August 29, 2013 On Food The Art of Our Necessities: A Cronut Story By Nikkitha Bakshani “I’m embarrassed to be on this line,” says a woman in exercise clothes, bending forward to undo her ponytail and swirling it back into a limp bun. It is 6:15 A.M.. Given our errand, I am struck by the number of people in workout gear. We are on the fabled cronut line. For those who have been spared the media blitz: every morning, hundreds of people queue up under the gingko trees near Dominique Ansel’s Soho bakery for the instantly iconic donut-croissant hybrid. Ansel patented the name after other bakers—from Fort Greene to Jakarta—began frying ring-shaped croissants, forcing them to fumble for alternative nomenclature: zonuts, frizzants, cronies, doissants. The cronut has, famously, paved its own black market; those who want to avoid the line can by them on Craigslist for an 800 percent markup. Want twenty delivered to you by professional line waiters? That’ll be $5,000. The idea of braving the line arose during a conversation in the hologram-like stage of a new friendship. It would be cool to get to know each other while we wait on line, right? Right? Initially, I naively envisioned something akin to the line outside Magnolia Bakery in 2009; curling just around the block, the commitment of a few minutes. A brief Internet search quickly informed me otherwise. Still, without too much reluctance, we decided to go anyway; partly for the story, partly for the taste, largely just because we could. “We’re only here because we were jet-lagged,” says the Canadian tourist in front of me, adjusting her Lululemon groove pants. “Oh, me too,” the bespectacled older woman in front of her chimes in, clutching a newspaper to her chest. “I woke up in the middle of the night to get water, but tripped on my husband’s suitcase.” She points to her apartment’s window, above a bistro with a French name, where men in baseball caps are unloading boxes from a Naked Cowboy Oysters truck. “I couldn’t go back to sleep so I came here.” Read More
August 29, 2013 Quote Unquote Past Tense By Sadie Stein “I don’t regret the present. I don’t feel it’s cheap and tawdry compared with the past. I think the past was cheap and tawdry too.” —Thom Gunn, the Art of Poetry No. 72
August 29, 2013 First Person On Keeping a Notebook, Part 2 By Sarah Gerard Read part 1 here. People often ask me whether, as a writer, I prefer to write by hand or on a computer. Realistically, it depends on the kind of writing I’m doing, but for a long time I responded that I preferred writing on a computer because it’s more difficult to write by hand and because writing on a computer is faster. “My thoughts move faster than my hand,” I would say, as if one part of my body was smarter than the other. Of course, this was just an excuse. The first entry of my latest notebook includes the following passage: How much time every day will I have to spend getting all of my thoughts down on paper? But they don’t have to be all of my thoughts. But some may be left behind. Are they really that important? How important are my thoughts? That is the real question here. The question of how much time every day is required for keeping a notebook is—like the question of the difficulty of writing by hand, or that of whether or not someone will read my notebooks, or the question of accuracy or inaccuracy—just a way to keep myself from making work that is “unpresentable.” I don’t mean unfinished—I mean not good. Over the last two years, I’ve managed to scare myself out of treating my notebook as a private space, and trick myself into using it only as a place to reflect on other peoples’ public thoughts under the guise of intellectualism. It is the same fear that beset me three and a half years ago when I took my high school notebooks outside and burned them. What was I afraid of? Of someone I respect seeing work that I found embarrassing, maybe. Of being exposed as a fraud, as if, because I once filled entire notebooks with “free verse” poems about underage sex and drinking, I could never be considered a serious writer. Of someone thinking—proving—that I’m not good enough. Read More
August 29, 2013 On the Shelf In Which Jane Austen Tells Your Fortune, and Other News By Sadie Stein Oxford Dictionary Online (not to be confused with older sibling OED) has added twerk, derp, and selfie. “I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of a cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones.” The Jean-Paul Sartre cookbook. The top twenty books people leave in motel rooms. (Fifty Shades Freed leads the pack.) The (inevitable?) Jane Austen tarot deck.
August 28, 2013 Arts & Culture Notes from a Bookshop: Late Summer, or Summer Is a Kind of Island By Kelly McMasters 3. Arcana Of one order are the mysteries of light and of another are those of fantasy Rider Tarot Deck instructions —Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda A good friend came to visit this spring, and a few times during her stay, she pulled a book off the shelves, either from Moody Road Studios or at my home, shuffled the pages under her thumb, and stuck a finger on a line like an arrow hitting a bull’s-eye. Then she’d read the single line aloud, a kind of party trick. This would typically happen when we’d be in the middle of a conversation, talking about some big questions that we were swirling at the time, the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I, will-this-work-or-not, should-I-take-this-chance kind of conversations that tend to occur after some Southern Comfort on a patio. She used whatever book was in her hand as a literary tarot, and believed the line would tell us all we needed to know. Usually, bizarrely, it worked. I tried this on my own, but it fell flat. After the house was asleep, I would pose a question in my head and stalk a book, pull it from the stack before it could resist, flip open its pages and point hungrily at it, waiting for its answer. Each time, the result was tinny, hard-pressed, wanting. It reminded me of late nights with my Ouija board as a kid, waiting desperately for something to speak to me when I was really just waiting for my own voice. People ask a lot of their books. They want them to be amazing, they want them to be cheap, they want them the moment they walk through my door. I often feel like a kind of carnival showman, flashing bright colors in front of the customer, hoping something catches their eye. People’s personal restrictions always amaze me. “I don’t read books with dogs in them.” “I don’t like to have to think too hard.” “I can’t buy books with white covers.” Really? Read More
August 28, 2013 Quote Unquote Childish Things By Sadie Stein “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.” —John Betjeman