February 12, 2013 First Person Letter from Berlin: In the Cut By Zeke Turner Fabian One morning my first summer in Berlin, I woke up alone in a park with a piece of sweaty plastic wrap around my forearm. I still had the tattoo. I still didn’t have my keys. Fabian had given me the tattoo lying in his bed the night before. We met in a club thirty-six hours earlier, on Sunday afternoon, after I tried to pick up his roommate, a brooding Austrian boy with shoulder-length blond hair who was sitting alone away from the dance floor. He had a homemade tattoo of a sword on his wrist. His roommate had made it, he said, and did I want to meet him? They both turned out to be straight, and we spent the rest of the day dancing together and sharing our drinks and our cigarettes and whatever else we had. Another Sunday afternoon dancing at the same club, a Portuguese friend stopped me and asked, “Americans come here for the freedom, right?” Another Sunday there, a Scottish boy asked me if I moved to Berlin “just to have fun.” Usually in these situations I say, “I guess so.” Nobody with pupils that size could have patience for a real answer. Read More
February 12, 2013 On the Shelf Hypothetical Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein “But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote’s claim that his best seller was an ‘immaculately factual’ recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse.” Cold blood, indeed! Douglas Coupland makes some very nice furniture. E-readers: not big in Japan. Readers have rallied around Maine’s Longfellow Books, badly damaged in the weekend’s blizzard. “I never realized what this store means to people until this weekend,” says the owner. Bad hypothetical book proposals.
February 11, 2013 Arts & Culture February in Chicago By A-J Aronstein Just a few years ago, I had no idea what cold felt like, and no way to know how to prepare for it. I didn’t know my limit. Zero degrees. No degrees. None of them. Personally, that’s when I start to lose it. In this range, anyone’s capacity to describe what they are feeling—already a pretty fraught prospect—collapses into mutterings about “hanging in there.” And then the wind comes off the lake. February in Chicago: four weeks when it’s acceptable to shower in a hoodie and sleep in a balaclava, wool turtleneck sweater, and thermal socks. Anyone who says they’re not wearing long underwear is either lying or an idiot. I’m wearing one of my three pairs right now, and I’m sitting in my apartment. If I lean forward over the keyboard, I can feel the sun through my bay window on my face. It’s colder elsewhere, sure. Mostly in the settings of nineteenth-century Russian novels. And as we get toward March, I keep the weather for Duluth in my iPhone rotation, just to stay humble. But—as anyone around here will remind you over a Schlitz, or eight—Chicago is the largest American city that deals with negative-twenty-degree wind chills on a regular basis. The wind chill last week got down to negative twenty. In this range, we all become characters in a Jack London story, fighting to keep the blood in extremities we didn’t know we had. And I start to wonder: If I needed to build a fire and all I had was an iPhone, how long would it take for me to freeze to death? Read More
February 11, 2013 Quote Unquote Dear Enemy By Sadie Stein “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ―Sylvia Plath
February 11, 2013 Books Love in Amish Country By Rachel Yoder I didn’t know Amish romance novels existed until a trip I took a number of years ago to Shipshewana, Indiana. There my uncle directed an Amish and Mennonite cultural center, and I was ostensibly working on a book about Amish and Mennonite culture, so it seemed a place I should go. I had just turned thirty and was beset with ambivalent, indistinct longings for the Mennonite heritage in which I’d been raised, even though the entirety of my twenties had served as an extended exercise in exodus and estrangement. Still, I went, most excited to locate and eat some peanut butter pie made with flaky, lard-infused crust. The cultural center my uncle ran was called Menno-Hof, hof a Pennsylvania Dutch word that means something close to “farmyard,” though at Menno-Hof the farmyard is neatly pruned, the pond perfectly ovular, the flower garden precisely planted to approximate a quilt. It seemed to me a beautiful lie in need of some freshly dropped horse patties. After touring the fastidiously curated exhibits in the barn and adjacent whitewashed Amish farmhouse—replete with a recreated reformation dungeon, a small hurricane room with a vibrating floor and powerful fans, a Conservative Mennonite church where a booming God voice commanded that I consider my spiritual fate—I finally wound up in the gift shop on the brink of both ecstatic revelation and nervous breakdown. Many of the wares there approximated the contents of my mother’s root cellar (raspberry jam and apple butter in glass jars) and the theological section of my father’s library (Nonviolence—A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures, by John Howard Yoder). The only items there truly unfamiliar to me were two wire racks full of paperbacks, their covers each backlit with the golden glow of God’s everlasting presence and bucolic perfection: wheat fields, corn fields, rivers and barns beneath cerulean or honey skies. A plain-clothed woman in some state of muted emotional duress gazed into the middle distance beneath her white bonnet. I spun through the racks, elated, repulsed. Could there be anything better, or worse, than Amish romance novels? Read More
February 11, 2013 On the Shelf “A Reverse Fahrenheit 451,” and Other News By Sadie Stein Sharon Olds, Lena Dunham, and Jennifer Egan on The Bell Jar. Dark horse Antonio Munoz Molina wins the Jerusalem Book Prize. Little-known books, blockbuster adaptations: a bittersweet colloquy. The romance author Jessica Blair is really an eighty-nine-year-old vet named Bill, who has no problem with his nom de plume. In “a reverse Fahrenheit 451,” firefighters carry books to safety.