Archive for November, 2010
>Sitting on hard wooden chairs
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| Wanda Kujacz @ Posi+Tive Magazine |
Sheila Fitzpatrick remembers not being a spy in the Soviet Union in the 1960s @ London Review of Books.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )They gathered us in a dark-panelled windowless basement in the Foreign Office for a briefing. The year was 1966, and the group was made up of 20 or so British students selected to go to the Soviet Union for ten months under the auspices of the British Council. Plus one Australian, myself, who had managed to get on the British exchange because Australia didn’t have one. Our nameless briefer, who we assumed to be from MI6, told us that everybody we met in the Soviet Union would be a spy. It would be impossible to make friends with Russians because, in the first place, they were all spies, and, in the second, they would make the same assumption about us. As students, we would be particularly vulnerable to Soviet attempts to compromise us because, unlike other foreigners resident in Moscow and Leningrad, we would actually live side by side with Russians instead of in a foreigners’ compound. We should be particularly careful not to be lured into sexual liaisons which would result in blackmail (from the Soviet side) and swift forcible repatriation (from the British). If any untoward approach was made to us, or if we knew of such an approach being made to someone else in the group, we should immediately inform the embassy. This was not a normal country we were going to. It was a Cold War zone.
I ended up spending a total of a year and a half in Cold War Moscow, between autumn 1966 and spring 1970. I travelled under a false identity, or that’s what it felt like: the nationality on my passport was British, not Australian; the surname was Bruce, which was my husband’s name but not mine; and, to top it off, I had decided to use my middle name, Mary, on the grounds that it could be shortened to Masha and would be easier for Russians. (Nothing came of this: I could not believe in Mary as my name, and in any case it turned out that all educated Russians knew the name Sheila – which had an easy diminutive, Shaylochka – because they had read C.P. Snow.)
>I sputtered out of the depths
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| Roger White @ At Length |
Chris Wiewiora reflects on his life in pools at Frostwriting.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I know all the pools I’ve ever been to. The first one I remember is West Virginia Wesleyan College in the mountains of my hometown, Buckhannon. The private Methodist school had an Olympic-size pool that the public could swim in for a small admission fee. I learned how to swim there with my father.
Dad splashed in, lowering himself further down, then strummed chords on an invisible acoustic guitar and sung the folk song I’m being swallowed by a boa constrictor…. The snake ate him throughout the verses: “Oh no, oh no. He’s swallowed my toe / Oh gee, he’s up to my knee / Oh my, he’s up to my thigh / Uh-oh, uh-oh. He’s at my torso.” Deeper and deeper the water climbed up. Then “Oh heck, he’s up to his neck—Gulp!” Dad went under and the water ate him whole.
After surfacing, Dad coaxed me into the pool: Jump in, I’ll catch you. He held onto me with one hand on my stomach and let me practice the front crawl: Stroke, breathe, stroke. Dad let me go: Just keep your head up. I dog paddled in place, slapping the water frantically. I started to sink, gulping more water than air. Dad caught me right before I went under: Good try.
All at once came my moment of success: I paddled in the shallow end without needing Dad to save me and swam into the deep end where I couldn’t put my feet down on the pool’s floor. After Dad taught me to swim, my mother wanted to teach me to float. Mom and her younger sister, my aunt, would lie on their backs and skim half in, half out of a pool for hours in perfect symmetry. I expected them to puff out a snort like whales.
>The healthy butcher
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Merit Mitchell on the increasing consumption of ethically-produced meat in Canada @ MaisonNeuve.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )It all ends up in here. The bits and pieces, the undesirables. The trim. Kept cold in a fridge at minus twenty degrees Celsius, it moves through the silver grinder and squeezes out the front plate, like ribbons of mottled Play-Doh, into a blue Rubbermaid bin. In the basement of the Healthy Butcher on Toronto’s Eglinton Avenue, Ryan Klauke looks at the white board on the wall to see which recipes he’s following this morning. Three days a week he’s here, before most of us are out of bed, to get elbow-deep in these odds and ends. The boombox on the butcher block behind him plays Bach. From the shelf above the stainless steel countertop he selects herbs and spices and pours them into their respective containers: thyme, cayenne, pepper. In go garlic, chopped onions, white wine. He mixes by hand, forming fists and pummeling the meat, making sure the spices don’t clump. It’s surprisingly unyielding, and cold enough to be painful. But it beats the hell out of sitting at a desk nine to five, which he did for eight years, working in customer service for a major bank. When he left he took a picture of the stack of unfinished paperwork sitting on his desk. Klauke doesn’t like dealing with customers anymore, so he’s in the basement with his Philip Glass CDs and buckets of soaking intestines.
Klauke forms four little patties of sausage meat and heads upstairs to the kitchen. He heats a frying pan on the industrial gas range and slides the patties into the oil. This is quality control—ensuring the sausage fill is seasoned correctly before it’s packed into casings. Morning tastings are another job perk, and for an avowed carnivore like Klauke, “It’s never too early for meat.” Back downstairs, he packs the first batch of fill into R2, a metal cylinder that works like an upside-down trash compactor: inside the cylinder, the floor rises toward the lid, forcing the meat mix out a metal nozzle on the front. Klauke feeds a length of casing—pork intestines—onto the nozzle and it bunches up like slimy white panty hose. He leaves three or four inches of lead hanging off the tube, leans against a teal lever on R2’s side and out shoots the meat—a rope of flesh coiling up on the counter to his left. He makes about five feet of sausage before the intestine runs out and a column of loose mix shoots from the nozzle and splats on the wall. Later he pinches off the rope in eight-inch lengths and spins it to create individual sausages connected by links. Klauke twirls one sausage toward him, one away, one toward, one away, again and again. He pops air bubbles with a bamboo skewer. After this batch, he’ll load R2 with another and repeat. He does this all day.
>This is a good place to make friends
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| Condrin Lupei @ F-Stop |
Rory Douglas writes from the ringside of a mixed martial arts competition @ McSweeney’s.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )My brother Chad, with a record of ten wins and one loss—which he later avenged—and three title belts, has accomplished everything one could hope to accomplish in the 145-pound weight class of the north Seattle suburbs amateur mixed martial arts circuit. If this were Street Fighter II, he would now be fighting Sagat, the one-eyed Muay Thai fighter who shoots fireballs and throws what’s called a “Tiger Uppercut.” Instead Chad’s fighting someone named Mike.
Chad wasn’t supposed to fight Mike, but Chad’s previous opponent backed out earlier in the week because, according to Chad, “He saw my last fight.” It’s remarks like these that make me think it’d be terribly interesting—from a purely journalistic perspective—to see Chad get knocked out.
But it doesn’t look like tonight’s the night. Not only has Mike only fought twice, but by the time they step into the ring Chad will outweigh Mike by ten to fifteen pounds. When he doesn’t have a fight coming up, Chad weighs around 165 pounds. In the forty-eight hours before weigh-ins, he literally sweats off twenty pounds by working out in a plastic suit. After weigh-ins, he spends twenty-four hours rehydrating with Pedialyte while he watches Jurassic Park III. By fight time he’s back in full athletic and mental condition—and again weighs 165 pounds. And since Mike accepted this fight on two day’s notice, he likely didn’t cut weight at all, and there’s really no way he can weigh more than 150 pounds at fight time.
>Something lost can be recovered there
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| Tiffany Bozic @ The Morning News |
Alec Wilkinson goes underground in New York City @ The Believer.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )For a long time I have been drawn to places that are underground. I often dream that I am in a basement, or descending the stairs to the subway, or walking in a cave, or swimming toward lights at the bottom of a river, or finding rooms below ground that no one else knows about and that aren’t there later when I try to go back to them. The world of symbols is impenetrable to me, but I am not so thick that I don’t see that the underground stands for the unconscious. I sometimes think of the unconscious as a series of rooms, each opening out from the next. In one of them, perhaps, a book lies open on a table. In another an old woman sits in a rocking chair while rain beats against a window. On the wall in another is writing that you can almost decipher, or a mural depicting a scene that turns up later in a dream. Or maybe not as a series of rooms but as a landscape. It has weather and there is night and day, but it is not always a landscape I recognize, and it changes all the time, as if each vista were a fragment of another one, like the planes in a Cubist painting. I am drawn to the unconscious for the reason I assume most people are, which is the belief that something it contains, if recalled and examined, has the power to release you from torment. Or that something lost can be recovered there. Whatever the explanation might be, it accounts, I think, for my interest in underground places. Occasionally I read in the newspapers about subterranean locations in the city such as the corridors and tunnels under Grand Central or the railroad lines along the West Side, by the Hudson River, where until a few years ago, when the railroad police began chasing them out, squatters lived in the cinderblock chambers that the railroad had built in the walls beside the tracks for its workers to use while they were constructing the tunnels. The darkness in the chambers was so complete that the men and women who inhabited them couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.
>Indian food made me more English
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Tony Judt on gastronomic encounters in the London of his youth @ New York Review of Books.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Just because you grow up on bad food, it does not follow that you lack nostalgia for it. My own gastronomic youth was firmly bounded by everything that was least inspiring in traditional English cuisine, alleviated with hints of Continental cosmopolitanism occasionally introduced by my father’s fading memories of a Belgian youth, and interspersed with weekly reminders of another heritage altogether: Sabbath evening dinners at the home of my East European Jewish grandparents. This curious melange did little to sharpen my taste buds—it was not until I lived in France as a graduate student that I encountered good food on a regular basis—but it added further to the confusions of my youthful identity.
My mother was born in the least Jewish part of the old London East End: at the intersection of Burdett Road and the Commercial Road, a few blocks north of the London Docks. This topographical misfortune—she always felt a little tangential to her surroundings, lacking the intensely Jewish milieu of Stepney Green a few hundred yards to the north—played into many otherwise curious aspects of her personality. Unlike my father, for example, my mother had great respect for the King and the Queen, and was always half-tempted to stand up during the Queen’s speech on television in later years. She was discreet to the point of embarrassment about her Jewishness, in contrast to the overtly foreign and Yiddish quality of most of the rest of our extended family. And in an inverted tribute to her own mother’s indifference to Jewish traditions beyond those ordained by annual rituals (and the decidedly Cockney ambiance of the streets where she grew up), she had almost no knowledge of Jewish cuisine.
>Precision in imagination and in language
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| John Martino @ Cerise Press |
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.”
Italo Calvino
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
The impulse for this essay struck hazily, one of those ideas that snuck in between pillow and sleep, or after too many coffees. I’d just read Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium for the first time and thought, ‘fuck me, this is important stuff’ and then, ‘I want to tell other writers and readers about this’.The following revised memos, which are bits of Calvino that I’ve sliced and diced, bits that I’ve twisted and mushed together with my own words.
>In those days, it was easy to join the revolution
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Ann Diamond’s essay on the ’70s and meeting Leonard Cohen @ Geist.
In 1966, when I was fifteen years old, I saw Leonard Cohen sing “The Stranger Song” on Canadian television. Not long afterwards, I took the subway from the dormitory suburb where I lived with my parents, into downtown Montreal and to Classics Bookstore, where I bought my first book of poetry, The Spice-Box of Earth, for which Cohen had won much critical praise. Magic was afoot.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In 1968, when I was starting university, I went to my first poetry reading. At the Rainbow Bar and Grill.
Applause. A slight man in a dark jacket approached the stage, head down, and spoke to Lane for a moment, then melted back into the crowd. Lane told us Leonard Cohen had declined to read — he had come only to listen. The audience groaned in disappointment. In the interval a madman suddenly stormed the stage, grabbed the mike and began to rave and weep. No one knew what to do, except Patrick Lane, who embraced him like a brother. The man returned to his seat and the crowd composed itself to listen to the next reader, but everyone kept looking around for Leonard Cohen, who had vanished.
The following week a letter appeared in the pages of the student newspaper for which I was news editor. It was signed by one of the poets who had read that same evening. Reaching back into the recent literary history of Montreal, the poet built a case accusing Leonard Cohen of “selling out.” What exactly had been sold, and to whom? What had he done to deserve this ranting assault? At seventeen I read hidden knowledge, and no small amount of envy, between the lines.
>I can’t go back to school after what happened to me
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| Rhiannon Adam @ Deep Sleep |
Nir Rosen on Iraq’s lost generation @ Boston Review.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I met eighteen-year-old Mu’min in the Baja Café, my evening hangout in Baghdad’s Mansur district this past summer. It was an inconspicuous place to arrange interviews, send emails, and drink melon smoothies. Men played billiards, dominoes, and backgammon, and downed fruit juices and ice cream. Mu’min was there almost every night, a thin, handsome kid, street-smart and hardened, but still open to talking with me. I had spent time in his neighborhood while reporting on the war for the past seven years, and we chatted about dead militia leaders and American soldiers we both knew.
When the Americans invaded in 2003, Mu’min was eleven years old, living in West Baghdad’s majority-Sunni neighborhood of Amriya. His father was a retired police officer. Their life before the war had been good, he recalled.
On one of those early days of the war, Mu’min and his father drove to the airport to take food to his uncle, a soldier in the Republican Guard. They found him shot to death. It was the first time Mu’min ever saw a dead body. Later that year Mu’min’s father was out driving, moonlighting as a taxi driver. A bomb targeting Americans exploded, and American soldiers arrested all the men in the area. Mu’min’s family could not find his father. They held a funeral for him one year later. On the third and last day of the fatiha, as the funeral was called, a man who had seen Mu’min’s father in prison told the family that he was alive.
>Why women smile
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| Jessica Hines @ Lens Culture |
Alana Noel Voth explores the circles of abuse and violence @ Pank.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )A writing mentor once told me I should remain forever dissatisfied with my world because satisfaction led to comfort and comfort led to complacency and complacency was a path to laziness, and laziness, everyone knows, enables ignorance. Do you believe that?
The most infamous bully in history, Adolf Hitler, once asserted in a speech, “Thank God people rarely take time to think.” Here was a man who rose to power on other people’s ignorance. After all, people who take time to think likely ascend into self-awareness, and self aware people are more empowered, and this spells disaster to a bully. A man like that will do anything to mollify you, soft at first like a hand moving over your face to cover your eyes. He knows what’s good for you. Listen. He’s a narcissist whispering in your ear; he’ll feign heart break even, persecution, and then grab you around by the hair. Manipulation, patronization, guilt, fear, ridicule, force—a bully pulls out all the stops until pretty soon, everything’s your fault. You can’t do anything right; which way is up?
An acquaintance recently told me she endures an abusive relationship to keep the peace. Better not to rock the boat by standing up for herself, and you can tell by her demeanor: she feels trapped, remains dutiful and resentful. I’ve known plenty of women like that, especially in this town. I ran from these women long time ago because I didn’t want to become them. Now I’m back. What do they want me to do? They tell me they have no choice, which makes me sick to my stomach, and I avoid them for fear I’ll become caught like a deer in headlights, the way these women smile at me.
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