October 27, 2017 Eat Your Words Cooking with Barbara Pym By Valerie Stivers This is the third installment of Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words column. In my alternative literary universe, people who wish to read romances would be given one option only: Barbara Pym (1913–1980), an English writer whose dry, hilarious, unsentimental 1950s novels of spinsters and curates, office girls, bored wives and nebbishy male intellectuals are as insightful about the gender wars today as they were when written. Readers would start with Excellent Women, Pym’s best-known work, move on to second-best Jane and Prudence, and take special caution with Quartet in Autumn, a later, darker work written after Pym’s fall into obscurity. All materials would be issued in vintage Plume editions from the 1980s. As domestic comedies, Pym’s books make great use of food, though her women are likely to be poor or bewildered cooks, and the meals are as often absurd as they are comforting. In Crampton Hodnet, a husband announces an affair while topping and tailing gooseberries for a pie. In Jane and Prudence, the cosmopolitan Pru considers herself sophisticated because she rubs garlic on the bowl before dressing the salad. And though Pym herself was not a consummate cook, her food writing inspired her sister, Hilary Pym, and friend Honor Wyatt to publish a cookbook based on her works after her death in 1988, with excerpts to accompany the recipes. Hilary Pym explains: Read More
October 27, 2017 Arts & Culture What’s Scarier: Library Fines or Turning into a Scarecrow? By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi Last Thursday, at the New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch, in Harlem, city officials gathered to announce the forgiveness of all fines on cards held by borrowers aged seventeen and younger. It was a recognition that even the best of us can incur these basic civic penalties—in 2010 George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon replaced a book, checked out to “President,” which had started accruing fines at the New York Society Library 221 years earlier. It was also a recognition that library fines may unduly burden the most vulnerable. Across New York’s three library systems—NYPL, Brooklyn, and Queens—161,000 of 927,000 youth cards had been blocked due to fines of at least fifteen dollars. The average blocked card, at the time of the amnesty, owed about fifty-five dollars. Countee Cullen tied for the highest rate of blocked youth cards in the NYPL system, at 28 percent, and in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, rates exceeded 40 percent. All three library presidents spoke of young patrons who, already barred from borrowing books, may, for fear or for shame, stop visiting the library entirely. “I don’t want to live in that kind of society,” NYPL president Anthony Marx said, after the announcement, which took place on the building’s bright, open-plan teen floor, with the tops of trees and the cornices of town houses peeking through the windows. Marx pointed out that public-school students who enjoy fine-free borrowing privileges through a current pilot program are ultimately no likelier to fail to return books than are those who face fines. The NYPL is considering eliminating fines entirely, though this would require a significant endowment to offset the revenue loss. (To fund-raise during the Great Depression, some public-library systems encouraged their patrons to keep books late and intentionally incur fines.) For now, at least, youth fines began accruing again at the moment of the amnesty. The libraries hope that educational initiatives will improve renewals and timely returns. Read More
October 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Theodore Dreiser’s New York By Mike Wallace Teddy Dreiser tries to make it. Theodore Dreiser, 1917. In late November 1894, in the depths of the 1890s depression, Theodore Dreiser arrived in New York. He soon headed for City Hall Park, where he bulled his way into the World building, successfully evading the hired muscle who barred the doors of most Park Row newspapers, keeping desperate job seekers at bay. Once inside, he managed to land an unsalaried position as a space-rate reporter, paid by the column inch, on the strength of having served a lengthy journalistic apprenticeship in various midwestern cities. Dreiser liked newsmen. He appreciated their cynical dissent from prevailing pieties. “One can always talk to a newspaper man,” Dreiser would write, “with the full confidence that one is talking to a man who is at least free of moralistic mush.” His own life had rubbed him free of Victorian illusions. His family was grit-poor, his father a beaten man. The Dreisers were always on the move—being evicted or chasing cheaper rents—and ostracized as trash by “respectable” people. The slums of Terre Haute and Chicago taught him that life was hard, amoral, and indifferent to the individual—ideas reinforced by his readings of Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin. Read More
October 26, 2017 First Person On Basquiat, the Black Body, and a Strange Sensation in My Neck By Aisha Sabatini Sloan Jean-Michel Basquiat, Back of the Neck, 1983, silkscreen with hand painting. While visiting Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I strained my back. My mother gave me the name of her former chiropractor. As I stood before him, I listed my symptoms, and in one quick gesture he ripped my pants down, without warning, just below the cheek. He hadn’t really looked at me while I spoke, so I wasn’t sure how to make sense of the way he’d stripped me. It was like he was going to spank or fuck me. He used a TENS machine to electrostimulate my muscles and I left with almost no back pain. A bit ambitious, I walked the several miles back to my hotel. It’s only now that I wonder what else might have prompted that need to wander so far by myself. I went to see another chiropractor in Tucson when my back froze up again. I waited for what seemed like hours, watching other walk-ins pass quickly through to the other side. I think we were ushered in based on seniority, and I was new to the place, but I kept a close eye on those who came and went, what they looked like. The chiropractor listened to my troubles. He moved my head quickly and I heard a click in my neck. After a few more adjustments, he told me to come back the following day and had the receptionist sell me a multi-visit package. The next day, I was still in pain, but my body refused to obey when I tried to drive back to claim the appointment I’d already paid for. I turned down a side street and pulled over. I will likely never see a chiropractor again. Because they know how to break my neck, I’m afraid they might. Read More
October 26, 2017 In Memoriam Ain‘t That a Shame: Fats Domino By Brian Cullman Nobody but nobody communicated joy and pleasure better than Fats Domino. Oh, the Beatles came close, but early on John got mopey, George got petulant, and Ringo simply kept his head down, so that doesn’t count. But for Fats Domino, happiness was a given. At a time when rock ’n’ roll seemed rife with sex and noise and the wild beat of anarchy, Fats Domino was the odd man out. A date with Elvis would start and end in bed, a night out with Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis would probably land you in jail, but a date with Fats Domino would probably just involve pork chops. From his first recordings in the early 1950s through his final album in 2006, his style never changed, nor did it need to. With his sly, loping piano mixing barrelhouse with boogie-woogie, with those warm, casual vocals, his way of stretching words halfway around the block, and with Earl Palmer, the best drummer in New Orleans, and arranger, cowriter Dave Bartholomew in tow, his records sounded like nothing else on the radio. Read More
October 26, 2017 Arts & Culture Alec Soth’s Mississippi Dreamers in a Nightmare America By Rebecca Bengal Alec Soth, Joshua, Angola State Prison, Louisiana. All photos from Sleeping by the Mississippi. Courtesy the artist and MACK. The photographs in Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, which have just been published in a new edition, contain a freedom-seeking, derelict melancholy: deceptively clean, silver early-morning surfaces, a mattress floating in a swampy puddle, a casually arranged set of rescued furniture resembling a wall-less living room in some forlorn woods, a family of bikers grieving underneath a canopy of Spanish moss, weeds growing wild through the springs of an abandoned bed frame. When the book was originally published, in 2004, I was drawn to the vagrancy of its title, the down-by-the-river evocation of it. It took me another minute to consciously realize that “sleeping” pointed naturally to dreaming. Its portraits and scenes formed a larger story about individual longing; the way we impress upon our tiny worlds; the way we project our desires and the idealized pictures of ourselves onto our walls and out into our yards and onto the symbolic river. The third image in the book depicts a drooping, loosely made, ordinary-seeming bed left on a porch—outside, where, we all know, even deeper, stranger dreams happen. Read More