January 19, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking from Sixteenth-Century Fairy Tales By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The first and most deliciously weird collection of European fairy tales comes not from the Brothers Grimm but from Giambattista Basile (1575–1632), a poet, courtier, and feudal administrator from Naples. Because Basile wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, The Tale of Tales—in the original, Lo cunto de li cunti—has been obscure for most of its history. The first authoritative English translation, by Basile scholar Nancy Canepa, appeared only in 2007. For those of us who read to enter different skins and live in different worlds, the book is a treasure box of estranging language and metaphor. The tales are fantastical, but the greater thrill is how the writing brings alive the details and sensibilities of daily life in Baroque-period Italy, six hundred years ago. Here is Basile describing a pretty young girl: She truly was a delectable morsel: she looked like tender curds and whey, like sugar paste; she never turned the little buttons of her eyes without leaving hearts perforated by love; she never opened the basin of her lips without doing a little laundry of souls. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture The Academic’s Guide to Academese By A Community of Inquiry The following definitions are culled from a critical glossary written by a group of Princeton graduate students and faculty. The glossary defines fifty-eight terms common to academic life, in a style intended “to prick both egos and consciences.” art. Most generally, the ability, manner, or “knack” essential to the realization of some task or goal, especially when tricky or specialized (e.g., “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”). Also, a large class of objects and/or nonmaterial phenomena privileged for their putative ability to occasion unpredictable but significant responses (particularly aesthetic, but sometimes sentimental or political) in individuals and groups. A term substantially defined by resistance to definition. Hence, difficult to define satisfactorily, if also satisfactory to define difficultly. canon. A sacred weapon within academic departments, fired ritually upon the uninitiated or wayward. Injuries suffered may generate the scars requisite for entry into the relevant sodalities and/or encampments. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Finding Science Fiction and Fantasy for Female Readers By Dara Horn “Why don’t you write anything fun? You know, like about an alternate universe or time travel or something?” That’s my twelve-year-old daughter, an obsessive reader who plows through four or five books a week, disappointed that her novelist mom hasn’t invented a tweenage dystopia like the ones she devours daily. For her, like for so many readers her age, reading means plunging into the supernatural, fantasy, science fiction, some wild imagined world where new rules apply. I watched endless alternate universes with daring heroines pile up on my daughter’s nightstand, baffled by how different her tastes were from mine at her age—until I finally understood one very obvious answer to her question. My daughter’s fascination with nonrealistic literature began a few years ago with one of my own childhood favorites: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1962. And that was where the wrinkle between my daughter’s time and mine began. Read More
January 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing Fiction in the Shadow of Jerusalem By Moriel Rothman-Zecher I started writing fiction while a cloud of death and mourning hung heavy over Jerusalem. To be clear: death and mourning are always hovering in the air over Jerusalem. It is not a joyful city. But in this period, beginning in early fall of 2015, death and mourning were increasingly part of the daily reality of almost every Jerusalemite I knew, and were spreading elsewhere, throughout Israel-Palestine. In late September of that year, a car driven by a sixty-four-year-old Israeli man named Alexander Levlovitz was stoned by a number of Palestinian youths in Jerusalem. He crashed into a pole and was killed. A few days later, an Israeli couple were shot and killed by Palestinian gunmen while driving in the West Bank with their four children, who were not physically harmed. In the days and weeks that followed, the Israeli military began a trigger-happy campaign of suppressing any form of Palestinian uprising, whether armed or not. By mid October, some two hundred Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces—some of them armed with lethal weapons and attempting to carry out attacks; some of them throwing stones at army posts, vehicles, or checkpoints; some of them entirely unarmed; some of them small children, like thirteen-year-old Abdel Rahman Obeidallah. During the same period, twenty-eight Israelis had been stabbed, axed, run over, or shot to death by Palestinians, and an Eritrean refugee named Haftom Zarhum was beaten to death in a bus station after a group of Israelis mistakenly identified him as the Palestinian perpetrator of a shooting attack that had just taken place there. Read More
January 17, 2018 Look Two Thousand Pieces of Subway Ephemera By The Paris Review A bag of bullseye subway tokens. All photographs by Brian Kelley. In 2011, the Brooklyn-based photographer Brian Kelley began collecting old MetroCards, a project that soon transformed into a zealous obsession. After scouring all of the city’s 472 stations, he widened his scope to include maps, pins, tokens, buttons, uniforms, promotional papers, and other historical artifacts. With the help of fellow enthusiasts, MTA workers, and eBay sellers, he has amassed, over the years, some two thousand pieces of ephemera. A selection appears below. In his new book, New York City Transit Authority: Objects, Kelley tells the story of the subway’s evolution. In a moment when the subway’s future has been put into question and dissected by frequent exposés of the system’s degradation, this project offers a uniquely intimate view into its history. The transit passes and MetroCards, in particular, read like familiar texts, each inscribed with traces of their respective time and place. A pink omnibus pass from 1956, for example, contains a name field for the passenger’s husband. A test MetroCard from 1992 heralds the end of tokens. Two years later, in 1994, the MetroCards already resemble those New Yorkers use today. Later specimens from the aughts feature public-safety warnings as well as advertisements, most recently for the fashion brand Supreme. Some things never change: a flyer from 1985, when the 7 line was overhauled for repairs, shows a commuter frustration that wouldn’t be out of place today. Taken together, the objects constitute both a public record and a palimpsest, suggestive of the countless ways the city has grown, faltered, and reinvented itself over the decades, even as the structures undergirding it have remained for the most part unchanged. Read More
January 17, 2018 On Music Don’t You Weep: The Bruce Springsteen Cure for Despair By Tom Piazza Bruce Springsteen One year down, three to go. Season one of the Trump unreality show was a fire that wouldn’t stop burning, set against the apocalyptic backdrop of real California wildfires that consumed over a million acres in the fall. Huge tracts of psychic energy, funds of hope and goodwill, were consumed by the effort to make sense of what was happening to the nation, to respond meaningfully, and to maintain sanity. Millions ranted about the “arsonist in chief,” yelled at their televisions, at their laptops, yelled on Facebook and Twitter or at protests in the street. Some, it is true, retreated into permanent Cat Video Land. But almost everyone was looking for evidence of hope. Twelve years ago, New Orleans was still on its knees after Katrina. I remember January 2006 well. Four months after the disaster, vast sections of the city were still mud logged and disfigured; citizens were still being pulled—soaked, bloated, dead, stinking—out of shipwrecked houses. The failure of the federally funded and constructed levee system, the Bush administration’s bungled, ineffectual response, and, in the background, the ongoing disaster in Iraq made it feel as if the country were going off the rails. That spring, Bruce Springsteen played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. It remains probably the single greatest performance that I’ve ever seen, by anyone. It wasn’t just the music itself but the way Springsteen and the band grasped the moment, understood what the city needed, and delivered it to an audience made up largely of people who had lived through, and were still living through, disaster. For years, I’ve wished for some kind of document of that afternoon, and now there is one. A company called Nugs.net—do you know these guys?—has just issued a two-disc set of the entire concert, Bruce Springsteen, Fair Grounds Race Course, New Orleans, April 30, 2006. Read More