October 16, 2017 Fashion & Style The Macaron That Tastes Like Marina Abramovic By Hannah Foster Raphaël Castoriano, Marina Abramovic’s Taste, 2017, from the series “Pastry Portrait.” Stepping into the small office suite in midtown Manhattan, I half expected to find gurgling pots filled with caramelizing crystals, molds crusted with chocolate, and white powder dusting the doorway. Instead, in the headquarters of the sugar/art company Kreëmart, I found a cluster of normal-looking rooms with a small kitchen. The company’s director and founder, Raphael Castoriano, offered me a cup of tea and a variety of sweeteners, saying, “Pick your poison.” The bottle he held must have contained simple syrup, but, feeling suspicious, I opted for unsweetened tea instead. I sat down with Castoriano and his programs manager Simone Sutnick to discuss Kreëmart’s newest edible endeavor. Castoriano explained that sugar is an ideal medium for art because both sugar and art are “not necessities—they are luxuries.” His first foray into the sugar medium was in 2009, at the American Patrons of Tate Modern show. He teamed up with pastry chefs at the Milanese pasticceria and confetteria Sant Ambroeus and the artists Teresita Fernández, Ghada Amer, and Vik Muniz. The artists were no strangers to molding and sculpting, though perhaps not in material as frangible as frangipane. The evening’s most memorable reveal was two cakes crafted into the shapes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Amer decimated the cake politicians’ heads with a hammer, exposing the simulacrums’ respective strawberry and raspberry guts. Read More
October 16, 2017 On Writing Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and the Benefits of Jealous Friends By Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield We consider ourselves fortunate to have become friends during our early twenties, back when we were at the very start of our literary journeys. We were both English teachers living in rural Japan, and we had both been writing in secret in between lessons, but it took us almost a year to pluck up the courage to “come out” to each other as aspiring authors. We made our mutual confession over bowls of spaghetti in an eccentric, garlic-themed restaurant. Our delight at discovering a friend with the same dream eclipsed any prospect of possible rivalry. From that moment on, although our lives took us geographically in different directions, we trod a joint path as writers. After returning home to the UK, we lived many miles apart but helped each other from afar, reassured by the knowledge that our friend was also eschewing a well-paid profession and making do in the pokiest of apartments to buy some time to write. We shared and critiqued drafts of stories, passed on news of writing courses and contests, and soon confided in each other about our ideas for books. Sweetest to us during these years were what we termed our “writing weekends.” On these occasions, we’d travel across country by train to hole ourselves away in one another’s homes. We spent hours engrossed in our separate worlds on the page but came together to discuss our chapters in cramped kitchenettes—one of us slicing vegetables, the other toasting spices, both of us sipping from large glasses of wine. Together, we’d celebrate any successes: an acceptance on a master’s program, a place on a competition shortlist, signing with a literary agent. As time wore on, however, we’d more frequently find ourselves commiserating over the receipt of yet another publisher’s rejection slip. Read More
October 16, 2017 At Work Suitcase Full of Candy: An Interview with Svetlana Alexievich By Mieke Chew Svetlana Alexievich headlined this year’s Louisiana Literature festival, a gathering of writers, readers, and Scandinavian publishers held twenty-five miles north of Copenhagen, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The event was conducted in Danish and Russian, and the audience peopled a hill overlooking the Baltic Sea, craning their necks to glimpse the 2015 Nobel Prize winner. Alexievich spoke of the “wild, sacred years” of the Soviet Union, the responsibility she felt to free people from time through her books, and the legislation of memory. She was reluctant, when asked, to describe the evolution of her style. (“Must I explain everything?”) And she assured listeners that women are just more interesting than men. I hovered backstage for two days waiting for our interview. Meanwhile, I occasionally saw Alexievich eat, laugh, and chat with a group of friends, all Swedes (she lived in exile in Sweden for years). More recently, and still at risk of persecution, she returned home, to Belarus. “When I walk my dog in Minsk, I go past a church,” she told the festival audience, “I see the youth with their new cars. The priest comes out to see them. They want their cars to be blessed.” This is how she prefers to answer questions—through details. When we spoke, Tine Roesen, Alexievich’s Danish translator, acted as our interpreter. When the interview ended, after forty minutes, I figured Alexievich had had enough. Outside her hotel, she wrapped a scarf around her head and tied it under her chin; it was starting to rain. She stepped toward me and firmly shook my hand. Back in New York, a few weeks later, I read the transcript: The translator, mindful of Alexievich’s schedule, had suggested we end the interview much earlier than we had. Alexievich declined and started to ask me questions. INTERVIEWER In The Unwomanly Face of War, your first book, you say you hear texts everywhere. How did you start interviewing people? ALEXIEVICH I was born in a big city—Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine—but when I was a child, my father moved us back to his homeland in Minsk. We lived in a Slavic village and in the evening, sitting on benches, people talked, and we, the children, listened, of course—this was after the war, they were all women. This made a big impression on me. A much bigger impression than books, which filled our house. Because in books, the Soviet government made war look like a victory—beautiful, without misery. I don’t think one could even have more than two people killed in a book. What the women said was frightening, different. They would talk of death but also of love. And this, of course, affected a child’s mind. INTERVIEWER And how were you allowed to publish your books, books that changed the past? ALEXIEVICH It was a different time. I would not say it was easy, because no one could understand when I showed up, to a factory, or somewhere else. Why women? Why not men? But it was a different time. I couldn’t get published for three years. Then the times changed, glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn’t allowed to publish The Unwomanly Face of War, but then it changed. The manuscript was getting passed around in Moscow, and someone gave it to Gorbachev’s aide. And in Gorbachev’s report on Victory Day, he said, according to one book, War has an unwomanly face. This was quite a signal. Before that, the censors said: what a frightening book, naturalism, pacifism. Who will go to war after this book? Read More
October 13, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Witch-Hop, Typingpool, and Salkis By The Paris Review Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country is a deceptively narrow book. It seems to be the memoir of a young, untested journalist who finds herself in Turkey, almost by chance, and begins to learn about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East. In reality, it is a book about what it means to be white and American, in the world and at home. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I picked it up. Among its many virtues, it is the first book I’ve read that gives an honest account of what, for my generation, passed for history class at even a “good” high school. “I was in high school for the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia, but I was conscious of none of it at the time. During my senior year, I learned twentieth-century American history through the lyrics of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ … Many years later I unearthed a research project I made about the song.” If that doesn’t make you wince, then you may not recognize yourself in Notes on a Foreign Country. Not everyone will. If you do recognize yourself, then you may also recognize the connections Hansen draws between American exceptionalism abroad, white supremacy at home, and a national self-image based on virtue—a self-image that could survive in no other free country on earth, and that may finally be falling apart in ours. —Lorin Stein Maybe it was the cover image of Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing that prompted me to pick it up: the bare tree, icy lake, and snowcapped mountains might have been a subconscious relief for my all-too-conscious discomfort at this past week’s mid-October mugginess. Mieko Kawakami’s story, “The Flower Garden,” is aesthetically sparse and cool as well, yet far from simple. It is a brief story that pries with gentle force at the tight societal seam binding female identity and material possessions, and it begins in medias res: a woman is showing her house to a potential buyer, a wealthy, attractive woman much her junior. The narrator, a housewife, spent her entire married life decorating the house and curating its interior design. She feels for it a deep and maternal bond. Yet her husband’s business went bust, leaving them bankrupt, and she is forced to sell. Shortly after leaving, she begins stalking the house, sitting on the bench outside and going to tend the garden (her husband’s favorite thing about the house and maybe about her) after the new inhabitant has left for the day. In a few pages, Kawakami’s austere prose sketches the narrator’s rapidly growing infatuation with both the home and its new owner. Kawakami’s psychological realism is on the expert level of Henry James, suggesting ethereal and nuanced feelings through their material representations. However, unlike James, her mastery comes in the form of a skillful economy of language. The story blossoms hypnotically into a dark and strange ending. —Lauren Kane Read More
October 13, 2017 Humor Jewish Comedy Is Serious Business By Jeremy Dauber From Nize Baby by Milt Gross (1928). “You want to hear a joke? I’ll tell you a joke. What’s green, is nailed to the wall, and whistles?” “ … I give up.” “A herring.” “A herring’s not green!” “Nu, you can paint it green.” “But it’s not nailed to the wall!” “You could nail it to the wall. If you wanted to.” “ … But a herring doesn’t whistle!” “All right, fine, so it doesn’t whistle.” Or: “I just threw in that part to confuse you.” Or: “All right, all right, so it’s not a herring.” Or: “What am I, some kind of herring expert?” And on and on. Is this joke, with its multiplicity of potential punch lines, a Jewish joke? And if so, why? Is it the syntax, with its faint Yiddish overtones? The slightly smart-ass sensibility? The comfort with its meta-jokiness, or, put another way, the subversive, near-parodic jab at the joke’s very form? Is it the particular refusal to provide the closure of a punch line, which could be taken, by an overzealous interpreter, as a metaphor for a Jewish historical consciousness ever in wait for messianic redemption? Or is it just a joke about herring? While you think about that, here’s a story about telling Jewish jokes. It’s an old story, a tale of the Preacher of Dubno, an eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi famous for his apt and witty parables. Asked by an admirer how he always managed to find such an appropriate parable for each and every sermon, he answered, not uncharacteristically, with another parable. He told the story of a general visiting his troops who was struck by the results of their target practice: while most of the chalk circles drawn as makeshift targets on the wall revealed your regular variety of hit-or-miss results, one showed nothing but bullseyes—dead center, every shot. Gasping, the general demanded to see this marksman; he was even more surprised to discover the shooter was a Jew, a conscript forced to serve in the tsar’s army. He asked the Jew the secret of his success at arms. The Jew looked at the general as if he were cockeyed and responded: “Well, it’s very easy. First you fire the gun, and then, once you see where the bullet hole is, you draw a circle around it.” This had always been his technique, the maggid concluded: find a good joke or story, then figure out the larger point to draw from it. Read More
October 13, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Ivan Doig By Valerie Stivers Whipping up recipes from a fictional 1930’s creek picnic. Ivan Doig’s characters take their food seriously. Doig (1939–2015), a canonical writer of the American West, was shaped by the effects of the Great Depression. His family were Scottish farmer-settlers. In his 1978 memoir, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, Doig recounts his ancestors’ struggle to ranch the poor, high-altitude land of the Tierney Basin. It was a “peculiar” and “maybe treacherous” country where instead of homesteads, the land “turned out to be landing sites, quarters to hold people until they were able to scramble away to somewhere else.” In English Creek, the first novel in Doig’s acclaimed McCaskill trilogy, the 1930s landscape is littered with abandoned farms. The thirteen-year-old narrator, Jick, cursed with a teenage boy’s appetite in a rural environment of relative scarcity, is always on the lookout for his next meal. I find reading and rereading Doig’s work to be a moral tonic. It’s soothing to encounter a writer who values small communities, stewardship of the land, and the merits of human endeavor. He extracts meaning from the simplest things—a teenage boy’s appetite, for example—and when pleasure comes along for his characters, he celebrates it fully. Cooking to keep up with Doig’s women, though, is a challenge. Here’s a description, through Jick’s hungry eyes, of a Fourth of July creek picnic prepared by his mother and a friend: Read More