May 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Booksellers Week By Sadie Stein Carl Spitzweg, Kunst und Wissenschaft (detail), ca. 1880. One of the few remaining bastions of character on New York’s Upper West Side is its smattering of sidewalk booksellers. Up and down Broadway—displaying wares by American Apparel, blasting Bach, and hawking signed Roth novels in front of Zabar’s, dressed in velvet by the Eighty-Sixth Street Uptown 1—these are the folks who keep the neighborhood alive. Over the weekend, I was perusing the stall of a certain bookseller when another customer—a “character” in a many-pocketed fishing-tackle vest—strode up and began barraging the mild-mannered proprietor with questions. Read More
May 8, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Culinary Complicity By Sadie Stein The beloved family wine cake Back in 2011, I wrote a paean to my family’s one and only signature recipe: the wine cake. I hadn’t read it since it went up, and recently ran across the post while searching for a recipe for the cake; I was craving one for my own birthday. At the time, I described wine cake as the sole edible thing to emerge from my grandparents’ kitchen, and explained that it was a constant at all family birthdays. It wasn’t too galling, so far as rereads go. But I worry that I failed, in 2011, to express the most important thing: wine cake is amazing. Read More
May 7, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Another Day, Another Doll Hero By Sadie Stein H. Schönhauser, Mädchen mit Puppe (Girl with Doll), 1904. Yesterday, after posting about the Edison Talking Doll, I was wracked with guilt. I could not believe that I, a lifelong defender of dolls, had turned on them so callously, joining the chorus of ignorant fear-mongering that contributes to the current hostile doll work environment! I was ashamed. I set about to offer a counterpoint. Surely, I thought, there must be some dolls out there whose good works I can acknowledge. I Googled “Doll saves life.” Read More
May 6, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent If I Should Die Before I Wake By Sadie Stein The Edison Talking Doll, prepared to shatter whatever fragments of inner peace you‘d once believed to be infrangible. Even doll partisans—those of us who defend doll life from slander and prejudice and unfair film portrayals—have to admit that they’re sometimes terrifying. Indeed, I think it would be fair to say that the Edison Talking Doll is one of the scariest things ever made by man or demon. You have been warned. The Edison Talking Doll is just what it sounds like: a doll, with a small phonograph in its body, mass-produced by Thomas Edison’s lab in the 1890s. Although it was a progenitor of Chatty Cathy and a hundred other loquacious toys, the Edison Doll didn’t catch on, for the simple reason that it opened a howling portal to hell. (Well, they claimed the relatively high price was a factor.) While we may assume that the poor sound quality is a result of wear and tear on the original wax cylinders, apparently that’s not the case; as the Thomas Edison National Historical Park’s site explains, “Even with a brand-new, unplayed record, the sound emitted by the talking doll was always distorted and unnatural.” That’s putting it kindly. The doll … shrieks. It’s like an unearthly Carol Kane screaming in a wind tunnel, trapped in the body of a lifeless totem. Listen at your own risk. Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily’s correspondent.
May 5, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Word Games By Sadie Stein Simeon Solomon, A Youth Relating Tales to Ladies, 1870. My mother’s loathing for the word lady occupies a special place in her pantheon of negativity. To be specific, she doesn’t actually mind lady as a word or a title of the peerage—as seen in, say, Lady Day*, The Lady Vanishes, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s when the word appears in lyrics that she puts her foot down. (And even then, there’s a disclaimer: some lyrics are okay. “Luck Be a Lady,” “The Lady Is a Tramp”—these, among others, are acceptable.) Read More
May 4, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Wack Job By Sadie Stein József Rippl-Rónai, Woman Dressed in Polka Dot Dress (detail), 1889. Nothing can make you feel older than thrift shopping. As you walk the aisles, thumbing through the racks, young you keeps up a running monologue: That 1940s square-dancing outfit is cool! Look at those Polynesian-print slacks and the matching vest! You’d look like an awesome fifties-pulp lesbian cover model if you wore this shirt and tie! Sure, that leather dress is totally unflattering—but it’s neat! And five dollars! Have you ever worn your other five fake-fur chubbies? No, but maybe now’s the time! And time was, you’d have bought all these things. Each would have symbolized a you you might have been, or could have been for a day—an identity you could don or pretend you’d don. At the very least, the cheap thrill of the moment would have overridden any other concern. Who cared if your closet looked like it belonged to a hoarder pied piper? Anything was good enough for class, or for the existence of a creatively inclined, sensitive young person in the urban wild. Read More