April 28, 2016 On Food Hot Dog Taste Test By Lisa Hanawalt The cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt is preparing to release her new book, Hot Dog Taste Test. Hanawalt’s insouciant, irreverent drawings and stories regularly grace the pages of Lucky Peach, and a number of the book’s longer pieces appeared there first, including her illustrated tour of the New York City street-food scene and the James Beard Award–winning “On the Trail with Wylie,” in which she shadows chef Wylie Dufresne for a day: One dish he prepares contains “the most delicate sea scallops basking in almond oil and a single ravioli made from carrot. I eat the ravioli too fast to see what’s inside, but based on the flavor I would describe it as ‘sex cheese.’ ” The restaurant critic Jonathan Gold has called Hanawalt “the Matisse of the buffet line, the O’Keeffe of the fish ball and the Vermeer of the pigeon with a hot dog in its beak.” We’re pleased to present excerpts from Hot Dog Taste Test, and we can, from firsthand experience, vouch for her advice about Merlot. —Nicole Rudick Read More
April 28, 2016 On the Shelf Plimpton Worldwide, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring George Plimpton (left) with cat (right). Jenny Diski has died at sixty-eight. Blake Morrison told the Guardian: “What I liked was her abrasiveness—she was tough, not least on herself. Whatever subject she took on—rape, depression, the sixties, Antarctica—she had something new and surprising to say … Some of the diaries and reviews she published in the London Review of Books were small masterpieces.” You can read those diaries here. “It’s as simple as pushing a button, and I’m lost in no man’s land,” she wrote in the last entry. “The insoluble grief. Not that there’s anything to be done about any of it.” Prince’s early webmaster remembers helping him with the NPG Music Club, a crucial forerunner for social media, digital music, and artist-run distribution: “If he built his own online record label, his own online radio station, and his own online music store, he had just as much access to his audience as the traditional channels did. He finally had a way to skip all the barriers and go direct … This direct connection between the fans and an artist on Prince’s level didn’t exist before the NPG Music Club. There was no Twitter, Facebook, or even YouTube. At the time, he saw direct Internet distribution as a model for all artists. He would tell me, if you could build your own music club, why would you need to pay anyone else a share and give away all your fans’ information? Why not do it all yourself—downloads, concert tickets, streaming concert events, and even a hub for emerging artists? He was leading the way to a new artist-owned music business … For a moment in time, we had something special no one had ever seen before—and something prescient, that predicted some of the questions about online distribution and artist agency that would come later.” Today in reality: Is it real? Do our sense perceptions offer anything more than impotent glimpses of the world outside our heads? “We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally … I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.” When George Plimpton wasn’t editing The Paris Review, he was doing … almost literally everything else. “Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural life—both high and low—in the last third of the twentieth century. He appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared in the movies The Bonfire of the Vanities and Good Will Hunting and on TV’s Married with Children. He was present when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, helping to tackle Sirhan Sirhan. He turned up as a character on The Simpsons. In a New Yorker cartoon from 1967, a man about to undergo surgery looks up at the doctor wearing a mask and asks, ‘Wait a minute! How do I know you’re not George Plimpton?’ That Zelig-like identity rested largely on a series of seven books in which the New York–born, Harvard-educated Plimpton threw himself both physically and intellectually into the professional sporting life. Decades before the onset of reality TV and the Twittersphere, Plimpton starred in his own Everyman story.” As I write this, Moscow is teeming with horrendous art. So what, you may say—so’s New York. At least in Moscow’s case there’s a festival to blame: the Moscow Spring Festival, with a three-million-dollar price tag. “By Friday, the entire center of the city was covered with sculptures and installations, most of them far larger than life size. These included a plastic reproduction of the classic Russian painting Bogatyrs (featuring three Russian-superhero horsemen), the size of a two-story house; the head of a woman—also roughly the size of a house—in faux topiary, with a twisted hand growing out of the ground next to it; and a cartoon Soviet policeman, which was the height of a small apartment building. It was as if the city had been invaded by a horde of aliens with flamboyantly bad taste. The Moscow intelligentsia recoiled in horror.”
April 27, 2016 From the Archive Birthday Letter from South Carolina By Jean Valentine Augustus Paul Trouche, The Hundred Pines, James Island, South Carolina, c. nineteenth century. Jean Valentine’s poem “Birthday Letter from South Carolina” appeared in our Fall 1981 issue. Valentine is eighty-two today. Her most recent collection is Shirt in Heaven. Read More
April 27, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent No Regrets By Sadie Stein Marietta Peabody Tree, from the cover of No Regrets. My mother has been on somewhat of a socialite kick lately. For a while, when I talked to her, she was reading No Regrets: The Life of Marietta Tree. “Someone who ought to have had a lot of regrets,” was her acid review. From there, she moved on to a biography of the famous Cushing sisters. Read More
April 27, 2016 On Food Try First Thyself By Bill Beverly In praise of the campus dining hall. For thirteen years now I have taught at the same small women’s college. Its dining hall is an old building with high ceilings, long windows. I love the dining hall. My students hate it. But hating it is their job—I was like them once. I was a freshman grabbing food as if I were still playing high school soccer seven afternoons a week: the hamburgers, the pizza, the Coke machine and fried everything. Fueling the young body at full burn. The sandwiches. The glutinous cookies, perfectly round. But I spent those freshman afternoons in the library, reading for Intro to Political Science: that fiery body was already gone. And quickly, I had had enough. One November day, I observed a classmate, Jenny, slender and freckled, sitting across the dining table eating a salad. Her plate bloomed with things that had recently lived. Broccoli and snap peas and sprouts and little tomatoes. A green apparition. “Where did you get that?” I said. “Salad bar.” “What salad bar?” She pointed with a fork. Straight across the center of the cafeteria it stretched. I’d walked past for ten weeks without noticing it. Read More
April 27, 2016 On the Shelf Be Bold with Bananas, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Go on. Deaccessioning: it’s one of the cruel realities of our time. But how do libraries determine which books turn to pulp and which remain to yellow on shelves? According to Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, who’ve created a blog called Awful Library Books, it’s easier than you think: “Kelly and Hibner created the site in 2009. Each week, they highlight books that seem to them so self-evidently ridiculous that weeding is the only possible recourse. They often feature books with outlandish titles, like Little Corpuscle, a children’s book starring a dancing red blood cell; Enlarging Is Thrilling, a how-to about—you guessed it—film photography; and God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents … ‘I pull one or two books a week. Nobody’s going to even question that,’ Hibner said. She also keeps a bag of her favorite weeded books under her desk—Vans: The Personality Vehicle, Be Bold with Bananas—in case any inquisitive patrons want examples.” It’s not always easy to muster one’s enthusiasm for railways—even train buffs get the blues. But James Meek has been reading The Railways: Nation, Network and People, and so can offer a vital refresher for a world suffering from rail fatigue: “The shock of the speed of the first trains, three times faster than a stagecoach, wasn’t only physical, embodied in the sensations of acceleration and travel, but conceptual: the old measures of distance, how far town X was from town Y, were rendered irrelevant, leading to what commentators as early as 1833 were calling ‘the annihilation of space by time’, twenty-five years before Karl Marx used the phrase in the Grundrisse. Along with the speed of the trains was the shock of the speed with which the railways spread, gouging cuttings out of hills, flinging embankments across bowls of land, boring and blasting tunnels through solid rock, hurling viaducts over valleys and gorges … Writing in the 1960s, Michael Robbins said: ‘The Victorians who created the railway look like a race imbued with some demonic energy.’ ” David Means discusses his new novel, Hystopia, and the way he manipulates time in his fiction: “For me, grace lies in a paradox: the moment you are fully in existence while also fully aware of the vastness of time itself; so you’re sitting there in a hospital hallway holding a baby and the baby is looking up at you and you’re in the moment but also aware of the hugeness of the moment, the inexplicable forgiveness in the tactile feeling of this newborn life in your hands and the absolute innocent need inside the baby’s gaze. The writer’s job is to be as true as possible, not only in the drafting but the revision process, to the words and the reality that they are representing and creating. That requires an attempt at humility before the material, somehow. Humor and grace, for me, are entwined.” It’s great that Harriet Tubman will soon grace our twenties, but isn’t it time to spice up the ol’ government oil-portrait collection, too? “Looking through the House and Senate portrait collections, you’ll find a wealth of white legislators in ill-fitting suits posing awkwardly among symbolic objects: dogs, children, clocks, gavels, and flags—lots of flags … But if you’re not a white man, gay or straight, good luck getting a portrait painted before you die. The first Asian American in Congress, Dalip Singh Saund (D-CA), served as a representative for four years until a stroke ended his political career in 1962 … Saund died in 1973, but his portrait wasn’t commissioned until 2007, over forty years later, and it shows him standing in the Capitol rotunda, bordered by the places and people that influenced his career: India, California, Gandhi, and Lincoln.” Today in new exhibitions: “Olsen Twins Hiding From the Paparazzi.” “Ever wish that visiting a museum was more like watching reality TV and simultaneously browsing TMZ, all while a few wine coolers deep? You’re in luck … [the artist Laura Collins] had a series of paintings depicting the Olsen twins hiding from the paparazzi … Collins’s artwork lines the hallway, which is operating under a ‘jungle’ theme, complete with large green-paper leaves. Mary-Kate and Ashley are not identified in each painting, which Collins says is intentional. ‘I have no idea who’s who. I wanted it to be like, they’re kinda interchangeable. We almost don’t care who’s who.’ ”