September 17, 2013 On Food Inherent Vice By Sadie Stein Paper and Salt, a blog devoted to food and literature, is consistently excellent. In a recent post, author Nicole Villeneuve draws attention to a little-discussed aspect of Thomas Pynchon’s writing: his recurring interest in Mexican food. Why, she asks? “Let’s just say he had done plenty of ‘research’ on the subject. As his friends’ memories, he was always seeking his next meal: ‘wearing an old red hunting-jacket and sunglasses, doting on Mexican food at a taco stand.’ Throughout the late 60s and 70s, Pynchon became a regular at El Tarasco in Manhattan Beach (It’s still open today, if you want to follow in his culinary footsteps). Neighbors would frequently spot him chowing down—the notorious hermit, lured into public by a burrito.” Alas! If Pynchon does, indeed, reside in pleasant anonymity on New York’s Upper West Side, his options for good Mexican food are (as California-bred Villeneuve points out) notoriously limited. Good thing she provides a recipe for Beer-Braised Chicken Tacos.
September 17, 2013 History Little Syria By Angela Serratore “The Foreign Element in New York—The Syrian Colony,” c. 1895 “When one leaves the hurry and roar of lower Broadway and walks southward through narrow Washington-st., the average New-Yorker of Caucasian descent might easily believe he was in the Orient. A block to the east roar the trains of the elevated. A little further eastward are the rushing throngs of Broadway. In the midst of all this tumult and confusion is situated the quiet village of Ahl-esh-Shemal.” And so, in 1903, the New-York Tribune endeavors to take its readers into Little Syria. Concentrated on Rector and Washington Streets in the lower parts of Manhattan, Little Syria in 1895 was home to an estimated three-thousand residents from modern-day Syria and Lebanon (nearly all Middle Eastern New Yorkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be referred to as Syrian or Arab, regardless of religion), most of whom had fled persecution under increasingly harsh Ottoman rule. Missionaries, dispatched to the Holy Lands to spread the Christian gospel, told tales of a city made of opportunity, ready and waiting to receive immigrants dedicated to hard work and moral living. Read More
September 17, 2013 On the Shelf Philosophy Turns Violent, and Other News By Sadie Stein During an argument over the works of Immanuel Kant, a Russian man was shot in the head. He is, shockingly, not seriously hurt, but the shooter faces up to a decade in jail for “intentional infliction of bodily harm.” The distinguished poet Graham Nunn—former artistic director of the Queensland Poetry Festival—has apologized for serial plagiarism. After getting caught. James Patterson: “I’m going to give away $1 million in the next twelve months or so, to help independent book stores. We’re making this big transition right now to ebooks, and that’s fine and good, and terrific, and wonderful, but, we’re not doing it in an organized, sane, civilized way. What’s happening right now is, a lot of book stores are disappearing, a lot of libraries are disappearing or they’re not being funded. School libraries aren’t being funded. This is not a good thing. It used to be you could go to your drugstore, you’d find books everywhere.” The president of the Ohio board of education is calling for the ban of The Bluest Eye by native daughter Toni Morrison. Debe Terhar calls the 1970 novel “pornographic.” Says Morrison, “I resent it … I mean if it’s Texas or North Carolina as it has been in all sorts of states. But to be a girl from Ohio, writing about Ohio having been born in Lorain, Ohio. And actually relating as an Ohio person, to have the Ohio, what—Board of Education? —is ironic at the least.”
September 16, 2013 Bulletin Tonight! By Sadie Stein Tonight at the Powerhouse Arena: Lawrence Block, Chip McGrath, and Lorin Stein on John O’Hara, moderated by Steven Goldleaf. See you there!
September 16, 2013 On Food Hemingway’s Hamburger By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Fingers deep, I kneaded. Fighting the urge to be careless and quick, I kept the pace rhythmic, slow. Each squeeze, I hoped, would gently ease the flavors—knobby bits of garlic, finely chopped capers, smatterings of dry spices—into the marbled mound before me. I had made burgers before, countless times on countless evenings. This one was different; I wasn’t making just any burger—I was attempting to recreate Hemingway’s hamburger. And it had to be just right. My quest had begun in May when I read a newspaper story about two thousand newly digitized documents of Ernest Hemingway’s personal papers in Cuba finally wending their way to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. This was the second batch of Hemingway papers to arrive from his home in Cuba, where he lived from 1939 to 1960, and wrote numerous stories and the celebrated novels For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. In his Havana home—Finca Vigía, or “Lookout Farm,” a large house and sprawling tropical gardens filled with mango and almond trees—between tapping out books like A Moveable Feast (while standing up at his typewriter), he also enjoyed dining well and entertaining. The ubiquitous Hemingway Daiquiri, after all, comes from his time in Havana, when he wandered into the El Floridita bar, had his first taste of a daiquiri, then ordered another with no sugar—and double the rum. (So the story goes, anyway.) Read More
September 16, 2013 Arts & Culture Paradise Found By Sadie Stein On this day in 1919, Maxwell Perkins accepted twenty-two-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise for publication. The novel had started as a shorter piece called The Education of a Personage; following a breakup with future wife Zelda Sayre, Fitzgerald became determined to achieve success and overhauled, expanded, and retitled the book (this time after a Rupert Brooke poem) while living with his parents in St. Paul. Published in March, 1920, This Side of Paradise was an instant bestseller. Scott and Zelda were married a week later. Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan donated the This Side of Paradise manuscript to the Princeton University Library in 1950; the library recently digitized the whole thing.