December 4, 2013 On Food All We Had By Amy Butcher Photo: Luigi Anzivino. My boyfriend Keith does not like my dumplings. He thinks they’re plain-tasting. I stir the sticky dough. He says that even their color is unappetizing. Like paste, he tells me, like something thick from inside an engine. “Like papier-mâché, almost,” he says, and I look at him and blink. Keith and I have been standing in my cramped kitchen for over an hour now, scraping spoons against spoons, and it’s late. On the table behind us, there’s a bowl of French-cut green beans and a whole chicken, getting cold. I take a pinch of flour and release it over the bowl. “Like this,” I say, but still the consistency won’t come together in the way I know it can. I add another pinch, and then another, and then another. The recipe for the dish is my grandmother’s, and it is simple: whisk together flour and egg, whisk until the dough sticks to the spoon and then, at last, snaps back against the bowl. It’s all about consistency, something you can’t put your finger on, something you just have to know. That is why there is no written recipe for this dish, this congealed mess of white that gets boiled in bits and drenched in sour cream and salt and pepper. There is no written recipe because how do you put your finger on dumpling elasticity? “So you just know?” Keith asks. He dips his finger into the simmering stock beside us, pulling it to his lips. “I just know,” I say. Read More
December 4, 2013 Look F?!@#g Ohio By Sadie Stein Nice work, Buckeyes: you curse more than any state in the union. (Not to be confused with our Ohio-born associate editor’s odd penchant for exclaiming, “Jesus Christ and all his merry elves!”)
December 4, 2013 On the Shelf People Are Angry, and Other News By Sadie Stein The Supreme Court has spoken: Amazon will pay taxes in New York. The family of Norman Rockwell is going to the mattresses over a new biography by Deborah Solomon, which raises questions about the artist’s sexuality. Says Rockwell’s granddaughter, “She layers the whole biography with these innuendos … These things she’s writing about Norman Rockwell are simply not true.” In praise of writing while one reclines. Eight prominent Dominican figures have written an open letter condemning the work of Junot Díaz, who is currently visiting the Dominican Republic. They accuse the lauded writer of “a scarce capacity for reflection and a disrespectful and mediocre use of the written word,” and resent his self-identifying as Dominican.
December 3, 2013 Bulletin Give the Gift of The Paris Review! By The Paris Review This holiday season, why not give your loved ones a full year—or even two, or three!—of the best in prose, poetry, interviews, and art? Subscribe now! And don’t forget to treat yourself, too!
December 3, 2013 Video & Multimedia A Downright Incantation By Sadie Stein Old Belgian river station on the Congo River, 1889. Everyone knows that Heart of Darkness was adapted as Apocalypse Now, but have you ever listened to the 1938 radio version Orson Welles did with the Mercury Theatre? The sound quality is poor, but it’s compelling nonetheless.
December 3, 2013 On Poetry Teeth Marks: Three Early Poems by Albert Cossery By Anna Della Subin Image via 3ammagazine.com. Like his friend, fellow Scorpio, and confidant Albert Camus, Albert Cossery would also have celebrated his one hundredth birthday last month. The patron saint of indolence—who wrote only when he had nothing better to do—died in 2008. But one can imagine that Cossery, had he made it to his centenary, would have been exactly like Cossery at any age. The elegant Egyptian novelist, impeccably dressed, forever held fast to his routine. For nearly sixty years, until his death, he lived in an austere room in the Hotel La Louisiane in St. Germain des Prés. Each day he slept late, venturing out only in the afternoons, to bask in the sun and watch the girls of the Luxembourg Gardens, or to have a plate of lentils and fizzy water at the Café de Flore and linger for hours, doing nothing. Even when, toward the end of his life, he was hospitalized for an operation, Cossery—still wearing the ward’s pajamas—escaped the hospital for the café, pushed in a wheelchair by a beautiful blonde. “Here comes Tutanhkamun,” the waiters whispered behind his back. Just so, Cossery’s writings, forever returning to the same scenes and casts—of mendicants and saltimbanques, failed revolutionaries and hashish-addled philosophers—preserved a certain consistency over the decades. The young Albert, who attended French schools as a child in Cairo, began his first novel at age ten. At seventeen, he published a book of poems, titled Les Morsures, “The Teeth Marks” or “Bites.” By all accounts the book has been lost, and Cossery himself up until his death coyly refused to aid any devoted readers in search of a copy. Yet three poems were preserved in the monumental anthology Poètes en Egypte, edited in Cairo in 1955 by Jean Moscatelli. The anthology, which brought together over fifty-five Franco-Egyptian writers, captured the collective achievements of a literary community in the twilight of its end. It included Cossery’s friends Georges Henein and Edmond Jabès, as well as Joyce Mansour and Horus Schenouda—all of whom were soon to leave, or had already left, for exile in Paris in the wake of Nasser’s coup. Read More