July 20, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Leonora Carrington By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. To capture the weird factor in Carrington’s work, I used a molecular-gastronomy technique to make balsamic gel beads. Surrealism today is mostly a chapter in art history, so it’s difficult to appreciate the wildness and power it once had, or to imagine (or fear) that it might rise up from the pages of a book and possess a cook and her kitchen. But it felt like that’s what happened when I essayed to cook from the works of the English-born surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). Carrington’s works are full of animal familiars, animate vegetables, and impossible foods like “pomegranates and melons stuffed with larks.” In one story, there’s “a plump, fat chicken with stuffing made of brains and the livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve with a few drops of some divine liquor. This chicken, which had been marinated—plucked but alive—for three days, had in the end been suffocated in vapours of boiling patchouli: its flesh was as creamy and tender as a fresh mushroom.” Well then! As one might imagine, cooking that dish, or anything from what one introduction calls the “writhing, dense thicket” of “Carrington’s version of Jung’s collective unconscious,” was intimidating, and I was concerned that anything edible would be too ordinary. I didn’t have access to larks or live chickens. I had no giantess tart pan, and I don’t quite have the stomach to make truffled brains or suffocate anyone in patchouli fumes or marinate her alive. To my surprise, though, the spirit of the book seemed to rise up within me, and the mostly invented recipes were better than I knew I could dream up, brighter and more sour, weirder and more delicious. I thought they looked right and tasted even better. Read More
July 19, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: I Loved My Friend By Claire Schwartz In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. © Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, What do you do when the person you thought would be your best friend forever and ever and ever no longer feels the same way? Or perhaps never even did? Is it just time to move on? What do you when you’ve promised yourself, and her, that you would love her forever and ever, no matter what? Was that a ridiculous promise? Thank you, Lost Dear Lost, I’m sorry that you’re experiencing this heartbreak. It is both an exquisiteness and a challenge that friendship is not governed by the regulation of other relationships. Friendship is not afforded the same social (or legal) recognition as blood ties or romantic partnerships. How we love our friends has few rules, and that means we get to be gorgeously creative with that love. It also means that how we work through conflict—how and if and when friendships end—has few models. In my experience, this confusion has made the end of close friendships all the more painful. For you, “Poem” by Langston Hughes, which cuts through the haze to say it plain: I loved my friend. He went away from me. There’s nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began— I loved my friend. Read More
July 19, 2018 Arts & Culture The Saddest Children’s Book in the World By Yevgeniya Traps What could be simpler than a bubble, a thin little floating membrane, the symbol of an innocent, trouble-free childhood? But it is said that one cannot live in a bubble—it’s right there in the definition: “a good or fortunate situation that is isolated from reality or unlikely to last.” In this jagged world, bubbles burst. A Bubble, the artist and musician Geneviève Castrée’s posthumously published last work, is, in essence, a children’s board book. It begins with the caption “Maman lives in a bubble,” above a drawing of a little blond child in cat-face knee socks gazing at her mother, who floats in the titular sphere. “I love you very much,” the mother says, her freckled face anxious, her choppy hair concealed under a beanie hat. She may be unwell, sick. Indeed, the next page confirms it, the mother has been ill for some time: “It has been a while now. I no longer remember the time when she didn’t live in the bubble, I was too little.” The mother works on projects in her bubble: embroidery, reading, crafting, drawing. She gets sicker and sicker, her illness progresses, her hair thins, she starts wearing a cannula, she is connected to a tank. She cannot leave her bubble, but sometimes the little girl joins her in it. They eat breakfast together (“She doesn’t mind if I make crumbs with my toast”), nap (“a special time for Maman and me”), make art (“I draw with her, it brings her great joy”). When she goes on excursions with Papa, the little girl makes sure to tell Maman about her adventures. The bubble separates them but cannot keep them apart. One day, the bubble ruptures, Maman washes out, disoriented at first, but overwhelmingly happy, and she kisses her little girl a thousand times, invites her for an ice cream cone. “I say yes!” the child reports contentedly, and the two walk off together, holding hands, free of the bubble at last, absorbed in each other. Read More
July 19, 2018 On Technology The Radical Notion of a Smartphone-Free Campus By Christopher Schaberg There’s a scene in Don DeLillo’s story “Midnight in Dostoevsky” that reflects on the current omnipresence of digital media and the relative oasis that the college classroom can be. Here we are in a laughably self-serious logic seminar, where the wizardly professor, Ilgauskas, utters one-line axioms before the small group of anxious, if intrigued, students: “The atomic fact,” he said. Then he elaborated for ten minutes while we listened, glanced, made notes, riffled the textbook to find refuge in print, some semblance of meaning that might be roughly equivalent to what he was saying. There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats. We sat and listened or sat and waited. We wrote with pens or pencils. Our notebooks had pages made of flexible sheets of paper. I don’t want to wax nostalgic for an earlier era when college students dutifully shunned digital technology or didn’t have it to begin with. I do want, as my university often encourages me, to meet my students “where they are.” But sometimes the imperative to digital mediation overwhelms me and makes me wonder about the threshold of these different ways of being: analog and digital. But of course, it’s never that simple, never a clear-cut binary. Read More
July 18, 2018 Look The Handwriting of Famous People By The Paris Review The Romans were among the first to develop a written script, and their penmanship was round and even. In the Middle Ages, the price of parchment soared, and handwriting, accordingly, became small and condensed. Years later, in the eighteenth century, elegant handwriting became a sign of refinement. Later still, in the twentieth century, American schools taught a standardized cursive by encouraging students to draw loopy letters through horizontal lines. Now hardly anyone writes anything at all. Through September 16, the Morgan Library and Museum is showcasing the handwriting of more than a hundred major artists, authors, composers, and historical figures drawn from the Pedro Corrêa do Lago Collection. A selection is presented below. Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking (1942–2018). Signed title page from A Brief History of Time (1993), with thumbprint signature witnessed by Hawking’s personal assistant, Judith Croasdell, inscribed by Croasdell to Philip Dynes, October 9, 2006. Read More
July 18, 2018 Revisited Glenn Gould Is Always on Fast-Forward By Katharine Kilalea Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Katharine Kilalea revisits Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major. Glenn Gould in the studio in 1978. Driving home from the swimming pool one day, I listened to famous people on the radio describing themselves as either happy or unhappy. They preferred, on the whole, to say, “I choose to be happy,” which irritated me, so I switched to another station, which was playing Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B-Flat Major. The partita’s gigue—meaning jig—had a kinetic energy about it. I danced with my head. It seemed, while listening to it, that everything was dancing. A cricket match was on in the local park and the Bach infected the game with its rhythm, giving the throwing and catching of the ball, the umpire’s gestures, and the batting an elegance and coordination. My fingers drummed along on the steering wheel, or tried to, because Gould was playing, and Gould is always on fast-forward, his hands skipping so quickly over each other it was hard to say which was which. The outlines of the sounds were unclear, also, because despite having poured olive oil into my ears for several days, I had swimmer’s ear, which gave even the smallest noise an unrefined booming quality. Perhaps I could play this myself, I thought. Perhaps I could order the sheet music off Amazon. The piano would appreciate the company. It hadn’t been touched since New Year’s Eve when a friend’s new boyfriend—who would commit suicide shortly after—subjected us to a performance of Rachmaninoff. It was odd, most people play Rachmaninoff with feeling—because Rachmaninoff is full of feelings—but he just played it very loud and very fast. Impressively fast, really, but hard on the ear. Read More