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Published on April 16, 2017 05:49

Food Marks Milestones in These Culinary Collections

This content was originally published by MAX WATMAN on 12 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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A YEAR RIGHT HERE
Adventures With Food and Family in the Great Nearby
By Jess Thomson 304 pp. University of Washington, $28.95

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When a friend visits Thomson’s hometown, Seattle, and posts an invigorating series of vacation shots, she sees for the first time that she’s ignoring the potential in her own backyard. Why would she joyfully buy lamb from little butcher shops while on vacation in Provence only to come home and ignore the fishermen selling crabs off the dock just across town? A. J. Liebling had to go to France to enjoy long lunches and good bottles of wine. These things are now available in her own ZIP code.

So Thomson makes the “Here List,” which includes a visit to the Okanagan Valley wine region in British Columbia, a weekend with the goats, cattle and sheep at a rural creamery and an evening at an extravagant restaurant on Washington’s Whidbey Island. She wants to shoot a deer, dig clams, hunt truffles, ride bikes — all the sorts of things we make excuses about and know in the back of our minds we should be doing instead of flopping down the same old timeworn paths. Our excuses will pale before Thomson’s. She has lupus, so riding a bike for miles and miles through those Canadian vineyards isn’t easy. Her young son has cerebral palsy, and although he comes across as dauntless and resilient, he too will find that many things aren’t easy. Like walking in sand.

In a book so intimate — Thomson’s family, friends and husband are all in here — she needs to walk a very thin line, and she does it gracefully. She’s honest about people and their prickly selves. She doesn’t cover for them, but neither is she mean. Of course, things don’t go as planned. We all know what happens to the list you make at the start of the year. But if everything had gone according to plan, Thomson’s book would be as straightforward as her original list. The twists and turns are what makes it — that and a solid recipe for fried chicken.

MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life
By Peter Gethers
301 pp. Holt, $28.

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Gethers was having lunch with his mother at the famed Los Angeles restaurant Ma Maison shortly after Wolfgang Puck, then in his 20s, had taken over the kitchen. Judy Gethers loved the place, and when the owner, Patrick Terrail, came to sit with them, she asked how she might learn to cook such wonderful food. “Come to work in our kitchen three times a week,” Terrail replied. “We won’t pay you and you’ll basically be our slave, but after a year you’ll be a real French cook.”

While her son was still stifling a laugh, 53-year-old Judy agreed and began her powerful second act. She went on to write cookbooks, cook and teach. But in 2007 she had a massive stroke. Her resultant aphasia made it difficult to talk — unless the talk was about food. Asked to assess the duck she’s eating, she doesn’t miss a beat: “Very well cooked. Better today at room temperature. Outside crisp but moist inside. Maybe too much salt.”

Gethers decides to learn to cook his mother’s favorite dishes, then cook them for her. This is no small task. While he says that “every major decision I’ve made and most key events in my life have revolved around food and drink,” he’s not very handy in the kitchen. (Or so he claims. He does all right working his way from the matzo brei from Ratner’s, which was owned by his mother’s family, up through Puck’s salmon coulibiac.)

At times, Gethers’s book seems trapped in another era — one where Wolfgang Puck is still young and nobody knows how to make mayonnaise from scratch or use a food processor. Maybe that’s just the nostalgic atmosphere created by the reprint of the Ratner’s menu, or maybe he’s willfully harking back to a time when his mother would still be demonstrating how to attach the top of a Cuisinart.

She’s pretty game, though, sipping her Château d’Yquem in a wheelchair. Their relationship has always been solid, and her son’s patience and love are wonderful to behold. “I don’t think food is a tool that can be manipulated to bring people together,” he writes. “I think food is usually an extension of the person preparing it. People connect to other people. Food is the pleasurable bridge upon which both sides cross.”

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Published on April 16, 2017 04:47

A New Rule Book for the Great Game

This content was originally published by SERGE SCHMEMANN on 12 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter

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New America

THE CHESSBOARD AND THE WEB
Strategies of Connection in a Networked World
By Anne-Marie Slaughter
296 pp. Yale University Press. $26.

At the start of the 2015 Henry L. Stimson Lectures at Yale, on which this book is based, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a distinguished political scientist, authority on international law and now president of the New America think tank, explained that the topic came to her while she was serving as director of policy planning at the State Department — in effect while she was practicing what she had preached in her academic career. The time-honored exercise of international politics as a “great game,” an endless competition for strategic advantage among sovereign and equal powers, was in urgent need of a radical update for a world in which networks spawned by the internet and social media, both benign and malignant, were shaping a far different global order. “The Chessboard and the Web” is meant as a guide for foreign policy in this new world.

Whether in human interrelations or terrorism, efficient businesses or nefarious crime syndicates, government services or governments meddling in each other’s politics, Slaughter declares, we are at the dawn of a “Networked Age” when “all humanity is connected beneath the surface like the giant colonies of aspen trees in Colorado that are actually all one organism.” Yet foreign-policy makers, she argues, still play on the two-dimensional chessboard fashioned by the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia, partly because they lack the strategies for the web.

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The grand strategy she proposes is an international order based on three pillars: open society, open government and an open international system. Open versus closed, she declares, is the fault line of the digital age, the way capitalism versus Communism was in the last century. In the new order, in which competing states have been replaced by networks, openness means participation, transparency, autonomy and resistance to controls or limits on information.

Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, develops her ideas in a detailed journey through existing research and scholarship, guided by numerous charts and graphs, on how new technologies and ever-widening webs have affected the behavior of people and nations. The narrative is not always easy to follow, and I found myself longing for more concrete examples when confronting riffs like “A network strategy to build resilience across a society could start by searching for affiliation networks, with the idea that these repositories of social capital can be mobilized into civic capital.” But the fascinating complexity and consequence of the web that is enveloping the world certainly justifies a reader’s extra effort.

Slaughter’s government service was in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and her book was evidently completed before the 2016 presidential election (there is no mention of Donald Trump); the grand strategy she outlines is described as something the next president should adopt. Granted, the book is about a continuing global shift in international relations and not about the political movements du jour that have led to the election of President Trump or to the rise of authoritarian and nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere, yet on reading “The Chessboard and the Web” and listening on YouTube to the lectures Slaughter gave, I found myself repeatedly yearning to ask her how the grand strategy she advocates would apply to these political realities.

Growing nationalism and authoritarianism, after all, are also in part consequences of the digital age and the echo chambers it has enabled, and if indeed the Networked Age is a clash of open and closed, many Americans and Europeans seem to be opting for closed in all the forms Slaughter outlines. That does not negate the need for a grand strategy of openness, of course, but exploring the consequences of choosing “closed” would make for a fascinating follow-up to a valuable study.

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Published on April 16, 2017 02:45

Seattle is the testing ground as Amazon eyes its next big idea | Technology

This content was originally published by Lucy Rock on 16 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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The buzz of a text message heralds the latest offer on Amazon’s Treasure Truck – a funky lorry bedecked with funfair lights and retro signs that appears at random in the streets of Seattle with a one-off discounted product for sale.

Alaskan cod, four fillets for $17, was the most recent item; a few days earlier it was two 16oz prime steaks for $40. Click on your Amazon app to buy your “treasure” and you’ll be told where the truck is so you can pick it up.

“It’s fun,” says Nicole Jamieson, 42. “My kids love it because it looks cool with all its lights flashing. You need to move fast, though – they sell out quickly.”

The truck, which launched a year ago, is stocked several times a month with deals that range from turkeys to Nintendo game consoles. There are rumours it will appear in London soon.

The Treasure Truck is a quirky manifestation of Amazon’s recent foray into the physical world it once shunned. In late 2015 it opened a book shop in a Seattle mall, and it is currently piloting two types of supermarket in the city, Amazon Go, a hi-tech convenience store, which eliminates the need to queue at a checkout, and AmazonFresh Pickup, where orders placed online can be picked up within 15 minutes at a drive-through. These are currently in beta mode, open only to employees.

Amazon’s home town of Seattle is, in effect, its laboratory for its bricks-and-mortar retail experiments. Once glitches have been dealt with, these new stores may be rolled out – there are now five bookshops in the US, with plans for seven more.

AmazonFresh vans, delivering groceries ordered online, can be spotted all over the city – another concept trialled in Seattle that was fine-tuned for years before being introduced elsewhere. These latest appearances of the company logo, with its swooshing arrow from the A to the Z, make the company’s presence ever more felt.

Not everyone welcomes it. For some, it is mainly Amazon, which now employs 25,000 people in Seattle, that is to blame for the changing character of the city.

Jeff Reifman, a consultant and writer, says: “I’m spending [less time in Seattle] now, and Amazon has a lot to do with that. Since 2010 Amazon has been increasing exponentially. There’s a huge impact on traffic, the cost of housing, the affordability.”

Amazon Go, which has been in beta mode since December. Customers simply take what they want and leave – tracking technology does the rest. Photograph: Paul Gordon/Zuma Press/Eyevine

When he first moved to the city 25 years ago, he says there was “a slower pace”. “There was a connection to nature, a lefty awareness, a hippy culture, a focus on literature and the arts. Seattle is becoming one of the world’s greatest cities, but success has a cost in that it doesn’t have a rich cultural flavour to it.”

Others, however, feel differently. At the Amazon bookshop one weekday lunchtime, Tiffany, a digital advertising executive in her 40s, was browsing for holiday reads. “I find it exciting for Seattle to have a new influx of people and ideas. It’s good for the city. It’s super-interesting seeing what they test here. I’m an avid Amazon user – as a mom it makes my life so much easier. I’ll certainly try Pickup and Go when they open.”

Analysts say that Amazon is experimenting with bricks-and-mortar projects so it can capture a bigger chunk of certain retail markets.

The bookshops are an attempt to attract those customers who prefer to browse in person. While doing so, they’re encouraged to become a $99-a-year Amazon Prime member, which gives free online delivery and extras that include being able to pay the cheaper website price for a book in the shop.

But the bigger prize is the grocery market, which has been slow to move online. Online delivery accounts for only 1.4% of food sales in the US and 6.9% in the UK. Many shoppers want to see fresh fruit, vegetables and meat before they buy; others do not want to pay a delivery charge, and then there is the vast size of the US and the logistical issues that brings.

Shoppers scan their apps on entering the shop, put what they want in their bags, and walk out

Don Stuart, a managing partner at Cadent Consulting Group, says: “The $800bn-plus grocery market is the Goliath, and Amazon would like to penetrate it more deeply than it can with just Prime or different types of direct online e-commerce activity.”

Clearly, Amazon has competition from behemoths such as Walmart, and Seattle is where it is testing its battle plans. “It’s right in their backyard,” says Stuart. “They can keep an eye on things every day, control it, change the variables that they’re testing.” As Amazon spokeswoman Nell Rona puts it: “Experimenting close to customers here helps us innovate and learn faster in the early stages.”

The AmazonFresh PickUp store on a busy main road in Ballard, an area that has seen rapid gentrification in recent years, was unveiled last month. The concrete and wood-clad building has a glass foyer with “Hello Ballard” in foot-high white letters on the window. A steel canopy protects parking slots where drivers pull in to pick up their shopping. A notice on a sandwich board says: “Beta Participant Entry”. A man in a green apron, holding a clipboard, stood outside last week. “It’s not open to the public yet,” he told people who wandered up. “You’ll sure hear about it when it is.”

Some in the neighborhood aren’t so bothered. Ian Spicknall, 36, a taxi driver, says: “I prefer to go to the store and spend an hour or so choosing what I want, looking at prices. It’s hard to look at groceries on a tablet. It’ll be good for certain types of people, like mini-van moms, being able to pick up their groceries on the way home.

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An AmazonFresh Pickup employee wheels grocery bags to a customer vehicle. Photograph by Stephen Brashear/Getty

“I think they’re for people of a certain income – probably tech industry workers. I like mom-and-pop shops, the backbone of America, and you feel like you are supporting the community. Seattle is a lot about being green, going hiking, and breweries. People like to shop local.”

Whether Amazon will eventually win over the likes of Spicknall remains to be seen, but it is trying to appeal to as many types of shopper as possible.

Spokeswoman Nell Rona says: “We have all kinds of customers, who shop in various ways, who look for a wide range of items, and do so on any number of different occasions. As a result, we’ve created a variety of innovative services that satisfy customers’ different needs as it relates to grocery shopping.”

In response to criticisms of Amazon’s dominating presence in Seattle, she says: “We’ve made a long-term commitment to invest in the city of Seattle. From unique retail space on the ground floor of all our buildings to public spaces nearby – such as an outdoor dog park, playing fields, a shared-use street that’s designed to be great for pedestrians as well as cars, art installations, covered public walkways and other amenities.”

Brendan Witcher, a retail and e-commerce analyst at Forrester, says Amazon was trying to do to the grocery industry what Apple did to the music industry. “They’re trying to create a full grocery-to-home ecosystem. Starting with Alexa [Amazon’s digital personal assistant]. I can say: “Alexa, send me my groceries list minus garlic and tomatoes.” By having locations, Alexa can say to me: “Would you like them to ship or to pick up?” Done.

“Amazon will own the device you order from; own the method of delivery; own all the products in that category; own multiple ways to get those products.”

The Alexa tool is what other retailers should be most worried about, he says. “That is a critical difference in the customer journey that can allow Amazon to own so much of this space. That compares to me finding my phone or laptop, opening it up, logging in, going on the website, putting things into my shopping cart and checking out. Any time we see a huge amount of friction removed from the customer journey, we see adoption.”

Success is not guaranteed though. “Just because Amazon is a great online retailer doesn’t mean it will instantly jump into physical and be amazing at it: they still need to learn about labour, traffic flows, real estate, perishable items in the store environment, security… all these things they didn’t have to worry about as an online retailer.”

The Treasure Truck is fun and gimmicky. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a master of PR and getting people excited

Amazon Go has been in beta mode since December and was due to open early this year. Shoppers scan their apps on entering the shop, put what they want in their bags and walk out. No need for checkouts, card transactions or bagging. Nor for cashiers, of whom there are 3.5 million in the US (the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents grocery store workers, has strongly criticised the stores).

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the technology has been crashing in tests when the store is too crowded.

If these hitches can be solved, Neil Stern, senior partner at retail consulting firm McMillanDoolittle, believes that Amazon Go could be a game changer for every segment of retail because the technology is not food-specific. He wrote in a blog: “The proposition for the consumer is simple – save time and hassle. The proposition for retailers may be even more compelling – save labour on the biggest component of the store (the front end) as well as improve throughput.

“One can envision a future of Amazon bricks-and-mortar outposts: book stores, beauty stores, drive-through grocery stores and convenience locations all using this technology.”

He told the Observer that Amazon had an enormous advantage over other retailers because 40% of US households were Prime members. “They know who their customers are already, they have credit and payment [details] for their customers, and their buying preferences.”

Not that he thinks all Amazon’s ideas will have the same impact. “Take the Treasure Truck – it’s fun and gimmicky. Jeff Bezos [the founder and CEO] is a master of public relations, and getting people excited about an idea before it’s commercially viable, including the truck and the Amazon bookstore.”

Amazon is not the only global brand using Seattle as a Petri dish. Among other initiatives, Starbucks has trialled its high-end coffee house, the Reserve Roastery, which will now open in several major cities worldwide.

Innovation is threaded into Seattle’s DNA, according to Leonard Garfield, executive director of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. “In 1852 Henry Yesler was invited into the community of fewer than 100 people because he had a sawmill that was different to any other around. That initial technological innovation distinguished Seattle from any other of these small villages popping up in the woods of the north-west.

“You can see it again with Bill Boeing and again with Bill Gates, and it keeps repeating itself – relatively young people who are willing to embrace the new technology, willing to take a risk and willing to invite people to the table who are different than the people already here.”

He acknowledges that there has always been a counter-narrative to this. When Microsoft and Boeing were booming a few decades ago, there were people “who weren’t any too enthusiastic about lots of young tech people coming in and maybe changing a little bit of the character.

“That scene has been there, but at the end of the day I think it’s a community where the smart idea has always won out.”

Time will tell whether any of Amazon’s trial projects will be smart ideas.

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Published on April 16, 2017 00:43

April 15, 2017

The Osage Indians Struck It Rich, Then Paid the Price

This content was originally published by DWIGHT GARNER on 12 April 2017 | 9:16 pm.
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That was a book with a personality. It seemed to be written by someone who was, as Charles Lamb said of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an archangel a little damaged. There was some strange junk in its cupboards.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” has cleaner lines, and it didn’t set its hooks in me in the same way. But the crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains. It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man.

About America’s native people, Saul Bellow wrote in a 1957 essay, “They have left their bones, their flints and pots, their place names and tribal names and little besides except a stain, seldom vivid, on the consciousness of their white successors.”

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Patricia Wall/The New York Times

The best thing about Grann’s book is that it stares, hard, at that stain, and makes it vivid indeed.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” describes how the Osage people were driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky portion of northwestern Oklahoma — out of sight, out of mind. It became apparent within a few decades, however, that immense oil deposits pooled below those Oklahoma rocks.

The Osage people became wealthy from leasing their mineral rights; so wealthy that white America, stoked by a racist and sensationalistic press, went into a moral panic, a collective puritanical shudder.

“Journalists told stories,” Grann writes, “often wildly embroidered, of Osage who discarded grand pianos on their lawns or replaced old cars with new ones after getting a flat tire.” A reporter from Harper’s Monthly Magazine wrote, ominously: “The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”

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The prison escapee Blackie Thompson after he was gunned down in 1934.

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Corbis

Something was done about it. The federal government appointed white guardians to monitor many of the Osage members’ spending habits. Even tiny purchases had to be authorized. The chicanery and graft were remarkable. Then things got worse.

Tribe members began to be killed. They were, in the evocative words of a reporter at the time, “shot in lonely pastures, bored by steel as they sat in their automobiles, poisoned to die slowly, and dynamited as they slept in their homes.”

Few if any of these crimes were solved. Who cared about, Grann writes, using the intolerant lingo of the times, a “dead Injun”?

These murders were an embarrassment for the still-green F.B.I., however. J. Edgar Hoover sent a former Texas Ranger, the perfectly named Tom White, to investigate. It was dangerous work, and White had steely nerves and the upright aplomb of Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men.”

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David Grann

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Matt Richman

“Killers of the Flower Moon” builds to a cinematic court scene filled with outrages and recantations. White gets his man, a local cattleman and a figure of genuine evil. But it is among Grann’s larger points that these murders were hardly the work of one human. It took a village — a “culture of killing,” in his words — to eliminate this many people.

The government estimated that 24 Osage members were murdered. As Grann pores over the evidence, however, he realizes the number was almost certainly higher, perhaps in the hundreds.

He spends time with the descendants of some of those killed, and he pokes through old files and turns up new information. His own outrage, though kept at a simmer, is unmistakable. “While researching the murders,” he writes, “I often felt that I was chasing history even as it was slipping away.”

The period photographs in “Killers of the Flower Moon” are exceptional in their impact; they bore into you. If the book has a heroine, it is an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart, whose sisters and other family members are picked off one by one. The beautiful and implacable faces of Mollie and her brown-eyed sisters gaze, as if in accusation, across the ages.

Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and always a welcome byline to find there. Reading his book reminded me that the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, once dreamed of starting a serious true-crime magazine he planned to call “Guilty?”

This never came to pass. Grann’s book investigates one painful splinter of America’s treatment of its native people, and it snips the question mark off Ross’s title.

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Published on April 15, 2017 22:39

Which Force is More Harmful to the Arts: Elitism or Populism?

This content was originally published by ADAM KIRSCH and LIESL SCHILLINGER on 13 April 2017 | 10:00 am.
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The truth is, however, that few writers ever make a conscious choice between elitism and populism, difficulty and accessibility. Writers write as their minds and fates compel them to: Virginia Woolf could not have written a populist epic like “The Grapes of Wrath” any more than John Steinbeck could have written a modernist study like “To the Lighthouse.” The same holds true for writers who are classed as nonliterary, authors of genre best sellers. I would wager that even the most commercial writers seldom produce work cynically, according to a formula. Rather, they write as they can and must, and their talent happens to be of a kind that produces best sellers.

The difference between elitism and populism might better be understood as a difference in a writer’s attitude toward time. A popular writer is one at home with the conventions and expectations of his moment, which is why his work is immediately understandable to many readers. But for that very reason, his popularity is likely to be short-lived: When was the last time you saw someone reading “Christy,” by Catherine Marshall, or “The Eighth Day,” by Thornton Wilder, both top-10 best sellers from 50 years ago? (Of course, there are exceptions: Another best seller of 1967 was “The Chosen,” by Chaim Potok, which remains a durable part of the high school canon.)

An “elitist” writer, on the other hand, is not one who desires only a small audience — few writers have any interest in turning readers away. Rather, she is one whose vision of the world and style of expression are defamiliarizing, who does not reproduce the world in words but transforms it. This kind of writer appeals to relatively few contemporaries, because she isn’t giving them what they are used to. But she is more likely to appeal to readers over time, as people learn her new way of seeing and recognize that it is another expression of the truth. The same thing happens in all artistic genres: Think of how the Impressionists went from scandal to dorm-room poster in the course of a century.

In this sense, an “elite” writer tends to be ahead of his time, a scout for posterity. This is the sense you get reading, for example, Roberto Bolaño, whose novel “2666” has the forbidding strangeness of genius. To read Bolaño you have to learn how to think and see like Bolaño. This takes a kind of talent — a talent for reading, which is more common than the talent for writing, but still the possession of a minority.

Adam Kirsch is a columnist for Tablet. He is the author of two collections of poetry and several other books, including, most recently, “The People and the Books.” In 2010, he won the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.

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Liesl Schillinger

It may sound like a question of taste, but it’s really a matter of ideology.

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Liesl Schillinger

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Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

From century to century, from continent to continent, from audience to audience, one person’s elitism has a way of turning into another person’s populism …and vice versa. Today it might be considered elitist to harbor a passion for the poetry of Lord Byron; but in his own age, two centuries ago, his work was considered blamably popular by some of his rivals. Purists like Keats put the fame of Byron’s verse down to its author’s looks and status. “You see what it is to be six foot tall and a lord!” Keats reportedly scoffed to a friend. Byron, for his part, mocked writers he considered puffed-up, dull and, yes, elitist (including Keats) in his epic poem “Don Juan”: “Society is now one polish’d horde, / Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.”

It may sound like a question of taste, but it’s really a matter of ideology. Those of a populist mind-set attack so-called elitist art forms as boring; those of an elitist mind-set attack so-called populist art forms as facile and unworthy. But in either case, it’s usually the mind-set, not the work itself, that raises hackles. We need look no further than last fall, when intellectual circles reacted with outrage when the Nobel Prize was conferred on Bob Dylan for his song lyrics. A misdelivery of laurels? Not in my opinion.

Populism is easy to understand; it’s the force that courts the tastes of the masses. Elitism is trickier. The word is loaded with associations of snobbery and exclusivity. To fully enjoy a populist art form — like an airport novel, a reality show, a rock concert or a cartoon — you need only bring your ears and eyes. To fully enjoy an elite art form — like opera, epic poetry or ballet — audiences need a certain level of education. Anyone can adore (or hate) ballet; but only a balletomane knows the difference between a sublime grand jeté and one that’s merely passable. The populist mind-set keenly resents the presumption that such foreknowledge matters.

This question has extraordinary urgency right now, given our country’s — or rather, our government’s — present mood: anti-elitist and anti-expertise. This is not only a question of mind-set, it is a question of policy. The Trump administration has threatened to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are also on the chopping block. The conservative Heritage Foundation has called the N.E.A. “welfare for cultural elitists.” But the underlying mind-set here is that all culture is elitist; which means that all culture is under attack, so this is not a moment to indulge the vanity of small differences.

I believe that both populist and elite mind-sets yield bad art and good; and that the collision of the two opposed forces can bring new vitality to creative work. As an example, consider the (probably) most elite art form of all, opera — which, for full appreciation, requires a grounding in several foreign languages, acute powers of vocal and musical discernment, and a long attention span. In my early 20s, with great trepidation, I attended my first opera, Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.” As the music began, I relaxed, because I recognized the music. It had been introduced to me in childhood, by Bugs Bunny, in “Rabbit of Seville.” Cartoons, the (possibly) least elitist art form, had primed me to enjoy the loftiest. The next opera I saw was Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride,” a performance that bored me so terribly I had to pinch my earlobes to stay awake. If the first opera I’d seen had been Gluck’s formal, exigent masterpiece, I doubt I’d ever have given opera another chance.

It is no less difficult to make a successful popular art form than to make a successful esoteric one. The best expressions evolve and endure, titrated through time. The most important factor in their survival is whether audiences respond to them, and seek them out. And for this to happen, the artists must be granted the freedom to create them.

Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic, translator, and moderator. She studied comparative literature at Yale, worked at The New Yorker for more than a decade and became a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review in 2004. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Vogue, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She is the author of “Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century,” and her translations include the novels “Every Day, Every Hour,” by Natasa Dragnic, and “The Lady of the Camellias,” by Alexandre Dumas, fils.

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Published on April 15, 2017 20:37

Brooklyn Poets Take Center Stage In New Anthology

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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A new anthology co-published by a Brooklyn-based nonprofit and a neighboring small press is being billed as the first book to spotlight contemporary poetry written specifically by poets from, or living in, the New York City borough.

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Published on April 15, 2017 19:35

2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 15

This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 15 April 2017 | 11:55 am.
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We’ve officially made it to the half-way point of this challenge, which means two things: 1. I’ve got Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” song playing in my head; and 2. I should share the link to the poem finder tool for this blog (click to continue). Just use the Writer drop down to find your name and search for poems posted on the site so far (can also cross reference by year/day).

For today’s prompt, write a “one time” poem. This poem could be about a once in a lifetime experience. Or it could be about something a person wants to try just one time (good or bad). Or take it where you will–as always.

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Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at a One Time Poem:

“soda”

there are times when i tell myself
i can have another sip of soda

just one more time but no
one can leads to a 12-pack

& then i’m back to chugging
2 liters like water

because it becomes water
because i’m an addict

so no more soda
not one more time

not ever

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He’s a recovering soda-holic; 4 months strong, one day at a time.

Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.

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Find more poetic posts here:

Staff Pick: 'Fairyland' series by Catherynne Valente

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Assistant editor Drucilla Shultz recommends the 'Fairyland' series by Catherynne Valente, a middle-grade series following the adventures of a girl named September in an eccentric Wonderland-like world.

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The post Staff Pick: 'Fairyland' series by Catherynne Valente appeared first on Art of Conversation.