May 11, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Émile Zola By Valerie Stivers In her Eat Your Words series, Valerie Stivers cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. It’s finally the season for the farmers market, which inspired me to dig out my copy of The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola (1840–1902), a book whose descriptions of the central Parisian market of Les Halles in its heyday are perhaps literature’s greatest market scenes. Zola was friends with Cézanne, and he spends a very many pages in painterly descriptions of Les Halles, where at dawn, for example, “piles of greenery were like waves, a river of green flowing along the roadway” and the light “seemed to transform” cabbages into “magnificent flowers with the hue of wine-dregs, splashed with crimson and dark purple.” Later, “the swelling hearts of the lettuces were ablaze, the various shades of green burst wonderfully into life, the carrots glowed blood-red, the turnips became incandescent in the triumphant radiance of the sun.” Read More
May 10, 2018 The Moment The Moment of Writing By Amit Chaudhuri Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation, c. 1880. When does writing begin? The act of committing the first words to a page—as I am doing now—is cited for its difficulty. Though those words might well be deleted from the final draft, the resistance of the blank page is justifiably famous. It’s an entrance to the unknowable, like the doorway on your first school-going day as a child. Once you’ve gone through, you’re in a different domain; you’re in the story, which involves inhabiting a new space and a new self. Before going in, you stare at the lit doorway of the blank page, partly with anxiety and partly with exhaustion. Exhaustion because the blank page is not only the beginning but the end of something. It’s the end of the hours or days or months you’ve spent considering both the subject and the prospect of writing about it. Arriving at the blank page represents our coming to the end of the undecided space we call living. Now we must get down to telling. Read More
May 10, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Pleasure as a Means By Sarah Kay 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, Sarah Kay is on the line. Original illustration by Ellis Rosen. Dear Poets, My cousin is getting married in a month. We were born ten days apart, which we take pride in like we planned it, and grew up like sisters. We drifted a bit and now work different hours and are states away. We have a tradition of writing something to each other before momentous occasions. I’ve always looked up to her—she’s an adventurous, kind soul and has shouldered a lot of unexpected responsibility with grace. I have this well of happiness for her and her soon-to-be husband, but I’m having trouble expressing it. I know she’d appreciate even a simple “I’m so happy for you,” but I want to say more. I feel both giddiness and this more stable undercurrent of joy for them. Can you help point me in a direction for well wishes like these? Are there any you hold dear to your heart? Thank you, Speechless Congratulations Dear Speechless, One of the most common requests that poets get is to recommend poems for weddings. Sometimes we get asked to write original pieces for close friends, sometimes just to help find one for someone else to read. There are so many excellent love poems, and it’s difficult to pick the right wedding poem for a couple I don’t know. But wedding season is approaching, and I bet many folks will be writing in with similar requests soon, so I will give this one a shot. For you, for your cousin, let’s read “On the Occasion of Your Wedding,” by Sandra Beasley. Sandra writes: People will tell you it is natural to pair off. People say this despite the Pope, in his backseat built for one. People say this despite the cuttlefish, with three hearts of his own and no room for more … Sandra notes that there is nothing natural about the messiness of a dedicated partnership, the “clog of drain hair” and “the way you tuck used Kleenex into the crevice of his recliner.” And yet in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she applauds the couple for saying, “Screw it and I do.” In your letter, you mentioned your cousin’s adventurousness and her ability to meet the challenges that have come her way. It sounds to me like she is the kind of person who would nod her head at Sandra’s sage advice that “they make duct tape for situations like this.” I love this poem because not only does it celebrate the courage it takes to choose marriage in this endlessly chaotic world where nothing is promised, but it also includes small and practical blessings like “knowing when to leave the room.” Best of all, it ends with a single joyful thought—one that is perhaps the same thought all we romantics dressed as cynics have at weddings—“You fools. You lucky, lucky fools.” –SK Read More
May 10, 2018 Arts & Culture Nietzsche Wishes You an Ambivalent Mother’s Day By John Kaag and Skye C. Cleary Mary Cassatt, Sleepy Baby, 1910. The cultural institution of Mother’s Day began with a single massive flower delivery. In 1908, Anna Jarvis, widely regarded as the founder of the holiday, delivered five hundred white carnations to Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her mother had taught Sunday school for decades. It was the start of a century-long Mother’s Day tradition: give solid-white carnations in honor of the memory of the deceased; give solid-red and solid-pink ones to the moms who still live among us. For a single day, the life of a mother is supposed to be easy. She can take a break and bask in the admiration of her absolute purity, unmitigated faithfulness, unbridled charity, and total love. But perhaps this form of celebration is too easy; perhaps it masks the true difficulties and precariousness of a woman bearing and raising children. In truth, very few things about motherhood seem absolute, unmitigated, unbridled, or total. And maybe we should accept, even celebrate, precisely this ambivalence. Read More
May 9, 2018 On Books Selected Sentences from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi By Anthony Madrid A few words about an underappreciated piece of reading technology. Talking about underlining in books. Nobody shows you how to do this, and it’s a pity. You find out quick that if you do it wrong, you ruin the book. If you do it right, though, you create a precious heirloom. How do you do it right? Use a ruler, for starters. They make little stubby ones for this purpose. Then there’s the question of where exactly the line should go. Should it touch the bottom of the letters on the line, or should you give it a little space there? Depends. And then there’s the ink. When I was first underlining, I didn’t understand. You can’t use inks that are gonna show through. Also, you probably don’t want the ink’s color to dominate the page. Bloodred ballpoints are usually too much. The effect can be as bad as that of a highlighter. And you can’t use pens with runny noses that are gonna form solid droplets at their tips. You can’t, unless you like big ol’ gobs and smears of ink at the end of each stroke. Heaven knows not every book asks to be underlined. But heaven is founded on the idea that some books really do demand it. Reading any of these nineteenth-century supremo-supremo novelists without marking the best bits is insanity. You’re going to need those sentences later. Read More
May 9, 2018 Hue's Hue Lilac, the Color of Half Mourning, Doomed Hotels, and Fashionable Feelings By Katy Kelleher Lorde at the MTV Video Music Awards. In 1960, the architect John Macsai cracked open a book of brick samples to show his employer, A. N. Pritzker. Pritzker was, according to the Chicago Reader, an “incomprehensibly wealthy” man who wanted Mascai to build him a hotel. The building would be the first Hyatt Hotel in the Midwest. Mascai had already drafted up the shape of the structure. It was going to be a subtly striking building, a fine example of mid-century modern style perched on short stilts in downtown Lincolnwood, Illinois. Mascai’s plans called for a long low-slung building with the main structural elements, like the supporting steel beams, placed on the outside, allowing for extra-large rooms on the inside. Like most design of the era, it emphasized function and comfort equally, with few decorative touches (and certainly no Morris-esque flourishes). Macsai wanted to use gray bricks and white painted steel for the hotel’s facade. But Pritzker had other ideas. The gray, he said, was dull. He was a man with more dollars than sense, and he didn’t want something tasteful or subdued. He wanted to build something that would stand out, that would trumpet its existence to pedestrians from a mile away. And so, after pawing through the sample book, Pritzker picked out a purple glazed brick. He didn’t pick a deep purple or one of those obscure dark maroons that can read as brown in the right light, and he didn’t choose a soft gray-leaning mauve either. He picked lilac, a shade darker than thistle and lighter than mulberry, a shade that is undeniably purple, even at dusk, even at dawn. Read More