Magical Dinners

Illustration by Adrian Tomine for "Magical Dinners" by Chang-Rae Lee in the New Yorker Food Issue (November 22, 2010).

Read: "Magical Dinners" by Chang-Rae Lee in the New Yorker Food Issue (November 22, 2010)

Lee's writing in this piece is divine. Frank and vivid:

"[My mother] cooks an egg for me each morning without fail...there is always a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime, laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It'll corrupt you for all time. But one morning I'm finally sick of it, I've had enough....I steal into her bedroom with my plate while she's talking on the telephone with Mrs. Suh...and drop it onto her best shoes, black patent-leather pumps. And here's the rub: there is no sound a fried egg makes. It lands with exquisite silence. This is the dish I've been longing to prepare."

Quoted: Interviews

"Journalists request interview the way beggars ask for alms, reflexisvely and nervously. Like beggars, journalists must always be prepared for a rebuff, and cannot afford to let pride prevent them from making the pitch. But it isn't pleasant for a grown man or woman to put himself or herself in the way of refusal. In my many years of doing journalism, I have never come to terms with this part of the work. I hate to ask. I hate it when they say no. And I love it when they say yes."

-Janet Malcolm, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills," The New Yorker

Life is Beautiful

David Foster Wallace says so in "All That," the third excerpt of The Pale King, an unfinished novel the author worked on for more than a decade.

And GQ on editing the author's work in the absence of the author.

Oooh, you writers are mean!

Did anyone else notice that the New Yorker got really mean in the past several issues?

James Wood gave Paul Auster absolutely no credit in his review of the novelist's latest work Invisible.

Nancy Franklin also particularly nasty about Glenn Beck (maaaaaybe it's deserved but it's also obvious!)

But I have to give credit to Sam Tanenhaus for sharply lambasting Sarah Palin (and her book, somewhat) in "North Star: Populism, politics, and the power of Sarah Palin":

To an extent unmatched by any recent major political figure, she offers the erasure of any distinction—in skill, experience, intellect—between the governing and the governed...Her insistent ordinariness is an expression not of humility but of egotism, the certitude that simply being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.

True words!

[truest words!]

Exactly.

Tom Scocca: When I read it, I was literally ready to punch Dave Eggers in the face, except he was nowhere around. Now that I have simmered down, it remains possible that if I ever do find myself in a room with Dave Eggers, I may throw a drink in his face, probably including the glass or bottle.

The current issue of the New Yorker doesn't have a fiction piece in it. Instead, they chose to place a large ad (about 8 pages long) for Where the Wild Things Are. Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha talk about it at the Awl.

"The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Thomas Campbell's favourite work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Campbell is the museum's recently appointed director and only the ninth in its 139-year history.

Read more about Campbell in a dishy profile (well, as dishy as pieces get when you're writing about a guy whose passion is 15th century tapestries) by Rebecca Mead in this week's issue of the New Yorker

Sasha Frere Jones recommends...

Starfucker - Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second

"If there are too many hooks (and men) in your Phoenix, then Starfucker is for you."

SFJ @Twitter

I wish I had a time machine

It feels awfully silly to review 2008 when we are now well into the second day of 2009. Nonetheless, I am maniacally catching up on what I missed while fixating on Manderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer in the weeks leading up to November 4. CBC's review of the year in books led me to this piece by David Sedaris about undecided voters, published in the New Yorker in the October 27 edition of the magazine. It is so brilliant, I am posting it, no matter how 2008 I look doing it.

"To put [undecided voters] in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

The Sex Lives of Red States, Part II

"...among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier."

....

"Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.

"Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah."

....

"For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out."

--Margaret Talbot, "Red Sex, Blue Sex," The New Yorker