July 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Tender Trap By Sadie Stein From the cover of Das doppelte Lottchen, by Erich Kästner, illustrated by Walter Trier. In The Parent Trap—and the German book, Das doppelte Lottchen, on which it’s based—two strangers arrive at a girls’ summer camp only to discover they are identical. “The nerve of her! Coming here with your face!” exclaims one roommate in the 1961 film. Of course, in The Parent Trap, they’re actually twin sisters. But as anyone who’s been compared to someone else knows, just the accident of resemblance is enough to cause an instinctive enmity. I used to work at a store where this one customer would always remark on how much I looked like some friend of hers. She talked about it every time she came in. The friend was named Jen something. She was a potter. She lived in the Hudson Valley. The customer even brought in another woman to attest to this miraculous phenomenon. “You may think you’re a unique person walking around in the world,” said the customer one day. (I guess I had thought that.) “But you’re not—you’re a copy of Jen.” Obviously I had no alternative but to hate this Jen person. I imagine she felt the same way. Read More
July 9, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent One-Man Job By Sadie Stein Clara Peeters, Still Life with Shrimp and Eggs, ca. 1635. It is nice when people offer to help and mean it. But I was sincere, too, when I said that no, I didn’t need help cooking the eggs. That it was a one-man job. It’s true, I could have told him what to do. I could have instructed him to cover the eggs with an inch of cold water, and bring it just to the boil. But I know he would have been watching the pot anxiously, proverbially, and that the exercise would produce a stress all out of proportion to the scale of the job. Where to me, turning off the heat, covering the pot, setting the alarm, and then shocking the eggs in their ice-water bath don’t interrupt other thoughts, or even tasks. Read More
July 8, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Tree of Knowledge By Sadie Stein Ink Plum, scroll, ink on paper. The National Palace Museum, Taibei. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly … survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it. —Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn There is a very beautiful tree growing on West Eighty-third Street. You don’t notice it at first; it sort of blends into the walls and the weeds growing around it. I didn’t notice it for many years. And then one day, a flash of red catches your eye, and you look closer and see it isn’t a bit of plastic bag or a dead balloon or a Coke bottle or any of the urban flora one grows used to. It is a ripening plum. And then you see that there are many of them, dozens of them, and if you look very closely, you could, in that moment, be anywhere in the world. It’s next door to a church. Read More
July 7, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Jumping Through By Sadie Stein Honoré Daumier, Danger de porter des jupons-ballons à l’époque des coups de vent (The Danger of Wearing Hoop Skirts), 1857. While walking near Lincoln Center, I was waylaid by a frantic-looking young man. I was discombobulated—I’d been deep in a meretricious podcast—and it took me a moment to get the buds out of my ears. He had to repeat what he’d been saying. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” he was saying. “This is like a bad movie. I can’t believe this. But I just—I’m sorry, I’m just really upset—I just had an Uber driver kick me out and drive off with, like, an entire collection. I’m sorry, I can’t believe I’m doing this. I was at ABT—the ballet. I’m a costumer. Oh my God, I’m sorry, I’m crying.” “Do you want to call 9-1-1?” I was already unlocking my screen. Read More
July 6, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Fourteen By Sadie Stein A building without a thirteenth floor. You can tell who has lived in my building for a while by their elevator behavior. Anyone who’s spent any time in that unreliable apparatus knows it to be molasses slow, and that there is a significant interval between the stop and the opening of the doors. For instance, if you say, “Have a good one!” as soon as the elevator reaches the floor, there will be an agonizingly long moment of awkward silence in which you both stare fixedly at the door, willing it to open. An old-timer, by contrast, will allow the moment of silence first, and then slip in the valediction at the last possible second. I usually walk. But on this occasion, I was riding. You see, I’d snuck up to the roof to collect a mothballed sweater I’d been secretly airing and didn’t feel like walking all the way down to the basement laundry room. I had already marked out the other occupants of the elevator as newbies, both because I’d never seen them, and because they essayed a premature good-bye to a departing tenant on twelve. They had a very cherubic baby with them. “What a little sweetie,” I said. “How old is he?” Read More
July 2, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Ornate Rhetorick By Sadie Stein Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House, William Holland, 1789. There is a coffee shop in my neighborhood called the Sensuous Bean. This is obviously a great name, and perhaps one key to the store’s longevity; it’s one of the few small businesses in the area to have lasted over thirty years. I think it’s tops. No precious nonsense here, but the smell of roasting beans and the clutter of brewing paraphernalia is like a comforting hug. I’ve always hoped that their name was one of the few accurate Miltonian uses of the word sensuous in modern signage. After all, Milton came up with sensuous specifically to evoke a sensory experience innocent of leers and winks. And it didn’t really take. As Oxford Dictionaries would have it: The words sensual and sensuous are frequently used interchangeably to mean “gratifying the senses,” especially in a sexual sense. Strictly speaking, this goes against a traditional distinction, by which sensuous is a more neutral term, meaning “relating to the senses rather than the intellect” (swimming is a beautiful, sensuous experience), while sensual relates to gratification of the senses, especially sexually (a sensual massage). In fact, the word sensuous is thought to have been invented by John Milton (1641) in a deliberate attempt to avoid the sexual overtones of sensual. In practice, the connotations are such that it is difficult to use sensuous in Milton’s sense. While traditionalists struggle to maintain a distinction, the evidence suggests that the neutral use of sensuous is rare in modern English. If a neutral use is intended, it is advisable to use alternative wording. Read More