March 29, 2013 On the Shelf Faulkner Nobel on the Block, and Other News By Sadie Stein “The largest and most important group of William Faulkner material ever to appear at auction”—including his Nobel medal, an unpublished short story, and illustrated letters, recently found at the Faulkner home—is expected to fetch at least $2 million at Sotheby’s come June. Here is a sweet library marriage proposal for you. (To read, that is.) In further library human-interest, Flavorwire rounds up nifty librarians from around the country. (Just a small sampling, of course.) Now for something completely different: the all-seeing eye that is Amazon.com is acquiring Goodreads for an undisclosed sum.
March 28, 2013 At Work Everything They Cook Takes Five Hours: An Interview with Director Alexa Karolinski By Tim Small Alexa Karolinski is an old friend. I first met her in 2005, when I was the editor at VICE Italy, in Milan, and she was a particularly bright intern at the VICE Germany office. Alexa quit VICE a few months after I met her; she then moved to Paris for a while, started working in television for ARTE, met her husband, moved back to Berlin, and then moved to New York three years ago, where she studied documentary filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. And now she is a film director. Oma & Bella, her first feature-length film, began as her thesis, and was then released in German cinemas after being accepted at the Berlin Film Festival last year. If, like me, you have any sort of fascination with World War II, food, and your grandma, it is an absolutely must-see documentary. Oma & Bella tells the story of best friends Bella Katz and Regina Karolinski (Alexa’s grandmother), two octogenarian Holocaust survivors among the oldest surviving members of Berlin’s Jewish community, who moved in together when Regina had a hip operation. They spend most of their time cooking traditional Eastern European Jewish food, giving that food to their family, talking about food, organizing dinners, going food shopping, preparing food, washing the utensils they use to prepare food, putting food in Tupperware and freezing it, and occasionally taking a break from the food in the form of an amble to the park or the cemetery. With a delicate grace and a warm sense of humor, Alexa made one of the most touching portraits of an elderly couple―and of Holocaust survivors―I have ever seen on screen. A few months after the movie was released, we collaborated on The Oma & Bella Cookbook. That is to say: when Alexa told me she wanted to make a cookbook that would collect the movie’s recipes, I begged her to let the Milan Review design it. I recently got on Skype with Alexa to talk about her movie, grandparents, and food. So, tell me—exactly when did you decide to make this movie? It began about three years ago, when I was living in Berlin and decided that I wanted to learn how to cook. At the time I couldn’t cook anything more complicated than scrambled eggs and I decided that one day, my children—the children I don’t have yet—should be able to eat the food I grew up with. Therefore, I needed to learn that from my grandmother, and from her best friend, Bella, who she lives with. So I started cooking with them and then I kind of decided very quickly that it wasn’t enough to just cook with them, that I would have needed to write down the recipes and make a cookbook out of it. It must have been daunting. Yes. And they don’t cook with measurements—they go by eye—so I had to learn how to cook with them and invent the measurements just by watching them cook. So basically I started this cookbook project, and within that cookbook project I was looking for a visual landscape. And one day I kind of decided, knowing that I was going to go back to film school, to rent a camera and, just for fun, film them. Then I cut a two-minute teaser out of that, just to teach myself how to use Final Cut. And then, when I moved to New York, I showed this around, mostly just to show some friends how much I love my grandmother and how amazing she is. And people were like, This is gonna be your thesis film, and I kind of thought, Yeah, I guess it is. Read More
March 28, 2013 Weird Book Room Painting More Animals on Rocks By Sadie Stein Selected from AbeBooks’s Weird Book Room.
March 28, 2013 First Person Car Trouble, Part 2 By Pamela Petro Read part 1 here. I owned a car that I couldn’t drive. After the “Possession at Devil’s Bridge,” as we’d started calling it, Phil had parked the Mini alongside my cottage before roaring back to campus in her reliable yellow Renault. The following morning I went out and stood beside it, wondering what to do next. Any car’s speedometer cable could snap, but not just any car’s cable would have so profound a sense of timing as to do it at midnight, atop Devil’s Bridge, on its first outing with a new owner. Appropriately enough, the Mini and I were in Wales: home of Arthur and Merlin, breeding ground of the fabulous. In one of the old Welsh wondertales, black sheep that cross a magical river turn white, and white sheep turn black. The Mini’s color remained mushroom grey, but something similar, if more subtle, had happened as it crossed the Mynach. On the far side of the river the Mini had been cheap, utilitarian transportation; on my side, it had already become a character in a story. In Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald says we all have a heroic period in our lives. The Mini came into mine just as one of these phases was beginning (I don’t see why we can’t have more than one), and promptly took its place in the pantheon of memory. My next-door neighbor appeared and found me stroking my fingers through beads of dew on its roof. Read More
March 28, 2013 On the Shelf Medieval Pawprints, and Other News By Sadie Stein Presumably fifteenth-century paw prints have been found in a medieval Croatian manuscript. Herewith: Swan & Edgar, a Marylebone pub lined completely with books. Related: the International Edible Books Festival is a real thing, and here are pictures. “You are a wonderful writer. But you really should do something a little more interesting with your hair.” And other things people have said to authors.
March 27, 2013 Look Cat’s Meow By Sadie Stein “We’re definitely lending this book to the crew of kitten toughs who like to hang around the Myrtle JMZ stop talking about praxis and reminiscing about the days back when New York meant something, man.” (Good) book reviews, by two cats.