? What categorizes some things as art or marketing and others as pornography? What if we went beyond the “purely pornographic” and viewed marketing as a manipulation machine, seeking to both please and coerce consumers?
Categories: Review
by stewchef
By Claire Stewart Review of The Cultivation of Taste: Chefs and the Organization of Fine Dining by Christel Lane (Oxford University Press, 2014) The Cultivation of Taste: Chefs and the Organization of Fine Dining is a dogged endeavor to categorize and analyze the world of Michelin-starred restaurants and the chefs who run them. Author Christel Lane conducts a comparative study of restaurants in Britain and Germany, and applies her findings in an effort to examine the broader issue of […]
Categories: Review • Tags: chefs, cooking, England, Germany, restaurants, sociology
By William Eaton A discussion of four Emily Dickinson poems in the context of Françoise Delphy’s French translations appearing in Poésies complètes : Edition bilingue français-anglais by Emily Dickinson and Françoise Delphy (Flammarion, 2009). I. The Articulate Inarticulate An early reader of Emily Dickinson’s poems used this phrase—“the articulate inarticulate”—to describe her, and for me it provides a way into “translating” or seeking means of understanding one of my favorites among her poems, here quoted in its entirety: […]
Categories: Review • Tags: Emily Dickinson, French, poetry, translation
Notes of a Year of James Baldwin By Rachel Corbman Review of the opening session of the Year of Baldwin, New York Live Arts, April 2014. Click here for PDF version. The definitive James Baldwin documentary, The Price of the Ticket (1989), memorably opens with archival footage from a British television interview that aired shortly before the novelist and essayist’s early death in 1987. “Now, when you were starting out as a writer,” the interviewer queried, “You were black, impoverished, [and] homosexual. You […]
Categories: Review, Spring 2014 Issue • Tags: documentaries, gay lives, homosexuality, James Baldwin, LGBT, race
The Groups We Belong To By Walter Cummins Review of The Big Picture: America in Panorama, from the collection of Josh Sapan (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013) {Click for pdf wherein, inter alia, the pictures are larger} The Big Picture: America in Panorama celebrates both the possibilities of the panoramic camera and the manner in which the United States organized itself during the decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The people pictured are arranged […]
Categories: Review • Tags: photography
Revisiting this Proverbial Question of Equal Opportunity Review of No Citizen Left Behind by Meira Levinson (Harvard University Press, 2012) {click for pdf} By Moorel Bey And what I believe unites the people of this nation, regardless of race or region or party, young or old, rich or poor, is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all, the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead in America. (Applause.) President Barack Obama, 2014 State of […]
Categories: Review • Tags: African-Americans, education, Harvard University, segregation
Scent and Subversion By Jeffrey M. Barnes Review of Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume by Barbara Herman (Lyons Press 2013) The paradox and beauty of perfume is that it operates on multiple levels: the rational and the irrational; the visceral, the cognitive and the aesthetic. Perfume’s power is that it has one foot in the elevated world of language, and one foot in the primal, emotional and dreamlike. — Barbara Herman, Scent and Subversion […]
Poetry as Conversation By William Eaton Discussion, orchestrated by William Eaton, of Haikus du temps présent by Mayuzumi Madoka, translated into French by Corinne Atlan (Philippe Picquier, 2012).[1] In a museum gift shop I came across a book of translations, Haiku Love, credited to Alan Cummings of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Included in this volume was the following contemporary haiku which I quite liked: choosing a swimsuit when did I […]
Categories: Review • Tags: Bakhtin, bees, dialogue, French, haiku, Japan, Lacan, poetry
by stewchef
By Claire Stewart A review of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal by Abigail Carroll (Basic Books, 2013) Food historian Abigail Carroll’s debut book, Three Squares: the Invention of the American Meal, explores the historical reasons why we eat what we do, and when. Combing through a range of primary sources, she analyzes how our eating choices have been determined by our changing economic circumstances. Carroll proves that history unfolds at our dinner table, and that this story […]
Categories: Review • Tags: American history, dinner, eating, family, women
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