September 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Ashes to Ashes By Sadie Stein A vintage ad for Wonder Bread. I was surprised and touched, when I returned from a two-week trip, to find that a loaf of Wonder Bread had grown a furry cloak of blue-green mold. Read More
September 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent On the Fjords By Sadie Stein Fritz Grebe, Blick in den sommerlichen Hardanger Fjord, 1881. About an hour into the boat ride, I went below deck to buy two cups of hot chocolate. It was chilly and I hadn’t dressed warmly enough, but I didn’t want to miss anything. The fjord was unearthly beautiful. It felt counterproductive in every way to try to capture anything with a camera—scale, color, grandeur—or impose yourself on the landscape, although admittedly, no one else on the deck seemed to feel this way. There was a view from the cabin, too, of course, but it wasn’t quite the same. Read More
September 4, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent A Journey of Discovery By Sadie Stein From the cover of South Mountain Road. “My mother killed herself on the first day of spring.” That’s the first line of Hesper Anderson’s memoir, South Mountain Road: A Daughter’s Journey of Discovery. Please persevere. And don’t be put off by the subtitle—even if the squishy word “journey” gives you hives, the book won’t. I promise. This is a straightforward recommendation—a prolonged staff pick, if you like. If “September Song”—discussed recently in these pages—feels inherently melancholy, the standard comes by this honestly: its lyricist, Maxwell Anderson, led a life marked by sadness. The autobiographical Morning, Winter, and Night (written under a pseudonym) recounts a gothic childhood filled with abuse. And before he began his long and successful career as a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, Anderson lost a number of jobs over his politics. Read More
September 3, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Waiting Game By Sadie Stein The first release of “September Song.” One of my “parlor tricks,” if such you can call it, used to be performing the Kurt Weill standard “September Song” in the voice of Lotte Lenya. I can’t pretend anyone ever requested this, per se, but from the ages of fifteen to about twenty-one, I broke into it on the slightest pretext. Among other things, the rendition was very loud. No record exists of my performances: small mercies, et cetera. “September Song” was famously written for Walter Huston’s limited vocal range, and his initial rendition—as an elderly Peter Stuyvesant in 1938’s Knickerbocker Holiday—remains, for many, the most poignant. (To anyone who would laugh at the thought of a seventeenth-century Dutch colonist singing one of musical theater’s great laments on aging, I would merely point out that “Memory” is performed by an anguished cat.) My grandfather always talked about first hearing the song when Walter Huston visited the radio program for which he was a writer in 1938. He cried, he said. When he died, it was sung at his funeral. Read More
September 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent One Shade of Grey By Sadie Stein Photo: Bookfoolery “A 1907 page-turner about American heiresses marrying impoverished, effete English aristocrats,” reads the description affixed to the shelf below The Shuttle. Obviously, I want to read it. And obviously, this is the work of Persephone Books. You don’t need to go to their shop in London to read Persephone, of course. Their Web site lists all their titles, and many can be found at bookstores around the English-speaking world. Their catalog makes for good reading, too—and it’s lovely to look at, with the same attention to color and pattern that enlivens the flyleaves of the entire gray-jacketed Persephone library. Read More
September 1, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Varieties of Reluctance By Sadie Stein One of Alex Jardine’s illustrations from The Reluctant Cook. I was delighted, at a London bookshop, to encounter a recent reissue of the 1954 Ethelind Fearon manual The Reluctant Hostess. As far as I’m concerned, Fearon’s entire oeuvre should be in print always, regardless of commercial considerations. She is that idiosyncratic. Fearon, who died in 1974 and at present doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry, was an authority on restoring medieval houses and an accomplished gardener—at one point she kept H. G. Wells’s garden—but as her official Random House bio would have it, “under pressure from publishers and an eager public she also wrote a number of books on such diverse but essential subjects as pigkeeping, pastries, how to keep pace with your daughter, and how to grow herbs.” (I want to meet every member of this supposedly clamoring public.) Read More