Victorian England By Edward White Edward White’s new monthly column, “Off Menu,” serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times. Alexis Soyer, artist unknown (courtesy Alexis-Soyer.com) When the potato blight arrived in Ireland in September 1845, many of those in power downplayed the threat it posed. The disease had already blackened potato crops across the Americas and Western Europe, but dire predictions about the damage it could wreak on Ireland’s staple food were dismissed as irresponsible scaremongering, “deluding the public with a false alarm,” in the words of the mayor of Liverpool. That line didn’t last long. By October it was obvious that the lives of millions were at risk. In response, the British government offered half measures, unwavering in its determination that the solution should not be worse than the problem. To break economic orthodoxy by providing direct aid to those in need would be tyrannical, it was argued, and create a culture of dependency and deception. Charles Trevelyan, the government official leading the relief effort, put it bluntly: “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.” 1847 was the nadir of the crisis. Countless people died of starvation and disease, others fled in droves. The mayor of Liverpool could no longer contest the reality of the crisis; so many destitute refugees came to his city that it was described by the registrar general as “the cemetery of Ireland.” Into the bleakness stepped Alexis Soyer, the most famous chef in London, a man who had made a fortune from catering to the outsize appetites of sybarites and playboys, and about as unlikely a savior of the famished as it’s possible to imagine. A peacocking, Rabelaisian embodiment of modern London, Soyer was as adept at self-promotion as he was at creating the extravagant high-society banquets for which he was famed. Nevertheless, in Dublin on April 5, 1847, he unveiled his plan to end the suffering of the Irish people: a specially designed soup kitchen, combining the traditional craft of French cooking with the efficiency of modern science. The launch was attended not only by thousands of famine victims, but by representatives of the press, and hundreds of well-to-do observers, including the Duke of Cambridge and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. As the hungry stood behind metal railings outside, VIPs were given a first look inside the kitchen, where they sampled for themselves what the famous Soyer had rustled up with food aid rations. “The contrast was sudden and striking,” reported the Dublin Evening Post the following day. “A moment before, and the lovely faces which lighted up the pavilion, smiled their approval of every thing they saw; a moment after, their places became filled by the poor, upon whose persons famine and misery and time had seemed to have done their worst.” As laudable as it was unsettling, Soyer’s soup kitchen experiment was a precursor of the awkward union of celebrity and humanitarianism so familiar to our own times. But it was also the emblematic moment of Soyer’s unique culinary life, lived at extremes—poverty and wealth, toil and glamor, feast and famine. Read More
April 20, 2020 The Art of Distance The Art of Distance No. 5 By The Paris Review A month ago, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “Love letters, fan mail, business correspondence, even missives to a future self: letters can bring us together across time and space. The connection they offer feels particularly welcome in our disjointed moment. There’s something special about letters between friends, diary entries, and even appeals sent into the unknown—see this week’s pieces from the Paris Review archive to prove my point. Pen to paper does still create some alchemy.” —EN With little to do these days but sit inside and look out the window, I’m very aware of my neighbors, for better (the kid in the high-rise across the street airing her stuffed animals by letting them down from the window on strings) and for worse (the man downstairs playing music that shakes my floor). Mavis Gallant is, too, only she makes her Paris neighbors immortal characters of a tiny, finely wrought serial. Her “Diaries” remind me that to set down observations of the world honestly, precisely, and completely—however physically small that world might be—is to find the inevitable story in it. —Jane Breakell, Institutional Giving Officer Read More
April 20, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Carl Phillips By Carl Phillips In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. Read More
April 20, 2020 First Person Loneliness Is Other People By Katharine Smyth I’d never met Ian in person; we matched on a dating app in January, one week before he flew to China to start teaching cultural studies at a university in Hong Kong. We continued to message, and it was Ian who, on Valentine’s Day, first introduced me to the term social distancing. His school had recently moved to online learning, around the time that shops and restaurants began to shutter, and he was lonely; he described life in Hong Kong as a kind of super future, one in which the social fabric had broken down and citizens were living on a fault line. He lamented the impossibility of making new friends or dating in what he called the old analog style; he sent me an article from the South China Morning Post about the way we wither without touch. He appeared relatively cheerful, though, and he had come to embrace the life of an ascetic, running twenty kilometers a day through the verdant hills of Hong Kong and mastering his split-legged arm balance with the help of Fiji McAlpine, his virtual yoga instructor. Back then the virus had seemed, to me at least, a threat unique to China. Social distancing would make a good novel title, I joked, never imagining that Americans would be doing the same in a matter of weeks, that the phrase would soon be joining so many others—community spread, an abundance of caution, flattening the curve. But then the book event for which I had driven to my mother’s Rhode Island summerhouse was canceled, and with it much of life in New York City, and while I was used to, even thrived on, long solitary stretches—the previous winter I had opted to seclude myself for sixty days, leading an existence that was almost indistinguishable from my existence now—the growing realization that this time around I had no choice gave rise to a powerful, panicky loneliness. Coronavirus and the isolation it imposed, coupled with uncertainty about the future, about how long such radical withdrawal would last, was the clearest distillation yet that, some four and a half years after my divorce, I was still utterly alone. Read More
April 17, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Creations, Croissants, and Crutchfields By The Paris Review Alia Volz. California is rife with personal histories of various sorts—so many that one wonders if there’s anything yet to be discovered about the Golden State. Enter Alia Volz’s new memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, a beautiful evocation of the Bay Area in the years before tech bros and big money changed the city. During the wild and woolly seventies, Volz’s mother founded Sticky Fingers Brownies, a company responsible for delivering upward of ten thousand illegal cannabis edibles per month to San Francisco consumers. Like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, this is a narrative about a time that is now gone: San Francisco as circus, where pot was both ubiquitous and as illegal as heroin. Under Volz’s careful attention, all of it—the era, the place, and her own parents—is rendered clear, bright, and beautiful. —Christian Kiefer Read More