August 28, 2012 First Person Heal Thyself By Maureen Miller According to every epidemiological study of medical-student mental health ever published, a large percentage of us suffer from, well, something. The discussion sections of these research papers generally propose we educate one another in mental hygiene. They suggest we should practice more “mindful medicine.” And, good students, we oblige. A medical student may not come into med school knowing how to handle a “high-functioning” anxious type in clinic, but the diagnosis doesn’t require an office pamphlet. It’s visible right there in the room. At my school, we first learn to integrate this understanding of acute and chronic anxiety into clinical practice via the required six-week psychiatry clerkship. Six weeks of immersion in “ICU psychiatry,” the psychiatry faculty argues, is not enough time to master the management of anxiety disorders, but at least it is something. Third-year medical students spend six weeks on one inpatient psychiatry ward as well as several night shifts in a CPEP (Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation Program), the ER for the ill at ease. In these settings you learn to triage threat and fear until you know from anxiety. There you learn the difference between anxiety and agitation. Panic-attack patients stay in the ER for a while for cardiac and thyroid workups. Anxiety in the CPEP counts as psychosocial stressors, or Axis IV on the DSM-IV: losing your edge, losing your family’s support, your job your benefits, your place to live. Maybe you will have an adjustment disorder on Axis I, or existential anxiety that keeps you off your axis. Agitation is losing your cool, and sometimes losing your hospital gown if you’re especially feisty. For anxiety there is benzos and SSRIs; for agitation, benzos and antipsychotics and sometimes four point restraints. They call the agitation cocktail a 5+2, for 5 milligrams of Haldol and 2 milligrams of Ativan, though I saw one “frequent flyer” get a 10+4. Read More
August 28, 2012 On the Shelf Fuzzy Austen, Tipsy Wilde By Sadie Stein The literary felted dolls of My Cozy Classics are, quite simply, delightful. Above, a felted Elizabeth Bennett. Norman Mailer, film director. Exactly how Ladbrokes goes about determining their literary odds. Drink like Oscar Wilde: strongly against your doctor’s orders. The DNA of a successful book. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 27, 2012 At Work On Cataloguing Flaubert By Charlotte Strick Joanna Neborsky is a book lover’s illustrator. She may be as passionate and romantic about books and bookmaking as anyone I’ve met. She also draws the kind of pictures I’ve always wanted to make. They are deceptively simple due to the naive charm of each wobbly line, and they owe a great deal to the inspiration of mid-twentieth-century illustration—an obsession she and I both share. A few years ago Joanna and I collaborated on the cover of John Bowe’s Americans Talk About Love. A recent art school grad, she was willing to endlessly modify caricatures of the people interviewed for the book. The final package made for a witty and accessible take on social history. I always urge the artists I work with to keep me apprised of new projects, and so a few weeks ago I was tickled to discover a jpeg of Joanna’s poster “A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects, As Catalogued by M. Lemoel on May 20, 1880, Twelve Days after the Writer’s Death” in my inbox. We had to share it with readers of The Paris Review, and now I wanted to share a little about how it came to be. Read More
August 27, 2012 History Power Lunches By Jamie Feldmar As a penny-pinching undergraduate in New York, my idea of a power lunch was saving up for the Friday whitefish sandwich special at B&H Dairy on Second Avenue. Sitting alone on a vinyl swivel stool, I’d daydream about my boho-intellectual fantasy life, which involved large groups of opinionated writerly types laughing and arguing over exotic communal meals and bottomless tumblers of whisky, which I did not actually drink. If my luncheonette-fueled fantasy was a bit overstuffed, at least it was rooted in historical accuracy: power lunches are an institution in New York, so much so that they warrant their own section in the New York Public Library’s new exhibit, “Lunch Hour NYC,” a retrospective of 150 years of lunch history and culture in the city. While the term power lunch didn’t officially appear in print until a 1979 Esquire article about the Grill Room at the Four Seasons (unfortunately, “America’s Most Powerful Lunch” is nowhere to be found online), the ritual itself has been an important part of the city’s lunch landscape for well over a century. Lunch helped shape the rhythm of life in a rapidly industrializing New York at the turn of the last century: lunch breaks were hurried affairs, with rushed stops at quick-lunch counters in the early 1900s and Horn & Hardart automats a few years later. Time was a luxury, and leisurely midday meals were reserved for those wielding considerably political, financial, or social power. “Power lunches weren’t necessarily about exchanging money,” explains Lunch Hour cocurator Rebecca Federman. “They were about connecting with each other and exchanging thoughts, and there can be great power in ideas,” she says. The earliest power lunches likely took place in the 1830s at Delmonico’s, whose culinary wizardry (Lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska) and prime location in the financial district made it popular with well-heeled suits. Apart from the occasional visit from such authors as Charles Dickens or Mark Twain, Delmonico’s remained largely populated by business and finance moguls. Other powerful groups gathered at different locales over the years: playwrights and actors descended upon Sardi’s in the theater district in the forties, while wealthy socialites clustered at Le Cirque, Le Pavillion, and La Grenouille in the fifties and sixties, earning the not-entirely-flattering nickname “ladies who lunched.” For literary types, the lunch venue of choice was the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. What would later come to be known as the Algonquin Round Table (or, as its members preferred, “The Vicious Circle,”) began in June of 1919, when Vanity Fair writers Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert E. Sherwood joined like-minded pals for a midday soiree to welcome back famously sharp-penned New York Times drama critic Alexander Wollcott from a stint as a World War I correspondent overseas. Theater agent John Peter Toohey had organized the lunch as a practical joke, ostensibly as a welcome home, but instead used the opportunity to roast Wollcott for failing to include one of his clients in a column. Legend has it that all attendees—Wollcott included—enjoyed the gathering so much they decided to do it again the next day, and the next, and the one after that. Dining upon free popovers and celery sticks, or, in flush times, chicken hash with pancakes, the aforementioned writers—along with an ever-evolving cast that included playwrights George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, columnist Heywood Broun, and author Edna Ferber—bantered and gossiped, played endless games of cribbage and poker, and devised elaborate practical jokes to deceive one another. Conversation was fast, clever and biting—hence the “vicious” nickname, though the Round Table moniker was widely used after a Brooklyn Eagle caricature depicted the group draped in armor around a circular table. (Not all were fans of the club: Groucho Marx, whose brother Harpo occasionally joined the group, distanced himself from the table, claiming “the price of admission is a serpent’s tongue and a half-concealed stiletto.”) Of course, the Round Tablers also wrote—Kaufman, Connelly, and Sherwood all won Pulitzers for their work, and the Table’s wit was made famous nationwide in columns by Broun and Franklin Pierce Adams, who dutifully reported Tableside gossip in his “Conning Tower” column in the New York Tribune. Ernest Hemingway wrote his infamous “Baby Shoes” short story during a visit to the Round Table, collecting ten dollars apiece from the other writers who dared to bet he couldn’t write a complete tale in only six words. But the most enduring legacy of the Algonquin Round Table was undoubtedly the creation of The New Yorker in 1925, the masterwork of editor and Round Table regular Harold Ross, who secured funding for the magazine at the hotel (to this day, Algonquin guests receive a complimentary copy of the magazine). Many Round Tablers contributed to the magazine, whose urbane, sophisticated tone mirrored the conversations at the Algonquin’s power lunches. Over the course of the twenties, as its founding members moved on and away from New York, the Vicious Circle gradually disbanded (the hotel had long since stopped serving free popovers). The legacy of the Round Table has remained strong, however, in the generations since: in 1987 the Algonquin was designated as a New York City Historic Landmark, and in 1996 it was declared a National Literary Landmark by the Friends of Libraries USA. And the history of the power lunch, too, continues today, albeit in less ostentatious incarnations: Federman suggests Union Square Café as a modern-day haunt for literary agents and authors, while Michael’s in Midtown has long been a favorite for publishing-world honchos. The perennially hip Momofuku restaurant empire—which last year launched its own food-lit magazine, Lucky Peach, in conjunction with McSweeney’s—now hosts a series of lunchtime discussions at its Midtown outpost, Ma Peche. Called the “56th Street Round Tables,” the forums are billed as “lunch and lively discussion, in the spirit of the Algonquin Round Table.” This month’s discussion, presented in conjunction with the library, concerned the history and legacy of street food in New York, with insight from Federman; Robert La Valva, the founder of the New Amsterdam Market; Jane Ziegelman, the curator of the Tenement Museum’s Culinary Conversations; and Zach Brooks, the founder of the blog Midtown Lunch. The New Yorker’s midday meal, it seems, will continue its reign as the quintessential venue for the exchange of thoughts, ideas and power; to say nothing of the fare consumed. Perhaps for my next trip to B&H, I’ll split the sandwich with company. Visit NYPL’s “Lunch Hour NYC” through February 17, 2013. Jamie Feldmar is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor focused mainly on food, both professionally and personally. [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 24, 2012 Arts & Culture Henry James’s Living Room: Literary Color Palettes by Pantone By Sadie Stein In concert with their new book 35 Inspirational Color Palettes, Pantone (along with HuffPo Books) has designed thirteen palettes for the homes of famous authors. Below, a few of our favorites. Pause Play Play Prev | Next [tweetbutton] [facebook_ilike]
August 24, 2012 Video & Multimedia Watch: Nicholson Baker Sings About Jeju Island By Sadie Stein Nicholson Baker has written a song about Jeju Island. Watch it here: He writes: Jeju Island, a Unesco World Heritage site, full of wonders of nature—called the Island of Peace by South Korea’s former presiden—is now the locus of a large and controversial military construction project. The South Korean government is building a base there, which will be used by the United States to house missiles, submarines, and aircraft carriers, with which to “project force” against China. Samsung is the contractor. This is folly and should be stopped.