August 28, 2017 Arts & Culture A Case of Mania Grandiosa By Anton Chekhov A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. That civilization, in addition to its benefits, has also brought humanity terrible harm, no one now doubts. Doctors especially insist on it, not unreasonably locating in progress the source of those nervous disorders which have been observed with such frequency throughout the past decades. In America and Europe, one encounters everywhere all sorts of nervous illness, starting with common neuralgia and ending in serious psychosis. I myself have observed cases of serious psychosis, the causes of which should be sought only in civilization. Read More
August 28, 2017 On Food Reading and Eating Paris By Jennifer Burek Pierce All images from Hazel and Hewstone Raymenton’s travel journal, England and France, July 1914. By permission of Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries. Memories of Paris are entwined with its eateries. From Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to expatriates’ essays in the New York Times following the terrorist attacks in November 2015, writers have shown how their lives in Paris are marked by its restaurants, bakeries, and markets. Hemingway’s account of his postwar Parisian life uses food to define his days, his success, and his relationships. His struggle to find outlets for his fiction is linked with the tantalizing “bakery shops” that “had such good things in the windows and people [eating] outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.” He recounts meeting authors and artists for aperitifs or champagne, explaining that “drinking wine … was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.” He wrote in cafés amid the “smell of café crèmes.” A century later, news of the November attacks brought nostalgia for one writer, who, no longer in Paris, recalled the market “beckoning with the smell of roasting chickens” and “the flash of bright fruit against stark winter skies.” Another essayist described his decision, days later, to seek out the farmers and vendors of his local market. Its reopening, he wrote, reflected the resilience of Paris: “the market will be a celebration of the city itself, unvanquished, animated and always hungry.” For those who come to Paris as either actual or armchair tourists, guidebooks discuss how and where to savor the city’s food. Galignani’s 1830 guide for English-speaking visitors, as David McCullough observes, promised readers that French cafés and restaurants, characterized by elegance and quality, were superior to those of London. The Galignani guide explained everything from pricing to the Parisian habit of “lounging away nearly the whole of the day in cafés” to the French dish of “fried and fricasseed frogs,” which, readers were assured, “are an acknowledged and exquisite luxury.” Reading has long been a prelude to eating well in Paris. Read More
August 25, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Constipation, Hubris, Sincerity By The Paris Review Arista Alanis, “ … on down the road” (detail), oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″. From the cover of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. I first encountered Arthur Schnitzler’s work as an undergraduate, when I read Traumnovelle (which was adapted by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut). NYRB Classics has just come out with a recently unearthed Schnitzler novella, Late Fame, and I was excited to relive my college days with some fin de siècle Viennese fiction. Picking up this story in the spirit of nostalgia is apropos: the narrative follows an aging man, Saxberger, who is suddenly swept up into a group of young artists. They’ve discovered a book of poetry that Saxberger published thirty years earlier, have decided he is a genius, and want to hold a reading in his honor. What ensues is Saxberger’s comedic reckoning with a life he could have had: attention from a glamorous woman, exuberant toasts, and an ardent career in art (rather than as a civil servant). The cast of characters is vibrant with types—the tragedienne, the brooding critic, the romantic Wordsworthian—all rendered each with their own shade of irony. As he spends more time with this cohort, he comes to realize that he is not the person they want him to be: “His efforts were in vain. Laughable was what they had been. It was over. At heart it was simple and not even very sad—no sadder than age itself, hardly sadder than the thirty years in which no verse had ever occurred to him.” The levity of Schnitzler’s tone mitigates any deeply poignant feeling and saves the story from slipping into the realm of the melancholic, where it would perhaps be less appealing. The story considers questions of artistry and recognition (if a book of poems is published but nobody reads it, does it really exist?), but it is best in the subtle fun it pokes at its characters and their delusions of grandeur. —Lauren Kane The first I ever heard of Ross Gay was from another poet, who, at a reading, mentioned anecdotally that he had come across Gay at a café in Harlem. When asked what he was up to, Gay responded, “Writing down things that delight me.” Two seasons later, with Gay’s most recent book in my hands, I see how wonderful and serious an occupation this is for Gay. This collection is called Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude—and it is. Almost no one has the faith he seems to have in poetry’s ability to tap grace from the happenings of his life. (Don’t mistake his exuberance solely for bliss: my guess is that as a black man in America, Gay cannot afford naivety.) He looks to the act of writing as real alchemy, and death, disappointment, and inequity become honey in his hand. Gay devotes a poem to getting shit on by a bird, finds subterranean rhythm in “the passenger seat of this teal Mitsubishi,” and, in “An Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” does magic with the most quotidian tasks: “sometimes / the buttons / will be on the other / side and / I am a woman / that morning.” —Julia Berick Read More
August 25, 2017 Tales of the Unexpected Harry: A Ghost Story By Sadie Stein “Your father,” says my husband. “Your father might be the least-likely-to-see-a-ghost person I’ve ever met.” This is true. By his own admission, Papa doesn’t do whimsy. He likes lots of people, but he is most comfortable around people like himself—which is to say, irreligious Jews, ideally from the New York metro area, from progressive backgrounds, who have become more politically conservative with age. If they love baseball, American history, and the films of François Truffaut, so much the better. When I was a little girl and asked him if he believed in God, he taught me the term agnostic, but now that I think about it, I’d say a better description of his relationship to the divine is never given it much thought. Read More
August 25, 2017 First Person At Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, Twenty-Second and Fifth Ave By Brian Cullman Photo by David Puthenry, 1985. At Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, Twenty-Second and Fifth Ave: Pale man in a coat and tie. Ham sandwich. Rye bread. Diet Coke. iPhone. Cracker. That’s all he says. Cracker. Sometimes he says it as a question: Cracker? Sometimes like he’s answering a question: Cracker! Sometimes it’s like the punch line of a joke: Craaaacker! But that’s all he says. Cracker. Cracker. Cracker. My wife says he talks to her. Talks to her about tv shows or about her friends or about the color of the curtains. About the news. But I walk in the door, and all he says is cracker. …… Fuckin’ bird! Brian Cullman is a writer and musician living in New York City.