March 25, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Shad Season By Sadie Stein “The Shad (Clupea Sapidissima)” from the First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game, and Forests of the State of New York, New York, United States: Commissioners of Fisheries, Game, and Forests of the State of New York, January 1896. The thermometer outside my kitchen window reads thirty-nine degrees, firmly on the leonine side of March’s spectrum. But in the park, trees are budding. In the greenmarkets, forsythia are rearing their heads. And, in restaurants, shad are running. Okay, they’re not actually running in restaurants. On my annual pilgrimage for shad roe, my better-informed dining companion told me that these particular egg sacs had likely traveled north from Washington, D.C.—maybe from the Potomac? The point is, shad are in season, whether one favors the bony fish itself or its slightly more approachable roe. Shad and shad roe used to be a common spring meal up and down the Eastern seaboard. Nowadays, it is the purview of traditionalists and evangelical seasonal eaters. If you are neither, it is still the kind of edible time machine that is worth seeking out when you can. At the Grand Central Oyster Bar, the roe is served with bacon and a broiled tomato. Newly cleaned, the restaurant’s famous Murano tiles gleam under the lamplight, and commuters come and go, and even if you secretly think the shad is pretty overcooked and you’re kind of relieved not to have to eat it on the regular, all is very much right with the world. Read More
March 25, 2014 Seidelathon “For Holly Andersen” By Lorin Stein On April 8, at our Spring Revel, we’ll honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award. In the weeks leading up the Revel, we’re looking at Seidel’s poems. Bemelman’s Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, New York. Photo: Arvind Grover Over the weekend, I turned on Studio 360. A cardiologist was describing the health benefits of dance—and this cardiologist was none other than Holly Andersen, hero of a great poem by Frederick Seidel, from his 2006 collection, Ooga-Booga. Dr. Andersen is also the dedicatee of the poem. I guess you could say she is its muse, but hero is the better word. This is a poem about heroism: doing your job in the face of death. It happens also to be a love poem, for in Seidel’s work love and admiration are rarely far apart. I never have a drink at the Carlyle Hotel without thinking of the first lines, and I think of the last lines much more often than that. Seidel has never given a public reading, but he has made several recordings of his poems, including this one. I played it as soon as the segment was over. What could be more pleasant than talking about people dying,And doctors really trying,On a winter afternoonAt the Carlyle Hotel, in our cocoon?We also will be dying one day soon. Dr. Holly Anderson has a vodka cosmopolitan,And has another, and becomes positively Neapolitan,The moon warbling a song about the sun,Sitting on a sofa at the Carlyle,Staying stylishly alive for a while. Her spirited lovelinessDoes cause some distress.She makes my urbanity undress.I present symptoms that expressAn underlying happiness in the face of the beautiful emptiness. She lost a very sick patient she especially cared about.The man died on the table. It wasn’t a matter of feeling any guilt or doubt.Something about a doctor who can cure, or anyway try,But can also cry,Is some sort of ultimate lullaby, and lie.
March 25, 2014 Arts & Culture The Weather Men By Valerie Miles The life, times, and meteorological theories of Josep Pla. Josep Pla at his house in Llofriu, 1975. “I’ve attended the procession of my country with a match in hand. Not an altar candle, not a torch, not a candlestick, but a match.” Josep Pla (1897–1981) is a controversial figure in Catalan letters, and a well-kept secret of twentieth century European literature. If Barça is more than just a football club, then Pla—a political and cultural journalist, travel writer, biographer, memoirist, essayist, novelist, and foodie, whose collected works clock in at more than thirty-thousand pages and thirty-eight volumes—was more than just a writer. Now that his deceptively simple, earthy prose and mordant sense of humor are available to American readers, the best way to read Pla is to curl up with a crisp glass of cava and a few spears of white asparagus. It’s impossible to read Josep Pla and not fall in love with his Mediterranean landscape. His native Empordà, with its mushroom-laced winds and its hint of burnt cork, mesmerizes. Pla’s most important work, The Gray Notebook, is out now in a graceful translation by Peter Bush; the Daily published an excerpt yesterday. In the spirit of a bildungsroman and the form of a diary, the narrative chronicles 1918 and 1919, two crucial years in young Pla’s life. It captures the raucous energy of a precocious country boy who falls on his feet in the city, full of the spit and vinegar of youth. These were ebullient years in turn-of-the-century Barcelona; the city saw the first roiling curls of the belligerence that would lead to the Spanish Civil War, giving The Gray Notebook a tang of dramatic irony. But Pla’s masterpiece wasn’t actually published until 1966, after he had rewritten and reworked the material from his earlier diaries—a process similar to that of Proust, who returned to material written during Swann’s Way to fashion Time Regained. Read More
March 25, 2014 Quote Unquote Dude Looks Like a Lady By Dan Piepenbring Flannery O’Connor was born today in 1925. O’Connor, right, with Robie Macauley and Arthur Koestler in Iowa, 1947. Photo: C. Macauley, via Wikimedia Commons BARRY HANNAH Flannery O’Connor was probably the biggest influence in my mature writing life. I didn’t discover her until I was at Arkansas, and I didn’t read her until I was around twenty-five, twenty-six. She was so powerful, she just knocked me down. I still read Flannery and teach her. INTERVIEWER What was it that got you? Was there something specific? HANNAH “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and then I read everything. I thought the author was a guy. I thought it was a guy for three years until someone clued me in very quietly at Arkansas. “It’s a woman, Barry.” Her work is so mean. The women are treated so harshly. The misogyny and religion. It was so foreign and Southern to me. She certainly was amazing. —Barry Hannah, the Art of Fiction No. 184, 2004
March 25, 2014 On the Shelf All Your Favorite Shipwrecks in One Convenient Place, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Johan Christian Dahl, Shipwreck on the Norwegian Coast (detail), 1831. If you woke up this morning and wondered, Will today finally be the day that the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) puts together an interactive map of all known shipwrecks that have occurred off the treacherous Scottish coastline?, congratulations: the answer is yes. Shut up the surly teenager in your life—remind him of how viciously teens were treated in medieval Europe. “A lord’s huntsman is advised to choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight: one who is physically active and keen sighted. This boy should be beaten until he had a proper dread of failing to carry out his master’s orders.” Vis-à-vis cruelty: in Britain, it’s now illegal to send books to prisoners. Authors are protesting. Back in the day, Orson Welles performed ten Shakespeare plays on the radio. You can listen to them. “Not since the heyday of Dickens, Dumas, and Henry James has serialized fiction been this big.” Behind Wattpad, a new storytelling app. What if classic writers wrote erotica? (Hats off to Camus’ Sutra, which is especially inspired.)
March 24, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Little Bookroom By Sadie Stein Detail from the cover of The Little Bookroom, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone This morning, it was announced that the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) had named the Japanese writer Nahoko Uehashi and Brazilan illustrator Roger Mello the winners of the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award. Founded in 1956, the biannual “Nobel of Children’s Literature” honors outstanding contributions to both writing and illustration. Past winners have included Maurice Sendak, Paula Fox, Tomi Ungerer, and Tove Jansson. They are, of course, named for the Danish writer of the world’s most disturbing fairy tales, and the recipients are given a medal, emblazoned with Andersen’s likeness, by the Queen of Denmark. The very first Andersen Award was presented to the prolific British writer Eleanor Farjeon, for her extremely bizarre collection The Little Bookroom. This book, illustrated by the peerless Edward Ardizzone, is composed of twenty-seven stories, all somewhat remote in tone, frequently redolent of loneliness, and often carrying a vague air of allegory. Read More