Lapham's Quarterly: Roundtabletag:laphamsquarterly.org,2009-05-03:/roundtable//32012-04-20T17:17:51ZOpinions and Analytis from Lapham's Quarterly writers and editorsMovable Type Commercial 4.23-enPost Secretstag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.20192012-04-18T14:17:00Z2012-04-20T17:17:51ZLocated in the Middle Dutch Church at the intersection of Nassau and Liberty Streets (below), New York City’s original post office branch had previously played host to a Revolutionary-era prisoner-of-war camp as well as multiple religious congregations. It was, upon becoming a post office in 1845, an immediate disaster. Newspapers complained of its locational inconvenience, its rude staff, and its general wildness. What place was this for a lady?
As it turns out, yes, and a popular one at that. In an 1855 gossip column, “A Stranger in Gotham” tells the New York Times that a quick trip to the Ladies’ Window (top) left her enthralled, “so much interested in what passed before it came my turn to be served, that I drew into a corner, and, for half an hour, eyes and ears did me as good service as at any place of amusement that I have visited in the City.” The author describes the scene at the post office with bemused interest. For other publications, unescorted ladies meant chaos and no attempt was made to hide their concern for everyone’s virtue. A Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine report on women and children in America points out to its British readers that while the fair maidens of Europe must rely upon a town businessperson to mail and receive her letters, a girl in New York has a freer hand:
[She] has the privilege, if she chooses to exercise it, of her own private box or pigeon-hole at the post-office of the town where she resides, where she can have her letters addressed, and whither by a “Ladies Entrance” she can resort when she pleases and unlock her box from the outside, and take away her letters without observation.
It’s the lack of observation that made the New York Post Office such a source of fear—private communication is one thing, but to carry it out in a public space, away from the watchful eyes of protector figures, leaves women and girls open to assaults on their chastity, both in print and in person.
In The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York, an 1869 tour guide-cum-treatise on the modern city, war correspondent turned urban flaneur Junius Browne alluded to women’s peril in the at the hands of the postal system: “The stations are the favorites of intriguers of both sexes, and are frequently made rendezvous for interdirected communication and illicit pleasures.”
Like in Blackwood’s, the danger is implied—exactly what illicit pleasures comingling correspondents might fall into are left to the imaginations of the (likely) male readers of his work. Not all scribes were so coy. In his book The Women of New York, George Ellington (the pseudonym of an unidentified concerned citizen) explicitly warns of unscrupulous madams using the post office as a place to lure the “thousand school-girls a week that call there” into a life of prostitution:
Procuresses made it the business of forming the acquaintance of young, susceptible girls on their way from school. Waylaying them, they opened conversation, and gradually led their minds into the abnormal channels which the reading of sensational books, the conversation of sickly-sentimental companions and clandestine correspondence with unprincipled men inclined them.
Concerns about the post office were mitigated upon the construction of a new, more spatially regulated post office near City Hall, and upon the widespread introduction of home delivery by the Postal Service (prior delivery of mail to individual households was conducted by personal servants or private courier companies). Formally introduced in 1863 as a way to communicate news of Union soldiers, home delivery was available to most Manhattanites by the early 1870s, and its Congressional supporters were not unaware of the cult of vice surrounding urban post offices—Rep. John Palfrey of Massachusetts, when arguing for funding of home delivery, expressed concern for “the female of humble condition, who is compelled to go to a public place for the letter she is expecting, and await her turn to inquire for it, amidst the annoyance of a crowd.”
Still, the American woman’s taste for mail had not been satiated, and she continued to brave crowds and would-be assailants without intervention. After all, Browne reminds us: “Occasionally some unsophisticated citizen complains of such things through the newspapers, but New-York cares not for them. It is too busy to attempt to regulate the lives of persons to whom it is indifferent.”
Related:
1770 / Vienna
Advice to the Once and Future Queen
1839 / Stonegappe
Charlotte Brontë Has Her Hands Full
c. 1860 / United States
Horsepower Among the Pony ExpressAngela Serratore
By Angela Serratore. “The post-office system offers a facility for clandestine correspondence which no respectable father or mother on the European side of the Atlantic would think of without a shudder, if
Back Mattertag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.20182012-04-13T15:12:43Z2012-04-13T15:12:54ZUser-friendliness quickly became so crucial to the absorption of information that in the centuries following the development of the printing press, the index threatened to usurp the book itself. In 1701, this phenomenon prompted Jonathan Swift to muse that “The most accomplished way of using books at present is twofold: either, first, to serve them as men do lords—learn their titles exactly and then brag of their acquaintance; or, secondly, which is... the profounder and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail.”
Two hundred years later, the future of the profession was assured enough for Mary Petherbridge, a London librarian and author of The Technique of Indexing, to state, with a caveat, that the future of the indexer was bright: “Indexing is not an easy profession, but it is an interesting one... Indexing posts—some of them very well paid—are increasing yearly.” Indexing was a rare example of a profession considered suitable for women at the turn of the twentieth century.
Although the future of indexing is subject to the same hand-wringing as the rest of the publishing industry, the profession is thriving in its own quiet way. Even if the image of the indexer laboriously noting references and page numbers on index cards has been supplanted by that of the modern and technologically savvy indexer creating indexes in Word, the community of indexers—a profession as isolated as any in the realm of publishing—remains resilient against the pressures of fragmentation. Formal indexing communities have existed, with interruptions, since 1877; the aptly-named Society of Indexers continues to produce its own publication, The Indexer, chronicling the lighter side of modern information retrieval. Under-appreciated by the general public, indexers can gather in the safety of their professional enclaves and congratulate each other on their particular kind of poetry. The H.W. Wilson award, given out annually since 1979 by the American Society of Indexers for indexing excellence, describes winning examples not only as comprehensive and informative, but also "lovable," "evocative," and "elegant."
The power of the index was twofold. Not only was it a microcosm of a more protracted body of knowledge, but it could also be intensely political. With the formalization of the profession in the eighteenth century, an author’s choice of indexer required a discerning judge of human nature. One nineteenth century writer warned of books “whose indexes, compiled by unscrupulous enemies, have been their ruin.” Although an index considered ‘good’ by the standards of the profession could never express any overtly political bent, a shadow of authorship is inevitably cast. In the same way that modern search engines filter content, the index shows that the organization of information, no matter how straightforward, is never neutral. Information retrieval may not change the content of the information sought, but it certainly affects how that information is viewed, shifting physical and psychological perceptions.
Ultimately, the idea that it is possible to look at a list—whether that list be printed on a page or displayed on a screen—and see the whole of knowledge contained therein, is a seductive one. After all, an incomprehensible wealth of information made seemingly comprehensible—is that not all we ourselves are? “The world is a great volume,” preached a sermon from 1626, “and man the Index of that Booke; Even in the body of man, you may turn to the whole world” Moira Donovan
By Moira Donovan. Imagine a world without organized information. The possibility conjures to mind a Borgesian vision of books stacked in unmanageable piles, a dusty tidal wave of knowledge threatening to engulf
The Myth of the Fourth Estatetag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.20172012-04-03T16:35:42Z2012-04-18T19:39:49ZCapra plays the story for laughs and romance. But he also serves up a portrait of the fourth estate in all of its complicated glory. Bumbling and misguided, the reporters and editors do whatever they can to sell papers. But somehow, out of the industrial machine of the modern press, the truth will out.
It’s a fun ride. And it stands in pretty well for the heroic vision of the fourth estate. It’s only a few steps to the more earnest vision of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, served up by Alan Pakula in his memorable account of the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men. The word—stamped in black and white from typewriter to teletype—will set us free.
It’s a long time since Thomas Carlyle described in 1841 the power of the press as “the fourth estate.” He attributed the idea (mistakenly) to Edmund Burke, who he supposed to have said that “there were three estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact.” Carlyle elaborated, “Printing, which comes necessarily out of writing, I say often, is equivalent to democracy: invent writing, democracy is inevitable.”
The faith in the press as the guardian of truth, the watchdog of power, the foundation of democracy—in brief, the fourth estate—lies at the heart of the liberal imagination of the west. It is the principle enshrined in the First Amendment, nestled in between freedom of religion and the freedom of assembly. “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—adopted in 1789, the same year that the Bill of Rights was submitted for ratification—was loftier and more circumspect. “The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.” These foundational statements paid homage to the same dream. “Where the press is free and every man able to read,” Thomas Jefferson explained, “all is safe.”
Flash forward to the present day—to our age of Judith Miller and Jayson Blair, Rupert Murdoch, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, media consolidation, the waning circulations of the daily press, etc., etc.—and the heroic vision of the press seems to have lost its shine. A Gallup poll from 2010 found that 57% of Americans surveyed have little or no trust in the media to accurately report the news, a record high. If the public is down on the fourth estate, the fourth estate can’t be feeling so good about the public. Our citizenry is more eager to remain well informed about Kim Kardashian’s marital woes than the latest conditions in Fallujah or the intricacies of our health care system. Oscar Wilde wrote—in another day, to be sure, but his words still resonate—that “the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
And what should we make of the fact that the viewers of one prominent cable news station (yes, of course, Fox News) are more likely to hold mistaken beliefs about, well, you name it, global warming, health care, Iraq, than those who don’t watch cable news at all? Or the fact that, all through the Iraq War, in the midst of no shortage of evidence to the contrary, surveys turned up the enormous frequency with which Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11 or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the war?
In the midst of such misconceptions, it is no wonder that so many attribute enormous power to the media, not to inform, enlighten and uplift, but to mislead audiences, to close off discussion and buttress authority, to hide the machinations of power, to control readers and viewers. In the words of Howard Jones (to a synth pop tune), “The power of the media will make up our minds / The power of the media will take down our minds.”
For Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, the modern media are but the propaganda arm of big business and big government. They borrowed their title, Manufacturing Consent, from Walter Lippmann’s lament for the failures of the American press and public in the 1920s. By their view, one that has had remarkable resonance within and beyond the academy, the press is not the watchdog of the public, but the guard dog of power. These days, the corrupting power of the media is a more familiar refrain on the right side of the political spectrum. Today, the entire Republican Party is locked in a campaign against the “liberal media.” To be sure, this is not a new song. It was the Nixon White House, as part of its own struggles with the press, that encouraged the use of the term “media” in place of the more traditional expression, the “press.” William Safire explained that the “media” sounded more manipulative. And besides, the press hated it.
So Hildy Johnson’s question comes to mind once again: And what for? What is the purpose of the press? And what is its power? In the sixth century of Gutenberg’s reign, more than four hundred years into the run of the periodical press, at the dawn of the second century of electronic media, a few decades into the Internet era, we still don’t have much of an idea of the impact of our media. We’re surrounded by fantasies and phantasms of press power, blinded by the liberal dream of the fourth estate and its evil doppelganger, the specter of media control. The impact of the media turns out to be much less and much more than these visions allow.
The first newspapers, dating from the dawn of the seventeenth century, took the names “gazette,” after the Italian gazetta, after the copper coin that was the price of the first Venetian papers, or “coranto”, with the promise of current events. Others took up names like “News” or “Relations”. More imaginative titles would soon be on offer: the Journal, the Record, the Morning, the Evening, the Times, the Press, the Post, the Telegraph, the Intelligencer, the Advertiser, the Tribune, the Sun, the World, the Mirror. The very names of the periodical press held the promise to inform, to announce, to instruct, and to reflect the world in all its complications.
The four centuries of press history that have followed constitute a vast archive of modernity. There is no easy way to reckon the promises and prospects to be found within it. But it should be clear that what the press has promised—in all of its variety—is something far more complicated that the role of watchdog to power. We can leave aside the big lies of Big Brother, the propaganda machine of Goebbels and Co., or the production reports of Pravda, and restrict our vision to the press in democratic societies, where the formulation of the daily record has followed a recipe of roughly one part commerce, one part public interest. Here, the promises of the press are legion.
The press has promised to hold up a mirror to the world. Walter Cronkite famously signed off, “And that’s the way it is.” A CBS executive called him to task the first time he used the line, but he persisted. He wanted his own signature on the news. Edward R. Murrow opened his radio reports from wartime England with a marvelous promise: “This…is London.” His reporting brought the war to American living rooms before Americans were ready to make the war their own. In 1888, in the 6th Taráz of his Ornaments, Bahá’u’lláh (founder of the Bahá’í faith) wrote that “the pages of swiftly-appearing newspapers are indeed the mirror of the world … a mirror endowed with hearing, sight and speech.” It was in that same year that T.P. O’Connor, the founder of the Star, explained his aims for the paper: “Our ideal is to leave no event unrecorded.” Théophraste Renaudot’s Gazette de France, the country’s first weekly newspaper, founded in 1631, promised “all the true news.” (It would occasionally print the false as well).
The newspaper would be a mirror to the world, perhaps, but the mirror shouldn’t be allowed to reflect just anything, should it? “Make a paper for the nicest kind of people,” wrote William Randolph Hearst in 1933. Decades earlier, Adolph Ochs, who picked up the New York Times for a song and built it into the paper of New York’s establishment, added the memorable, long-lived pledge of “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” In contrast to the yellow journalism of Pulitzer and Hearst, he would offer a “clean, dignified, trustworthy, and impartial” paper. The press has always been selective in its vision. At its start, Renaudot’s Gazette de France barely printed any news from within France.
The press promised to make better readers, to inform, to instruct, to ennoble its audience. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Matin of Paris promised to be an “education in democracy.” Walter Cronkite put it this way: “A democracy ceases to be a democracy if its citizens do not participate in its governance. To participate intelligently, they must know what their government has done, is doing and plans to do in their name… This is the meaning of freedom of press. It is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.”
The press has promised to make a better world. That was Joseph Pulitzer’s idea. His paper, he wrote, should “never be satisfied with merely printing news.” It “should always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties…always oppose privileged classes and public plunderer; never lack sympathy with the poor; always remain devoted to the public welfare…” His paper wouldn’t be just a watchdog on power. It was the very representative of the public. William Randolph Hearst in 1936—at about the same time that he was shaking hands with Hitler (though he’d come to see the menace of fascism in the wake of Kristallnacht)—explained that “It is essential for the papers to conduct constructive campaigns for the benefit of the community with which they are associated.” W.T. Stead, the pioneer of the “new journalism” of late nineteenth-century Britain, a distant cousin of the yellow journalism across the pond, proclaimed “government by journalism,” while sitting in prison for his investigations into the “white-slave traffic” of London. “I am but a comparatively young journalist,” he wrote, “but I have seen Cabinets upset, Ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated, Bills transformed, estimates remodeled, Acts passed, generals nominated, governors appointed, armies sent hither and thither, war proclaimed and war averted by the agency of newspapers.” He thought it was all for the better.
The press has promised to move its readers. To reflection, to compassion, to anger. An old jingle for Time magazine made it plain: “Read Time—it takes you there. Read Time—it makes you care.” Timothée Trimm, a star columnist of the nineteenth-century French press, wrote that he found his subject matter in curiosity and fear, in “the event in the street that makes you open your window, the drama of the night that makes you lock your door.” This was just the start of it. The press would move its readers to department store specials and elixir sales, to plays and films and sporting events. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the advertising income of the largest newspapers already exceeded their sales income. It was a sign of the world to come.
And the press promised to bring together readers. In 1893, France’s largest daily, Le Petit Parisien, explained the power of the press to create new solidarities. It was manifest in the collective action of reading the newspaper. “[T]he same thought, at one and the same time, animates the whole population of the country…from one border to another…every heart beats as one…It is the newspaper that establishes this sublime communion of souls across distance.”
For all of these high-minded ideals, the press has promised to entertain. “To instruct and amuse,” that was one of the mottos of the best-selling French newspaper of the nineteenth century. The mass of the public doesn’t want algebra. It wants emotion, sincerity, a good story. Hearst asked his editors to give people the kind of news they wanted to read, not the kind “that they were supposed to read but didn’t like.” “We must have the courage to be stupid,” said a Paris press baron, If you only listened to high-minded discussions of the fourth estate you could forget that most of what the press has provided is not news of any importance. Or news at all. An Irish journalist from the nineteenth century explained that the mix of his daily newspaper would include “plenty of entirely unpolitical literature—sometimes humorous, sometimes pathetic; anecdotal, statistical, the craze for fashions and the arts of housekeeping and now and then, a short, dramatic and picturesque tale.”
Listening to so many promises, we find ourselves a long way from the austere image of the fourth estate as a check on government. We’re caught in a web of contradictions and tensions—to tell all the news and to tell the news that readers want, to make a better world and to entertain readers—contradictions and tensions that continue to shape the media landscape. But this isn’t the half of it, for the promises of the press only tell part of the tale. The practice has so often failed to live up to these promises.
The mirror of the press turns out frequently to be a funhouse mirror. It’s an old story, but one that George Orwell memorably recounted in Homage to Catalonia, some ten years before he created the specter of Newspeak. Returning to England from the Civil War in Spain, a bullet wound in his neck and an education in political propaganda for his trouble, Orwell couldn’t escape the feeling that the real story of what was happening in Spain would never make it to the light of day. He had the misfortune of joining up with an independent militia of anarchist leanings that was suppressed by the Communists in Spain in a bit of civil war within the Civil War. His militia, he was surprised to discover, had been tarred by Communist propaganda as the allies of Franco, and that black legend was swallowed hook, line and sinker by the London papers. It calls to mind Walter Lippmann’s diagnosis of the New York Times’ reporting on the Bolshevik Revolution. He wrote in 1920 (with Charles Merz), “In the large, the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.”
The power of the press is also the power to misinform. It was evident enough in the early years of the Republic. As President, Jefferson was hounded by an opposition press that mixed slander and misinformation. It was the dawn of the nineteenth century when Jefferson (yes, the apostle of a free press) wrote that “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them.” In his excursions through the young sister republic of the United States some decades later, Tocqueville saw the power of the press and its faults. It’s not just that the American press was selective in its coverage. It was full of partisan bickering and eager distortion.
When it does work its magic, the power of the press can be an awesome sight. But its effects are not always in the service of truth and justice. We will do well to remember Emile Zola’s defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus and his attack on official corruption in “J’Accuse!” “Truth is on the march,” he wrote, “and nothing will stop it.” Zola’s article, written as an open letter to the President of the Republic, reinvigorated the public debate surrounding Dreyfus’ (false) conviction for treason. It was a heroic moment in the history of the public intellectual, one that would lead to Zola’s conviction for insulting the army and energize the defenders of Dreyfus. But to tell the history of the press through the Dreyfus Affair, it would also be necessary to look to the right-wing press that rallied French readers in defense of the army (and against the would-be traitor), to the Catholic and anti-Semitic press that pictured the Affair as a battle over the soul of France, and spread warnings of the influence of Jews and liberals and intellectuals. If the press was one of the mechanisms of Dreyfus’ salvation; it was also the tool of his enemies.
What of the promise of the press to bring together its audience? Under the sign of a common catastrophe or the threat of war, with music hall tunes or flag lapel pins, the press has worked to create a common sense of identity for its audience. But the press is never simply a force for cohesion. It can just as easily serve the ends of division, giving voice to conflicts of all shape.
And for all of our hopes that the press might move readers to compassion and action, we can’t escape the sense that our appetite for news may be something less than civic. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust described the “abominable and voluptuous act of reading the newspaper.” Proust likened it to a sensual experience, nine parts stimulation for every one part reflection. The newspaper, he wrote, served up “all the miseries and catastrophes of the world during the past twenty-four hours—battles that have cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, crimes, strikes, bankruptcies, fires, poisonings, suicides, divorces, the shattering emotions of statesmen and actors alike.” And for what? “A daily feast that seems to make a peculiarly exciting and stimulating accompaniment to the swallowing of a few mouthfuls of coffee brought in response to our summons.” Sometimes, to be sure, the press has almost no power at all. The most shocking news can be read by a distracted eye and the shrug of indifference.
For all of this tumultuous history, we hold fast to a vision of the powerful impact of the press, for good and bad. It is an old story, already a common theme in the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the First World War—and the propaganda machines operated by western governments—a social scientific frenzy explained the enormous powers of the media. The curiosity is this: the ninety-some years that have followed have turned up precious little evidence of the direct impact of media. In 1940, the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld headed out for middle America to track the influence of press on opinion. His study of the presidential elections of that year—The People’s Choice—came to the conclusion that the effects of the press were remarkably limited. Family and friends—can we think of this as the Facebook Effect?—turned out to be much more powerful in the shaping of political opinion.
A flood of research in communication studies in the decades since Lazarsfeld has elaborated and revised his findings. The press doesn’t seem to have large, direct, measurable effects on opinion. The standard answer of the sociology of communication is that most of the effects of the press are limited and indirect. The press has the power to set the agenda, to direct attention, to frame political and cultural issues, to shape perceptions over the long term. These are real and meaningful influences, but they are a far cry from the immense powers that are so frequently invoked. It’s a difficult idea to fathom, for we put much stock in the power of the media, whether for good or ill. But it has been borne out repeatedly in careful analysis, even if it has not made much of an impression on the general public.
In the popular imagination, the press is an agent of enormous power for good and bad. We think of the yellow press fomenting war against Spain. “Remember the Maine!” goes the cry and the public followed. Or the common view that television news turned American opinion against the war in Vietnam. Neither story stands up to much scrutiny.
Take the case of William Randolph Hearst and the Spanish-American War. When Frederick Remington cabled from Cuba in 1897 that there would be no war, Hearst is said to have replied: “You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war.” American intervention in Cuba would come the next year. It is a wonderful anecdote that seems to embody the entire vision of the manipulations of the yellow press, one reason that it has been told and told again countless times. The only problem—demonstrated in detail by the media historian W. Joseph Campbell—is that the exchange almost certainly never happened.
But leave aside the anecdote. Did the yellow press drive America to war in 1898? Those who have considered the question carefully say that the press role was certainly not the dominant one. The New York press, which sold a lot of papers on the promise of Spanish atrocities and Cuban resistance, did not have enormous impact on the circles around McKinley that pushed for war. Early accounts of the war made no special mention of the yellow press. And why should they have? It was easy enough to explain the rush to war with a look to the expansionist tendencies of American foreign policy.
What of Vietnam and television? It is offered up as a lesson of media and war: when the American public sees American casualties, the war is lost. It was an opinion held fervently by government leaders, who were enormously sensitive to the color of war reporting in all its forms. But, as Michael Schudson explains, “Television news coverage was overwhelming favorable toward the American war effort up to Tet in 1968. Far from demonstrating the horrors of war, television sanitized the conflict, and the networks were particularly loath to show American soldiers who had been killed or wounded.” The public, it turns out, was way ahead of the news. A 1967 poll showed that 50 percent of Americans saw the American effort in Vietnam as a mistake. When Walter Cronkite famously declared on February 27, 1968 that the war was unwinnable, he was, Schudson explains, “only coming around to the views of middle America.”
And what about Watergate? This is the founding myth of contemporary investigative journalism. It’s remembered as the David and Goliath story of two journalists who brought down a president. For many, it stands as the finest hour of the American press. (Though, to be sure, some conservative voices have latched on to another view. In the words of the popular historian, Paul Johnson, it was “the first media putsch in history.”) Here, too, history tells a more complicated tale than the mythology. We will have a hard time pinning the uncovering of the scandal on the press itself. What Bernstein and Woodward did was to reveal the work of the FBI and the courts and Congressional investigators to a wider public. To be sure, the Washington Post moved forward on a story that left most American news outlets uncomfortable. They gave it wide play. They helped legitimate the investigations. But that’s a far cry from picturing the press as the maker of kings. Woodward put it plainly himself: “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”
What then should we make of our fantasies and phantasms of press power? The press as liberator? The press as controlling power? These are more the product of the liberal imagination (and its fears) than of historical experience. We are caught in the grasp of the myth of the fourth estate (and its evil double, the specter of media control). It is a myth, not patently false but selective and obscuring, a sacred story that embodies higher values and ignores so much in the history of the modern world. It is not that the press cannot serve as a check on power, or a bulwark of authority, or a force for dissent, etc. At various moments in its wide history, the press has been all of these. But its powers are so frequently misunderstood. The effects of the press are powerful, but rarely as direct as popular imagination would have them.
To understand the powers of the press, we should look beyond the tumult of the quotidian. We should think of reading the paper and watching the news as acts belonging to the world of ritual as much as the commerce of information. We can take a page here from Hegel, who wrote that the newspaper was the morning prayer of the bourgeoisie: a morning prayer, an act of devotion, a ritual that binds the reader to a community. Or from Jürgen Habermas, who (more recently) presented the newspaper as one of several institutions (together with the coffeehouse, the literary salon, the novel, and more) that served as the basis for the “bourgeois public sphere,” a space of rational-critical debate that changed the very possibilities of politics.
If the press is a mirror to the world, it is also a mirror to the public. And more. It gives form and shape to a public of readers and viewers who are reflected in its distorting glass. When he sought out the eighteenth and nineteenth-century origins of nationalism, Benedict Anderson looked to the power of the press to create an “imagined community” of the nation. He pictured readers across the land reading the same stories in the same paper from the same capital. That action, he explained, was the very foundation of a national imagination.
For some, the point is that the press will make its public. Pulitzer put it in dramatic terms—and put all of the responsibility on the press. “Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mold the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.” But the lines of action go both ways. And in any case, the press can’t make its public any way it chooses. The actions of readers and listeners and viewers surely help to shape the press as well.
What was the purpose of the press, Hildy Johnson asked? He tossed off the short answer with disdain: “So a million hired girls and motormen’s wives’ll know what’s going on.” If that’s it, he seems to be saying, we’d best find another racket. It’s an old jibe but also a mark of time and place that female readers should serve as the sign of the inconsequential. But we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the prospect, for knowing what is going on—across the street and across the world—is not a trivial pursuit.
Among the highest powers of the press is the capacity to stand as witness to the unfolding of events and to tell it like it is. Bill Moyers likes to cite the example of Martha Gellhorn. After half a century as a journalist, from the Spanish Civil War to the Nicaraguan Civil War and everywhere in between, one of the great war correspondents of the twentieth century, she had little faith in the promise of journalism to change the world. But she found a different sort of power to the press. “Victory and defeat,” she wrote, “are both passing moments. There is no end; there are only means. Journalism is a means, and I now think that the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself.” Gregory Shaya
By Gregory Shaya. In The Front Page, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 send-up of the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago journalism, the ace reporter Hildy Johnson is ready to throw in the
Living in the Marginstag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.20162012-03-22T16:37:48Z2012-03-22T16:39:31ZMarginal illustrations could be profane and bizarre: one manuscript of the romance of Lancelot shows a nun breastfeeding a monkey; another marginal image in the Rutland Psalter features a demon of some sort firing an arrow into the ass of a merman.
Depictions of sexual consort are frequent, among men and women, among various species of animals, and enough other combinations to make even contemporary readers blush. Camille cautions against reading such images as violations of the sacred text; because the medieval world was so rigidly hierarchized and structured, “resisting, ridiculing, overturning and inventing was not only possible, it was limitless.” That these psalters and books of hours often contained sacrilegious sentiments right alongside their holy piety, it seems, was perhaps the point: “We should not see medieval culture exclusively in terms of binary oppositions—sacred/profane, for example, or spiritual/worldly,” Camille explains. “Travesty, profanation, and sacrilege are essential to the continuity of the sacred in society.”
That these books contained such unresolved contradictions in them is what has drawn me to illuminated manuscripts time and time again—though my favorite of these images are those that, like the monks’ marginal complaints, involve the act of writing itself. A 1323 missal illuminated by Petrus de Raimbeaucourt, for example, contains on such picture of a scribe harassed by monkeys: while he tries to copy, they mimic him, drink his ink, and distract him. One moons him, an obscene gesture suggested by a suggestive line break in the Latin above: the word culpa, “sin,” is cut at cul, so that the line reads instead Liber est a cul—“the book is to the ass.”
And then there is the image from a manuscript of The Romance of the Rose, a thirteenth-century epic begun by Guillaume de Lorris and finished by Jean de Meun, in its time as popular and important as The Canterbury Tales and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Romance of the Rose offers a straight-forward, if increasingly lengthy and digressive, love story—having entered into an allegorical Garden of Love, Amant (the Lover) engages in a series of dialogues on the nature of love and women, before ultimately scaling the castle where his beloved awaits. It is, of course, a narrative by and for the aristocracy: no servants exist in this allegory, nor would anyone but the courtly elite have owned or read such a manuscript.
But while the text itself is focused around this aristocratic world, it was copied and built by tradesmen and the working class, and as Camille suggests, one finds in these marginal notes and images a subtle reflection on the power structure inherent in the medieval manuscript: “The artists who painted these images were sometimes servants in the retinue of the nobility, but even those who were professionals were lower on the social scale than those for whom they worked. Was the servant able to poke fun at his master in the margins in the same way that the Latin fabulist Phaedrus…thought he could?”
Thus the image in a manuscript of The Romance of the Rose held in the Bibliothèque Nationale, illustrated by a husband and wife team, Richart and Jeanne Montbaston, which has become my favorite of all of these strange interjections. In the bottom margin of a single page, the Montbastons’ incorporated a self-portrait of themselves, with Richart copying the letters while Jeanne illustrates. While they may appear initially as nothing more than a visual signature, their presence undermines the entire work of the epic, pointing to a world beyond the allegory of the romance with its gardens of pleasure and castles of jealousy. In a world of women treated variously as deceitful liars or sex objects, Jeanne’s presence as a worker and as an artist in her own right questions much of the assumptions the Romance’s authors make, and in their depiction of themselves in the process of making the very text we are reading, they proclaim the manuscript as manuscript, as a material object—inviting us to consider not just the terms of the allegory, but the literal surface on which it rests, and a reminder of the lowly craftsmen who lie always behind great works of literature and make them possible.Colin Dickey
By Colin Dickey. The Means of Communication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly contains a fabulous collection of complains and marginal notes by the monks assigned to copy manuscripts in the era before the
Predicting Their Own Demisetag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.18902011-12-23T18:19:16Z2012-03-22T16:36:45ZRay Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 made more grandiose claims about society’s hostility to literature. Books in this novel’s universe are illegal and burned on site. Why? “A book is a loaded gun,” explains Captain Beatty, overseer of government-sanctioned book burnings. Yet, as Bradbury would later add, “you don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Intellectual thought in this culture is anathema, prized only by a cadre of “book people” who memorize historic texts. A cursory glance at the authors that the book people preserve—Plato, Aristophanes, Gandhi, Gautama Buddha, Confucius—suggests that Bradbury agreed with Verne: he believed in the edifying power of the classics and feared for a society that fails to heed them.
Gary Shteyngart, author of last year’s Super Sad True Love Story, had a more fundamental worry: in the future, people will not be able to read, period. In the novel’s super sad universe, books are only glossed over and scanned for information—never savored during periods of extended concentration. Lenny Abramov, a crusty remnant of a literate era, is the only member of this society who can read and think critically. Yet one day, when Lenny realizes that Eunice, his much younger girlfriend, can’t understand anything he reads to her, he vows to stop reading. “We don’t have to read anymore. We don’t have to read ever again. I promise,” Lenny says. “It’s a luxury. A stupid luxury.” For Eunice and her peers, books are redolent of “wet socks” and nothing more. But for Shteyngart, books are our only hope against anti-intellectualism.
Writing in three different centuries, these authors, taken together, remind us that debates over the future of reading are nothing new. They remind us of the value of the liberal arts, the art of thinking deeply. Perhaps they may have indulged in some hyperbole—Verne’s scientific texts like Poetic Parallelogram have not taken over the bestseller lists—but by documenting their fears, these writers capture the intellectual concerns of different eras. After all, as Bradbury once said, “I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”Shaj Mathew
By Shaj Mathew. Borders bookstores around the country have all but shuttered. Magazine newsstand sales have dropped. And Steve Jobs had put it bluntly: “people don’t read anymore.” The good news? The
The Patron Saint of Dark Daystag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.19212011-12-22T16:46:55Z2011-12-22T16:50:07ZJust after the winter solstice, on one of the darkest nights of the year, Van Gogh ended an argument by flinging a glass of absinthe at Gauguin’s face, and the latter resolved to leave Arles for good. The next night—December 23—Gauguin was walking home when, as he later recalled, “I heard a well-known little step behind me, quick and jerky. I turned around just as Vincent rushed at me with an open razor in his hand.” Van Gogh halted abruptly, and in that bleak alleyway the two men stared at each other for a long, perhaps interminable, moment. “The look in my eyes at that moment must have been very powerful,” Gauguin wrote, “for he stopped, lowered his head and ran back toward the house.”
Van Gogh took Luke the Evangelist as his patron because Luke is the saint of painters. But the saint whom I most associate with this artist, and particularly with that dead winter night in Arles, is not Luke but Lucy, patron of the darkest nights of the year. Lucy’s story began as a sort of sequel to that of another saint—as a young girl she’d come to pray at Agatha’s shrine, bringing along her mother, hoping to cure her dysentery. Agatha not only cured Lucy’s mother but also appeared to the young girl in a vision, telling her that she, too, would one day be revered in her home of Syracuse as Agatha was in Catania. Lucy, like Agatha, subsequently pledged her virginity and paid a similarly high price for it—she, too, was sent to a brothel at one point and later tortured. And, like Agatha, she’s now recognized by the body part cut from her during these tortures: her eyes.
At least, that’s the most common version of Lucy’s story; there are differing accounts of how she lost her eyes. Another involves a suitor who relentlessly pursued the virginal Lucy, repeatedly complimenting her on the beauty of her eyes. Lucy, wanting to be left in peace, simply gouged out her eyes and sent them to the suitor, telling him he was free to have them if he felt they were so beautiful and asking to be finally left in peace.
This story is likely apocryphal, but it has echoes of another, a story that also happened on December 23, 1888. After threatening Gauguin with a straight razor, Van Gogh took that same razor to a nearby brothel, where he cut off a portion of his right earlobe, giving it to a prostitute named Rachel and asking her to hold it for safekeeping.
It was these dual stories of self-mutilation that initially led me to equate Van Gogh and Lucy, but there are other reasons why I think he should have adopted her over Luke. “The symbol of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, is, as you know, an ox,” Van Gogh wrote to Émile Bernard in the summer of 1888. “So you just be patient as an ox if you want to work in the artistic field.” But Van Gogh didn’t need a patron saint of patience; he needed a saint of the night, when he was most troubled. (“The thing I dread most is insomnia,” he wrote to his brother after he’d been hospitalized.) He needed a saint to offer hope in the darkness, salvation from the darkness of winter.
Lucy’s time is the winter, when the nights are long and unforgiving. Midwinter is sometimes called the “days of roughness,” precisely because it was impossible for earlier cultures to identify that exact moment when the earth begins its tilt back. Lucy, patron saint of blindness and of the darkest nights of the year, is meant to be celebrated on the solstice itself, but pinpointing the exact moment of the solstice has never been easy. Her feast day was originally on December 16, though it later changed to December 13. Neither of these is close to the solstice as we now understand it, but prior to the Gregorian calendar, the date of the solstice changed every hundred years. The Julian calendar was based on a calculation of 365.25 days to a year, when in fact the number is closer to 365.2422, creating a slight slippage that had added up to thirteen full days before Pope Gregory XII rectified it in 1582.
Lucy’s day was still December 16 when Dante wrote his epic in the early 1300s, though the solstice then would have fallen on December 12. When John Donne took Lucy as his muse three hundred years later, the longest night of the year was December 9. But Donne’s great poem to Lucy, “A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day,” is dated December 7. Donne didn’t know when the solstice occurred, nor when Lucy’s actual feast day was, but he understood on some level that Lucy’s is a movable feast—her day is every night, since at night all calendars stop.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
Donne was far less sanguine than Dante that the world is perfectly ordered and just. He had been born Catholic in a newly Protestant country, which was being torn apart by religion and by conflicting views of the order of the world. His brother Henry was imprisoned in 1593 for harboring a Catholic priest and died of disease in prison (the priest, meanwhile, had been hanged until he was nearly dead, at which point he was disemboweled). Donne had learned to keep his faith a secret throughout his early years before ultimately converting to the Anglican faith in 1627.
It was three years later, with the deaths of both his patron, Countess Lucy of Bedford, and his young daughter Lucy, that Donne turned to the Catholic saint of darkness. Like Dante, he came to Lucy in his darkest hour, beset by gloom. But unlike the Italian, Donne could not find solace in a divinely revealed master plan of the universe. Dante found a love beyond death through Lucy’s intercession, but Donne saw death hidden even in love, despair that outweighed belief, darkness to match the longest night of the year. The bleakness of Donne’s work dispels the order in Dante. If the Italian found paradise emerging from the inferno, Donne found midnight in a summer’s kiss. “I am re-begot,” he tells us, “Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.” Donne called on Lucy in the wake of a personal loss, and his poem suggests that if God exists, His purpose is only to affirm our emptiness. Lucy’s name is here invoked to remind Donne that the world will yet turn back on its axis, even if Donne himself can’t yet see it.
This is an excerpt from Colin Dickey's upcoming book Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith, which will be published by Unbridled in June of 2012. Colin Dickey
By Colin Dickey. Van Gogh’s The Night Café is an image of destitution, its garish colors unable to hide its bleak desperation. Around the edges of the room huddle silent patrons, beneath
The Zombie Apocalypse of Daniel Defoetag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.18142011-11-01T15:16:12Z2011-11-01T15:16:58ZWhat A Journal of the Plague Year doesn’t have is zombies—at least not explicitly. Still, the numberless, suppurating victims are apt to behave like the undead at every turn, crowding the novel with “walking putrefied carcasses, whose breath was infectious and sweat poison.” These abject and degenerating bodies, disfigured by the “tokens” of disease that look like “small Knobs…of callous or Horn,” can turn on others, even running through the streets actively seeking to infect people impressed “with a kind of Rage, and a hatred against their own Kind,” as if the sickness itself were filled with an “evil Will” determined “to communicate it self.” Thus babies kill their mothers, and men tackle women in the street hoping to infect them with a deadly kiss. Others manage to dodge the disease, only to be disfigured by the weight of madness or grief.
Granted, there is none of the urgent panic attendant on hacking one’s way through a shambling horde only to turn around and see the second wave. This lends the novel a kind of studious detachment as H.F. traverses the city in an effort to comprehend the scope of the visitation through a process of quantification and statistical computation—tallying the bills of mortality, measuring the size of the municipal grave pits, and delineating the necrotic geography of ravaged neighborhoods. Even in this, H.F. is thwarted, as the plague outruns information, spreading faster than the news, eroding actionable knowledge into useless nubs of hearsay.
Ultimately, as with all these narratives, the real plague is modern life. Physicians trace the disease to a package of silks imported from Holland that originated in the Levant, spreading the infection through the ports, mills, marketplaces and manufactories that form the early-modern economy. Quarantines and barricades prove useless against the commodity’s voyage; but while the products themselves may be infectious, it’s the appetite to possess them that truly kills. In this, A Journal of the Plague Year presages the lurching mallrats of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, who continue the puppetry of consumption into the undead afterlife, a theme that is similarly taken up in Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Zone One, where the post-apocalyptic reconstruction of New York provides opportunities for branding and product placement, and where the “Ambassadors of nil” evoke nothing so hellish as Times Square tourists, boring girlfriends, and the hollow communications of sitcoms and social media. In Whitehead’s apocalypse, Manhattan attains its logical apotheosis, whereas in Defoe’s, the London plague runs its course within a year—just in time for the Great Fire to burn the whole thing down. Andrew McConnell Stott
By Andrew McConnell Stott. You can barely flee down a city block these days without running smack into the middle of the newest zombie apocalypse, a genre usually traced back to Richard Matheson’s
Heraclitus in Guatemalatag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.18132011-10-28T17:55:39Z2011-10-28T17:55:22ZBy four o’clock my posterior is good and numb, and I have Nietzsche coming out my ears. Time for a stroll. A haircut, I decide—the perfect way to mark the new academic year.
So I make my way down Amsterdam Avenue on a glorious autumn afternoon, leaving the well-heeled precincts of Columbia University and descending into the neighborhood known as “Manhattan Valley”—the not-especially-elegant Hispanic enclave between the top of the Upper West Side proper (96th street) and the southern edge of the campus (114th). Laundromats. Vans parked on the street playing loud salsa music. Storefront Tai Kwon Do academy. There is a good sized rat pressed into the pavement at the corner of 109th street, and a few hustlers hanging around an ill-kept tenement on 108th. A double-decker bus goes by, open on the top and filled with tourists snapping photos. These blocks are on the “Harlem Loop” of the tour companies that send their lorry-galleons in endless circuits of Manhattan.
As usual, Rafael is sitting in his chair, reading the Spanish-language daily paper. He is the oldest barber at Michael’s, and has the place of honor at the window, though one hardly ever sees him employed in actual barbering. The lemon-colored place hums with young men—cutting and being cut beneath incongruous crystal chandeliers. The styles tend toward Dominican-rakish: closely shaved hairlines in unlikely face-framing patterns. Very odd. Arawakan in their artifice, and requiring nearly daily attention to remain crisp and clean. Not the sort of thing Rafael does. So he reads the paper, enjoying the sociability of passing acquaintances—old men. He greets me and rises, offering me the chair, and we embark on the familiar ritual: the neck tissue; the plastic apron; the banter. His granddaughters are well. And my girls? Fine.
And he starts snipping, unguided. I want a haircut. Simple enough. Nothing to explain.
What have I been up to, he asks in Spanish. I say I’ve been preparing for my classes. And what am I teaching? History. Historia. La filosofía de la historia.
Very interesting, he says, nodding. Interesante. There is a lot of work in that area these days, he notes. I have no idea what he might mean, so I ask. “People are interested in history,” he replies, squinting behind my ear: “They want to understand the past.”
Silence. He pushes my head to the side, and I find myself looking out the window at the street—the people passing: a bum, three small girls playing with a toy stroller, a dark-skinned woman in shorts and boots and an open-knit thing like a trenchcoat made of lingerie.
They do? It seems so unlikely. We are quiet for a while. In the mirror I can see the large plasma televisions that hang on the youthful side of the room. One is showing a Yankees game; the other an MTV-like Hispanic variety show in which the camera orbits the callipygian contours of women in spandex mini-skirts. On the stage, fat men in dark glasses ogle their dancers casually, and hide behind stumpy microphones held at strangely phallic angles. It’s a bad world. Ugly. Stupid. I look away from the screens, dropping my eyes, and notice the little hooks from which Rafael hangs his clippers. All crooked. He probably screwed them in himself. Sad. It’s a sad world too. Ugly, stupid, bad, and sad.
“Uno no puede cruzar dos veces el mismo río,” Rafael offers suddenly, seemingly apropos of nothing, brushing out the stubble from his clipper. But then I see what he’s referring to: philosophy of history. And so I nod: right, right; exactly. Heraclitus. The river is always changing. You are always changing. Upshot: neither you nor the river is what it was by the time you make your way back across. The flow of time. Time is all flow. The present moment is everything (Bergson) or nothing (McTaggart). I am trying to encourage further conversation, but am aware that I am doing the thing that professors do: lecturing. I wind down. Rafael takes a straight razor to the back of my neck. Silence again. Scrape scrape. A tingle down my spine.
“Heráclito,” says Rafael, as if trying to remember something long forgotten, “Heráclito habló de la tesis y la antítesis. Eso también es filosofía de historia.”
Hmm. Heraclitus didn’t talk about thesis and antithesis. The old man is confused. But where the hell did Rafael learn about Hegel?
“Ah, no,” I say. “That’s another guy, Hegel—German, much later.”
“Right, right,” chimes in Rafael, looking genuinely pleased. “Hegel. Very influenced by Heraclitus…”
He was? Maybe. I’ll have to check that. Hmm. Not impossible. I make some noncommittal noises.
“Sí, sí,” he goes on, pausing for a moment with the razor and looking at me in the mirror: “And do you know what Hegel said? He said that time is this: first you have the antithesis, and then you have the synthesis, and then together they make the thesis.”
We look at each other in the glass, and I nod slowly, totally perplexed, entranced. He’s got it all wrong—scrambled. The antithesis before the thesis? Time backwards. Hegel via Heraclitus. The river running in reverse. Rafael goes back to my head, shaving behind my left ear. “Eso influenció mucho a Karl Marx, ” he explains, and blows lightly on my neck, undoing the snap and showing me the back of my head in a small hand-held mirror. I look strangely young, and nod again, rising, brushing myself off.
As I hand him the green bills, I ask where he learned all the stuff about Hegel and Heraclitus, and he gestures vaguely—school, a school in Guatemala, back before he was a barber, a political school, international. All that was a long time ago. He smiles and waves me off, “¡Adiós! ¡Hasta la vista!”
Back outside, walking up the avenue, I Google “Heraclitus and Hegel” on my phone, and, sure enough, find quotes galore attesting to the German’s avowed debt to the presocratic sage. Huh. Raphael was right. Then I look up “Marxism and Guatemala,” and figure out that before the CIA coup in 1954 the place was understood to be a communist beachhead in the Caribbean. So there it is: Raphael, in the early 1950s, must have been an up-and-coming star of the Dominican leftist youth—one with it enough to get sent for training in neighboring Guatemala. All that, before the fall of Batista. Back when Che was rafting down the Amazon. We never cross the same river twice.
And in the end, we can’t even figure out which way the thing is flowing. Confused old man. Quiet now. Sitting all day in the window. The fragments of what he knew. The fragments of a whole world: first the antithesis, then the synthesis, together they give rise to the thesis. Voilà. The flotsam of German idealism on 107th and Amsterdam. Sad sad sad.
Unless.
Unless, of course, he was…joking.
Hmm. Review. Orthodox Marxist analysis? First the thesis (feudalism), then the antithesis (capitalism), and out of that ineluctable dialectic, the synthesis (communism). Raphael’s version? First the antithesis (capitalism), then the synthesis (communism), out of which conflict is produced, finally, the thesis (feudalism).
And at this point I actually stop dead on the sidewalk. Capitalism, confronting communism, out of which emerges feudalism. But this is the twentieth century history of Latin America! This is dialectical materialism in the Caribbean! Colonial capitalism, confronted by Marxist insurgency, implodes, leaving primitive strongmen atop agrarian serfs. Modernization theory plus collectivization yields Assyrian despotism! Raphael wasn’t confused, he was offering me, offhand, an analysis of the structural inversions of Cold War geopolitics.
And with that, I am back to the Hayden White: Hegel. A comic emplotment. Indeed. My Monday seminar is falling into place. I slip into a café, and send myself this piece as an email. So I won’t forget.D. Graham Burnett
By D. Graham Burnett. It’s a Saturday at the start of term, and I spend most of the day in bed, reading Hayden White’s once-scandalous Metahistory for my graduate seminar on historical methods.
The Worst Business in the Worldtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.18032011-10-20T18:21:16Z2011-10-20T18:15:41ZBen Tarnoff
By Ben Tarnoff. Imagine an industry where seventy percent of your products lose money. You knit ten different types of wool socks. Seven don’t sell enough to cover the cost of the
The Complete Syllabus: "The Future"tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.18012011-10-17T17:50:27Z2011-10-17T15:44:30ZThe Medieval World: 480-1400
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
The Qur’an
The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson
“The Intemperance of Human Life” Yamanoue Okura
Scivias by Hildegard of Bingen
The Renaissance: 1400-1600
Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
The 18th Century
The Life of Johnson by James Boswell
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
“The Telegraph” by Charles Dibdin
“Freedom is Lost” by Jean-Paul Marat
The Letters of Benjamin Franklin
“To the Fates” by Friedrich Hölderin
The 19th Century
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Future of the American Negro by Booker T. Washington
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The Letters of Ada Lovelace
“A Page from a California Almanac” by Mark Twain
On the History of Religion and Philosophy
in Germany by Heinrich Heine
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Anti-Dühring by Friedrich Engels
Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne
Theory of the Four Movements by Charles Fourier
“The New Utopia” by Jerome K. Jerome
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent by Washington Irving
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
“The Great Nation of Futurity” by John L. O’Sullivan
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay
Human, All too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche
Protests from the Study of Jiaobin by Feng Guifen
The 20th Century
“Waiting for the Barbarians” by C.P. Cavafy
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“The Second Coming” W.B. Yeats
1984 by George Orwell
Hind Swaraj by Mohandas K. Gandhi
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
Children of Men by P.D. James
“I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King Jr.
“On Completing the Circle” by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
All the Devils are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
Social Theory and Social Structure by Robert K. Merton
“Cramming More Components
onto Integrated Circuits” by Gordon E. Moore
Women of the Future by Meta Stern Lilienthal
Good Will Hunting by Ben Affleck & Matt Damon
“The Lottery” by Jorge Luis Borges
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
“Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine” by Filippo Marinetti
A speech by Winston Churchill
The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Myth of the Machine by Lewis Mumford
The Once and Future King by T.H. White
“As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden
The 21st Century
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
The Editors
By The Editors. Following a tradition that started with this Summer's "Food" issue, we've assembled all the fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays that produced this Fall's readings. We encourage you to read
An Artist In The Northtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.18022011-10-14T15:41:45Z2011-10-14T18:55:00Z“Tomas,” she said gingerly, “if I may attempt to say something for you…I imagine what you feel is a combination of joy and…terror, is that right?”
“Neeeej,” he said.
“No? It feels rather safe then, does it? You feel safe.”
“Jaaa,” said Tranströmer.
“Good,” said Monica, beaming, and the talk turned to what they would eat for their celebration dinner—a quintessentially Swedish concern.
“Fish,” said Monica, her eyes sparkling. “That much we know.”
A “deep metaphor” poet, one of the first Swedish modernists, yet schooled in the verses of Catullus and Horace, Tranströmer, has never allowed his work to be weighed down by politics, popular sentiments, or “style.” His poetic space owes more to natural science than to literature—a contemplative objectivity of both self and world; a lens fixed between the interior and the exterior, which he classifies as The Truth Barrier, the title of a collection which includes some of his most famous work.
In a poem called “Preludes,” from the collection Seeing In The Dark, as in so many of Tranströmer’s poems, the theme is not “truth” but the elusive processes involved in grasping it, especially if we only look outward at the world, and not inward at the same time:
Two truths draw nearer each other. One moves from inside, one moves from outside
and where they meet we have a chance to see ourselves.
He who notices what is happening cries despairingly: “Stop!
Whatever you like, if only I avoid knowing myself.”
If this all sounds wooly and vague, it is anything but. In the information age, Tomas Tranströmer’s adherence to the core idea that reality can never be trapped, caught, or fixed, seems increasingly urgent.
In “Baltics,” he notes jellyfish losing their form when out of water, “…as when an indescribable truth is lifted out of silence and formulated to an inert mass, but they are untranslatable, they must stay in their own element.”
It is a rare reversal of the intellectual tradition of knowingness, and no small wonder Tranströmer, who spent his career as a psychologist for delinquent youth, side-stepped the literary world deftly all through his career, always working a normal job to support his family.
In his 1993 autobiographical prose essay “Minnena Ser Mig” (“The Memories See Me,”) he charmingly dismantles all notions that he raised himself up as a poet. A single child, he was a devoted bug collector, amateur zoologist, and visitor of natural history museums. “The scientific method I was closest to was the Linnean: discover, collect, examine.”
“I was out on endless expeditions,” he writes. “I moved in the great mystery. I learnt that the ground was alive, that there was an infinite world of creeping and flying things living their own rich life without paying the least regard to us.”
One of his strongest memories is of being shamed by a stern librarian for trying to borrow—at too young an age—a book called The Animals of Scandinavia: A History Of Their Migration. (“Out of the question. I blushed. I was furious. I would never forgive her!”) Another time a respected but feared teacher arrived in class with a big mushroom—a Russula aerugina—and set it on his desk. Tranströmer reports it was “both liberating and shocking to have caught a glimpse of his private life. We knew now that Målle gathered mushrooms!” This is about as self-revealing Swedes as of Tranströmer’s generation tend to get.
But the telling line for those seeking clues to Tranströmer’s literary flight path comes in a single deft blow in his autobiography: “Once given the free run of the library I devoted my attention mostly to non-fiction. I left literature to its fate.”
Over the decades, Tranströmer has risen and risen not only for what he puts into his poetry but for what he has so steadfastly kept out: recrimination, political fire, self-pity of any kind. He is probably the most mild and forgiving writer who has ever received the prize. It is as if he has done away with the very wound that has seemed to fester at the heart of the literary world, forever. “There is one who is good. There is one who can see all without hating,” he writes in one poem, presumably a reference to a Christ, unmentionable in secular Sweden, but perhaps just as applicable to Tranströmer’s own role of as an innocent in the tortured, envy-driven world of literature.
In Tranströmer there is no fear of the borders between reality, dream, waking-dream, life, or death. It’s all one symphony of sound, melody, metaphor, perception, imagination, or maybe—as I believe—a true portal to other realms.
His persistent yet reassuring alienation is evident in the first line of the first poem, “Prelude,” from his 1954 debut collection, “Waking is a parachute jump from the dream.” With a few exceptions, he avoids the word “I” altogether in his first poems and introduces himself as “the traveler.”
Slightly critical of the pretensions of his debut collection, his later poetry becomes more intimate, warm, generous, and finally so gripping as to virtually transcend whatever it is we believe we mean when we say “poetry.” By the 1970s, he began to transmit something so pure and radiant it seems to dissolve all linguistic self-consciousness—the very skins of poetry.
Everything in poetry that seems to want to separate the poet from the meanings he gleans, or put distance between himself and the reader—everything lofty—is blessedly missing. He is reassuring and uplifting, even about death. In one poem he calls it “the real party,” likening the hue of violet wild flowers to an ecstatic invitation from the underworld. In another, he calmly states, “At long last, when space is black, a plane will come. The passengers will see the cities beneath them glittering like the gold of the Goths.” When asked in an interview if his fear of death, which afflicted him when he was younger, was still with him, he said simply, “No.”
In one often quoted stanza from his poem “Leaflet,” included in his 1989 collection For the Living and the Dead, he actually uses an exclamation mark to drive home the Tranströmerian view of death, supplanting Ingmar Bergman’s dark vision, which earned Sweden a bad rap for half-a-century:
We living nails hammered down in society!
One day we shall loosen from everything.
We shall feel death’s air under our wings
And become milder and wilder than here.
His poetry seems to work directly on the senses, to wake you up to wonder, often by allowing the mechanical world to come alive just as nature does, in mystical symbiosis. In the short poem “Homewards,” from Tranströmer’s stunning 1978 collection The Truth-Barrier, you get the essence of Tranströmer in all its strange, innocent beauty:
A telephone call poured out in the night and glittered over the countryside
and in the suburbs.
Afterwards I slept uneasily in the hotel bed.
I was like the needle in a compass carried through the forest by an orienteer with a thumping heart.
photo: the author, Tranströmer, and friends, outside Tranströmer's summer home, on the island of Runmarö, June 2000.Celia Farber
By Celia Farber. The phone rang in the Stockholm apartment of Tomas and Monica Tranströmer, announcing that after eighteen consecutive years of being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the 80-year-old
The Late Wordtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.17982011-10-07T16:45:58Z2011-10-21T14:59:35ZCurtis White
By Curtis White. When we speak of literature, we should not imagine that we are speaking of some stable and enduring Platonic entity. The history of literature has always been about its
Mr. Wells Reviews a 'Current' Filmtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.17972011-10-04T15:49:27Z2011-10-04T15:50:13ZThe word “Metropolis,” says the advertisement in English, “is in itself symbolic of greatness”—which only shows us how wise it is to consult a dictionary before making assertions about the meaning of words. Probably it was the adapter who made that shot. The German “Neubabelsburg” was better, and could have been rendered “New Babel.” It is a city, we are told, of about one hundred years hence. It is represented as being enormously high, and all the air and happiness are above and the workers live down, down, down below.
Now thirty years ago it may have been excusable to symbolize social relations in this way, but a lot of thinking and some experience intervene. That vertical city of the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable. Even in New York and Chicago, where the pressure on the central sites is exceptionally great, it is only the central office and entertainment region that soars and excavates. And the same centripetal pressure that leads to the utmost exploitation of site values at the centre leads also to the driving out of industrialism and labour from the population center to cheaper areas, and of residential life to more open and airy surroundings. That was all discussed and written about before 1900. Somewhere about 1930 the geniuses of Ufa studios will come up to a book of anticipations which was written as recently as a quarter of a century ago. The British census returns of 1901 proved clearly that city populations were becoming centrifugal, and that every increase in horizontal traffic facilities produced a further distribution. This vertical social stratification is stale old stuff. So far from being a hundred years hence, “Metropolis,” in its forms and shapes, is already, as a possibility, a third of a century out of date.
But in its form is the least part of its staleness. This great city is supposed to be evoked by a single dominating personality. The English version calls him John Masterman, so that there may be no mistake about his quality. Very unwisely he has called his son Eric instead of sticking to good hard John, and so relaxed the strain. He works with an inventor, one Rotwang, and they make machines. There are a certain number of other rich people, and the sons of the rich are seen disporting themselves, with underclad ladies in a sort of joy conservatory rather like the Winter garden of an enterprising 1890 hotel during an orgy. The rest of the population is in a state of abject slavery, working in “shifts” of ten hours in some mysteriously divided twenty-four hours and with no money to spend or property or freedom. The machines make wealth. How is not stated. We are shown rows of motor cars all exactly alike, but the workers cannot own these, and no “sons of the rich” would. Even the middle classes nowadays want a car with personality. Probably Masterman makes these cars in endless series to amuse himself. One is asked to believe that these machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used, and that Masterman grows richer and richer in the process.
This is the essential nonsense of it all. Unless the mass of the population has the spending power there is no possibility of wealth in a mechanical civilization. A vast, penniless, slave population may be necessary for wealth where there are no mass production machines, but it is preposterous with mass production machines. You find such a real proletariat in China still—it existed in the great cities of the ancient world—but you do not find it in America, which has gone furthest in the direction of mechanical industry, and there is no grain of reason for supposing it will exist in the future. Masterman's watchword is efficiency, and you are given to understand it is a very dreadful word, and the contrivers of this idiotic spectacle are so hopelessly ignorant of all the work that has been done upon industrial efficiency that they represent him as working his machine-minders to the point of exhaustion, so that they faint and machines explode and people are scalded to death. You get machine-minders in torment turning levers in response to signals. Work that could be done far more effectively by automata. Much stress is laid on the fact that the workers are spiritless, hopeless drudges, working reluctantly and mechanically. But mechanical civilization has no use for mere drudges. The more efficient its machinery the less need there is for the quasi-mechanical minder. It is the inefficient factory that needs slaves, the ill-organized mine that kills men. The hopeless drudge stage of human labor lies behind us. With a sort of malignant stupidity this film contradicts these facts.
Rotwang, the inventor, is making a Robot, apparently without any license from Capek, the original patentee. It is to look and work like a human being, but it is to have no “soul,” it is to be a substitute for drudge labor. Masterman very properly suggests that it should never have a soul, and for the life of me I cannot see why it should. The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and the drudge soul. But this is evidently regarded as very dreadful and impressive by the producers, who are all on the side of soul and love and such like. I am surprised they were not pinched for souls in the alarm clocks and runabouts. Masterman, still unwilling to leave bad alone, persuades Rotwang to make this Robot in the likeness of Mary, so that it may raise an insurrection among the workers to destroy the machines by which they live and so learn that it is necessary to work. Rather intricate that, but Masterman, you understand, is a rare devil of a man. Full of pride and efficiency and modernity and all those horrid things.
Then comes the crowning imbecility of the film—the conversion of the Robot into the likeness of Mary. Rotwang, you must understand, occupies a small old house embedded in the modern city richly adorned with pentagrams and other reminders of the antiquated German romances, out of which its owner has been taken. A faint smell of Mephistopheles is perceptible for a time. So even at Ufa, Germany can still be dear, old, magic-loving Germany. Perhaps the Germans will never get right away from the brocken. Walpurgis Night is the name day of the German poetic imagination, and the national fantasy capers securely forever with a broomstick between its legs. By some no doubt abominable means Rotwang has squeezed a vast and well-equipped modern laboratory into this little house. It is ever so much higher than the house, but no doubt he has fallen back on Einstein and other modern bewilderment. Mary has to be trapped, put into a machine like a translucent cocktail shaker and undergo all sorts of pyrotechnic treatment in order that her likeness may be transferred to the Robot. The possibility of Rotwang just simply making a Robot like her evidently never entered the gifted producer's head.
The Robot is enveloped in wavering haloes. The premises seem to be struck by lightning repeatedly, the contents of a number of flasks and carboys are violently agitated, there are minor explosions and discharges. Rotwang conducts the operations with a manifest lack of assurance, and finally, to his evident relief the likeness is taken and things calm down. The false Mary then winks darkly at the audience and sails off to raise the workers. And so forth and so on. There is some rather good swishing about in water after the best film traditions, some violent and unconvincing machine breaking and rioting and wreckage, and then rather confusedly one gathers that Masterman has learned his lesson and that the workers and employers are now to be reconciled by “love.”
Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; never for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature amid these mindless, imitative absurdities. The film's air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence. It has nothing to do with any social or moral issue before the world, or with any that can even conceivably arise. It is bunkum and poor and thin even as bunkum. I am astonished at the toleration shown it by “a number of film critics on both sides of the Atlantic,” and it cost, says the London Times, 6,000,000 marks. How they spent all that upon it I cannot imagine. Most of the effects could have been got with models at no great expense.
The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent, sentimentalizing, and make-believe film, wastes some very fine possibilities. My belief in German enterprise has had a shock. I am dismayed by the intellectual laziness it betrays. I thought Germany, even at its worst, could toil. I thought they had resolved to be industriously modern. It is profoundly interesting to speculate on the present trend of mechanical invention and of the real reactions of invention upon labor conditions. Instead of plagiarizing from a book thirty years old and resuscitating the banal moralizing of the early Victorian period, it would have been almost as easy, no more costly and far more interesting to have taken some pains to gather opinions of a few bright young research students and ambitious modernizing architects and engineers about the trend of modern invention and develop these artistically. Any technical school would have been delighted to supply sketches and suggestions for the aviation and transport of 2027 A.D. There are now masses of literature upon the organization of labor for efficiency that could have been boiled down at a very small cost. The question of the development of industrial control, the relation of industrial to political direction, the way all that is going, is of the liveliest current interest. Apparently the Ufa people did not know of these things and did not want to know about them; they were too dense to see how these things could have been brought into touch with the life of today and made interesting to the man in the street. After the worst traditions of the cinema world, monstrously self-satisfied and self-sufficient, convinced of the power of loud advertisement to put things over with the public, and with no fear of searching criticism in their minds, no consciousness of thought and knowledge beyond their ken, they set to work in their huge studio to produce furlong after furlong of this ignorant, old-fashioned balderdash and ruin the market for any better film along these lines.
Six million marks! The waste of it! The theatre when I visited it was crowded. All but the highest-priced seats were full, and the gaps in places filled up reluctantly but completely before the great film was begun. I suppose every one had come to see what the city of a hundred years hence would be like. I suppose there are multitudes of people to be “drawn” by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that “Metropolis” was really a possible forecast or not. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other.
The Editors
By The Editors. H.G. Wells spent the better part of his literary career concerning himself with the future, whether he was producing light fantasy or grave social commentary. As a consequence, he appears
Postcolonial Food Fighttag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.17952011-09-27T15:12:03Z2011-09-27T16:23:53ZThe same, scornful, 1860 Spaniard could have authored the comments on a 2010 San Francisco Chronicle article about Filipino restaurants: “There is no way Filipino food is the new Thai...They have disgusting dishes...I’ve smelled the stench that invariably turns out to be some Filipino ‘pood’.”
My grandmother said to me daily, “Eat your pood!” At 92, she made me chicken afritada, and no tomato-based stew was ever so subtle, no potatoes so soft. The memory of her accent made me close my laptop.
Chefs of Filipino cuisine in America do not have the option of ignoring culinary contempt. In San Mateo, chef Tim Luym runs Attic, which prominently features Filipino flavors in its menu. “If we classify ourselves under just Filipino food,” Luym says, “in the Michelin Guide or Zagat, people would just flip the page.”
In San Francisco, Dominic Ainza omits “Filipino” from Mercury Lounge’s description in San Francisco, opting for “Global Asian Cuisine.” “I don't think it's going to take off,” Ainza says. “We’re still missing, in a sense. I always preface that with ‘I hope I'm wrong.’”
In Brooklyn, chef King Phojanakong gestures outside his restaurant Umi Nom. “I think if you stop five people in the street and ask them where the Philippines is, maybe three might tell you where it is, and the other two will say, ‘What's the Philippines?’” he said. “Our food isn't bad! I love this food!”
The highest-profile advocate for Filipino food in America is perhaps Amy Besa, cookbook author and front-of-house master of Purple Yam, also in Brooklyn. She’s weary of discussing the cuisine’s low profile. “The question is no longer relevant, because the food is out there. Bringing that up again is really an insult to all who’ve been working so hard to put it on the landscape.”
My mother is one of 1.7 million migrants whose diaspora made Filipinos the second largest immigrant group in the U.S. today. And yet—at the risk of insulting Besa—the current number of Filipino restaurants in U.S. cities reaches double digits only in Los Angeles.
What, then, is Filipino food?
Precolonial Filipinos grilled, steamed, and preserved fresh seafood and vegetables with citrus fruits and vinegar. Chef Luym’s kinilaw embodies these methods. Pillowy orbs of butterfish are dressed with coconut milk, chopped Thai chilis, and flecks of cilantro. The effect is a colorful, piquant popping on the tongue, subsumed by smooth, melting sensation.
Chinese traders brought woks, noodles, cooking oil, and spring rolls. Ainza tucks pork into egg roll wrappers for Mercury Lounge’s lumpia rolls, their savory, garlicky crunch brightened by cilantro. Post-1521, Spaniards added the stewing methods and Mexican rootcrops that informed my grandmother’s chicken afritada. Americans brought pies, sandwiches, and, after WWII, canned meats and fast food.
In order to gain popularity in the U.S. culinary landscape, Besa says chefs of Filipino food must first establish the cuisine’s defining flavor and entrée. The flavor is pre-colonial: sourness. Filipinos have maintained their indigenous palate over centuries of invaders by using vinegar and lime-like calamansi as daily souring agents for everything from fish to noodles.
The entree is adobo, an ever-adaptable vinegar-based marinade. Every Filipino chef, home or professional, has a version of adobo; Phojanakong’s braises slick strips of pork belly in coconut milk and sugar cane vinegar. The meat dissolves at first bite, flooding the mouth with fatty bliss.
As they work toward mainstream acceptance, chefs of Filipino food are quick to name their most formidable obstacle in America: Filipinos in America.
The first Filipino restaurants in the U.S. were turo-turo; “point point.” Entrees warm in a buffet; customers point to the foods they want; meals rarely rise above ten dollars. Purple Yam uses imported Filipino vinegars. Umi Nom buys seafood daily. Attic uses hand-collected Philippine sea salts. The resulting entrees make harsh skeptics of Filipino immigrants. Filipinos call Purple Yam to scream about its use of coconut milk in adobo; Filipinos complain Phojanakong’s prices are too high. After 1965, most Filipino migrants were white-collar workers with no need to open restaurants for economic gain. Their objections against current Filipino restaurants are so passionate, one might construe them as pre-emptive defenses against another possible colonizer.
“What you’re facing,” Phojanakong says, “is a tough crowd.”
Yet Filipino cuisine is slowly reaching America’s palate, with food trucks run by second-generation Fil-Ams garnering its newest popularity. In California, the instant, guerilla PR of Twitter and Facebook, tantalizing foodhounds with changing locations, helps Adobo Hobo, White Rabbit, and Señor Sisig thrive. Still, chefs of mobile and brick-and-mortar restaurants alike continue to fight old ignorance toward their cuisine. Perhaps, as Besa dreams, Filipino foodmakers in America can establish solidarity with each other with a regular national conference.
Until then, anyone hungry might ignore centuries of haters, find a Filipino restaurant nearby, and try its adobo.
In January 2011, I ate Purple Yam’s adobo. The chicken is a carefully browned piece of organic thigh and drumstick, draped with thick, lustrous broth. I fit a chunk of chicken atop a sauce-soaked dab of rice on my spoon, as I have at home all my life. As I emptied my plate, adjectives fled me. Which word to choose? Velvety? Unctuous? Dazzling?
Amy Besa’s husband and business partner, chef Romy Dorotan, approached my table. The New York Times Magazine had recently featured his adobo in a two-page spread.
“On Monday,” Dorotan told me, his Tagalog accent distinct, “we sold out of adobo.” He grinned. “Can you imagine? Purple Yam sold out of adobo?"Laurel Fantauzzo
By Laurel Fantauzzo. In 1860, a Spaniard in the Philippines described local cuisine in the magazine Ilustracion Filipino. “The condiments, the preparation, and the cooking are horrible,” he concluded. Eat Filipino entrees,
Top Chef, Old Mastertag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.17832011-09-14T16:06:37Z2011-09-15T13:53:08ZMuch like a modern struggling artist, Leonardo da Vinci was in his daily life a line cook, tavern keeper, and chef-for-hire. “My painting and my sculpture will stand comparison with that of any other artist,” he wrote in a humble introduction to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, by way of a job application. “I am supreme at telling riddles and tying knots. And I make cakes that are without compare.”
Sforza took him on neither as a cook, painter, or sculptor, but instead as a lute player and after-dinner entertainer. Leonardo attempted to show his lord his new inventions for fortifications, catapults, and ladders, but Sforza paid little attention until the lute-player fashioned his inventions out of marzipan and jelly. Sforza charged the young man with refurbishing his kitchen, a task which would consume the life of Leonardo and the entire Sforza court.
Five hundred years before Modernist Cuisine’s exhaustive look at molecular gastronomy, The Kitchen Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci envisioned a culinary world as studio and laboratory, where food was to be prepared efficiently, beautifully, and ingeniously. Unfortunately, Italian food of the late fifteenth century had less to do with the luxurious feats of Ancient Rome and more to do with the rustic tastes of the Goths, whose dishes included meats and birds for those who could afford it, and an endless parade of porridge and gruel for those who could not. Leonardo was horrified by much of the food that was served to him, both at court and at home, and he included in his notebooks a running list of dishes that he hated, but that his own servant insisted on serving him: jellied goat, hemp bread, white mosquito pudding, inedible turnips, and eel balls—which he notes, “this dish if eaten often can cause madness.”
The notebooks, which include a history of Leonardo’s tenure as chef at the Sforza court, is primarily a collection of recipes (cabbage jam, snail soup), wayward thoughts (“Would porridge balls in gold-leaf attract My Lord’s attention?”), dining etiquette (“On the Unseemly Behaviors at My Lord’s Table”), household tips, (“On Ridding your Kitchens of Pestilential Flies”), and household inventions (“The Machines I Have Yet to Design for my Kitchen”).
For Leonardo, every food was only as good as the machine that created it, the technique was as important as the taste. Leonardo’s work in the Sforza kitchen strove for efficiency, but often the result of all this time-saving was sheer insanity, reported the humanist courtier Sabba da Castiglione:
Master Leonardo da Vinci’s kitchen is a bedlam...At one end of the premise, a great waterwheel, driven by a raging waterfall over it, spewed and spattered forth its waters over all who passed beneath and made the floor a lake. Giant bellows, each twelve feet long, were suspended from the ceilings, hissing and roaring with intent to clear the fire smoke, but all they did accomplish was to fan the flames to the detriment of all who needed to negotiate by the fires—so fierce the wandering flames that a constant stream of men with buckets was employed in trying to quell them, even though other waters spouted forth on all from every corner of the ceilings.
Every kitchen task could be mechanized—crushing garlic, pulling spaghetti, plucking ducks, cutting a pig into cubes—but the machines Leonardo imagined were sometimes far more elaborate than the task required. His invention for a giant whisk twice the size of a man involved an operator from within who was constantly in danger of being wisked into the sauce. (See below) Another model involved a team of three horses engaged in the task of crushing a nut.
The problem with these inventions was not that they could potentially kill anyone who used them, but instead that Leonardo was constantly frustrated with powering them. “But how shall I work them? By wind or by water? By cogs and by cranks? By oxen or by peasant-power?” One machine was intended to be operated by bees.
Leonardo was also a master of dining etiquette, possibly inventing the first napkin (and the first twenty-foot rotating napkin dryer) after Sforza insisted on “tethering beribboned rabbits to the chairs of his table guests, that they may wipe their grease-ridden hands on the beast’s backs.” Leonardo had strong opinions on the manners of the court, chiding the courtiers for bad behavior:
He should not place his head upon his plate to eat.
Neither should he sit beneath the table for any length of time.
He should not place unpleasing or half-chewed pieces of his own food upon his neighbor’s plate without first asking him.
He should not wipe his knife upon his neighbor’s clothing.
Nor use his knife to carve upon the table...
He should not set loose birds upon the table.
Not snakes nor beetles...
And if he is to vomit then he leaves the table.
Likewise if he is to urinate.
Leonardo’s notebooks also humorously reveal the hidden violence of the Sforza court. He included instructions for hiring a new taster after Sforza’s dies from a poisoning (“the old taster has done his job too well”). What Leonardo didn’t know at the time was that Sforza had his man killed in order to install an actual poisoner, hired to slowly kill his elder brother and assume the Dukedom. Death was a common pastime at the dinner table, and Leonardo included methods for removing blood from a table-cloth after a carving accident or assassination (“vigorous rubbing of warm sprout water”) without, of course, bothering the guests The possibility of an actual assassination was a real concern at the Sforza court, and Leonardo explained that there should be a refined protocol to the affair:
If there is an assassination planned for the meal, then it is seemliest that the assassin should be seated next to he who is to become the subject of his craft...as this will cause less interruption to the conversation if the action of the event is confined to one small area...After the corpse (and bloodstains if any) are removed by the serving persons, it is customary for the assassin also to withdraw from the table as this presence may sometimes be disturbing to the digestions of the persons who now find themselves seated next to him, and to this end a good host will always have a fresh guest, who has waited without, ready to join the table at this juncture.Michelle Legro
By Michelle Legro. They called him “fat boy,” this seventeen-year old apprentice in the studio of Florentine painter Verrocchio who would receive care packages from his step-father, a pastry chef. The bastard
The Devil’s Drinktag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.17822011-09-14T15:00:56Z2011-09-14T15:05:01ZMatters came to head in the year 1511 when the local governor of Mecca learned that satirical verses about him were sung in coffee houses. He publicly charged coffee with the crime of spreading immorality and literally put the beverage on trial. A full vessel was placed before a council of religious sages, who then decreed that the sale and consumption of coffee should be prohibited. Shops were then forcibly closed and coffee merchants flogged.
Within a year, higher authorities in Cairo had overturned the ruling and the governor was replaced. Yet the debacle began anew in Ottoman-controlled Istanbul, where in the 1580’s the Grand Vizier outlawed coffee. This time offenders were given bastinado—the charming punishment of having one’s soles beaten raw with sticks—while repeat offenders were sewn into sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus. Again higher powers intervened: the Sultan decreed its consumption acceptable and the Grand Vizier was replaced.
Why should long debates and harsh punishments occur over such a little vice in the first place? The religious argument bore little weight in the end—intoxication as defined by the prophet renders man “absent-minded and confused,” unable to distinguish “man from a woman, or earth from the heavens,” something for which even the most vehement coffee detractors cannot claim the drink culpable of. Even Pope Clement VIII, when told that coffee was “the devil’s drink,” proclaimed: “we shall cheat Satan by baptizing it”—thus inventing a particularly weak Americano.
Coffee’s crime then was not so much the consumption of it, but the manner of its consumption—the coffee houses where men would gather and gossip, often about politics. The Enlightenment was not the only revolution to have been born out of coffee shops, and rulers were wise to try clamp down on them—so were wives concerned about their husbands misconduct, as evidenced by an English society formed in 1674 called “Women Against Coffee,” which organized petitions to ban the drink in the attempt to get their errant husbands to come back home.
Perhaps the strangest attempt to ban coffee came in Berlin in 1777. Fredrick the Great had no taste for the drink of merchants and worried what its effect might be on the army. “The King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended on to endure hardship or beat his enemies.” He’d rather the troops drank the more manly, Germanic alternative: beer, which had clearly won more wars than any espresso had.
Given that 2.25 billion cups of the stuff is consumed per day—making the coffee the second most valuable commodity in the world—one would think the days of attempting to ban coffee are at an end. Not so, as evidenced by a 2010 bill introduced into the California state senate that would ban the mixing of coffee and beer—a bill so ludicrous, not in least because such a mixture sounds revolting, but also because coffee liqueurs such as Kahlua would still be perfectly legal, and so needless to say the measure went the way every other attempt did, it failed 4-10. The pernicious beverage is here to stay.
For more dark brews from LQ, explore Balzac’s obsession with, and untimely death from, an excessive amount of coffee, as well as our own Food Chains map, which charts the journey of coffee, pepper, and tomatoes across the globe and through time.
Luke Fentress
By Luke Fentress. Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical. —Jonathan Swift The origin myth of coffee begins with a Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who observed his goats “dancing” after they
Curry, Favoredtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.17812011-09-01T19:18:27Z2011-09-13T19:52:40ZAnd yet what is “authentic” food? Surely that curry soup was authentic to its place, a product of a particular, local history. Cuisine is a local affair, mostly. And it evolves within places. It isn’t about origins. Chili peppers may have originated in south America, but that does not mean that their use in Asian cuisines, or indeed in southern Italy, is inauthentic. Cook a dish in the same way for a few generations, and it will become “authentic.”
Italian cooking is a case in point. Most of what we know today as “Italian” is peasant cooking, specific to region, town, parish. Italians tend to be cooks rather than chefs—they repeat household recipes rather than invent new ones. But there was a time, before the late nineteenth century, when upper-class Italian cooking depended on French traditions, on elaborate condiments and the extensive use of spices. Italians have forgotten about spices now. But they cling on to what they believe to be their traditions, however recent these traditions may happen to be. And it is fair to say that experiments and combinations are not the forte of countries whose culinary traditions are rich, the beneficiaries of a long social and agricultural history. (This history is multiple, however. As with language, national cuisines are replete with borrowings from invaders.)
The variety of produce in Italy explains to some extent the regionalism of its cuisine: authenticity there means truth to regional tradition. The Bolognese do not make their tortellini in the same way as the Ferrarese. And the differences are reinforced insofar as Italians are adamant about rules, rigid about what is “not done” for no reason external to the rule. Some rules apply everywhere: throughout the peninsula you will be reprimanded for eating pasta after soup, for instance, since pasta is traditionally a minestra, a sort of soup really. This is because, once upon a time, pasta was eaten scotta, over-cooked and soupy, in a way that would seem shocking and “not done” today.
So what looks absolutely authentic is in fact a mirage of stability. It is at once the node of what seems eternally unchanging, and the locus of change. With food, history always proves the authenticity buff wrong in myriad ways, and shows up the inflexible cook as an impoverished one. One should never forget that dishes are the outcome of historical accretion and accident, that they constantly evolve.
Authenticity itself has a way of changing its colors. I have thought a lot about this because I grew up in France, but ate a hybrid sort of cuisine then, since my mother was born into middle-eastern foods but grew up in New York. I had no idea which national tradition to start with. I was no steak frites girl, but nor could I only live on labneh and za’atar, or tomato, olive oil and oregano on bread.
I started cooking in my late teens while living in England, at a time when “fusion” cuisine was fashionable there (and not yet called “confusion” by restaurant reviewers), even though the local fare, the average “pub grub” still consisted of a baked potato with cottage cheese. This was before the advent in pubs of the “Thai” green curry equivalent of curry powder, and before the rather more welcome gastropub became all the rage, as it has over the past decade. In the early 1990s I occasionally ate at curry houses, becoming convinced that “Indian” food was monolithic, monochrome, heavy, greasy, and indigestible, confusing a rich, multihued and hugely varied cuisine with bad northern fare, industrial chicken bathed in luridly colored, pre-packaged kormas or vindaloos.
Then, times changed, and the economy, and restaurants, and perceptions. I also began to frequent Italians, and quickly learned how to cook like them, learning tricks from everyone—eventually marrying a Roman-bred man. I learned about what was done, and not done. I also learned about proper, indeed authentically Indian (as opposed to authentically British) food, as good restaurants began multiplying in London, and in New York, offering regional dishes cooked by proper chefs for the sake of fine palates rather than for the beer-swilling pot-bellied of yore.
By the start of the twenty-first century, the search in the Anglo-Saxon world for the original dish, the ingredient local to an exotic place, the re-invention of local cuisines for the sake of rootless sophisticates was on—in good part because local traditions were comparatively poor, and unsatisfactory. By contrast, the Italians and the French did not care for re-invention particularly, and still don’t. (One could probably say the same for those born into any of the world’s great cuisines, in which I would include, from West to East, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, India, China, Thailand, Japan).
But they care about rules. They may find it odd to see those international gourmets eat pasta with a spoon, and drink cappuccinos after lunch—an Italian no-no; or cut their lettuce leaves and eat their steak well done—a French no-no. I did get upset when an Italian, herself an excellent cook (of Italian food), was unable to use chopsticks in a Japanese restaurant and began, horror of horrors, cutting sushi with a knife—a clear case of double standard on the part of those who will not tolerate a stranger wielding a spoon with their spaghetti.
Perhaps authentic cuisine requires its eaters to be able to claim as theirs what they were not born into, not merely to be gastronomic tourists. Yet those who have no serious tradition of their own have no choice but to fall back on what other culinary cultures give them. Here lies the paradox of authenticity: it is taken for granted by those born within old culinary traditions, but pursued precisely by those for whom the “local” is reduced to the farmer’s market, and who live in metropolises where foods from all over the world are available day and night.
I thrive within this paradoxical state of affairs. But there is such a thing as a cook who knows too much. The creator of the curry soup was not one of those; and I cherish her memory.Noga Arikha
By Noga Arikha. A curry soup was sometimes served in an old friend’s manor in Northamptonshire, England. It was the cook’s special. I loved it. A thick, aromatic combination of chicken broth
The Milkman Comethtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.16792011-08-24T18:55:22Z2011-08-31T19:33:55ZAccording to James Waterman Wise, whose father knew Straus well, Straus possessed “an individuality which is elemental, almost primitive, in its loves and hates; capable of antipathies as bitter as its sympathies are profound; an individuality impetuous, rugged, imperious.” As mandatory pasteurization began to spread nationwide, Straus became, in the words of Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History, “pasteurization’s most ardent supporter”—a philanthropist so prominent that the Democratic Party once nominated him for mayor of New York. He argued, lectured, and cajoled incessantly, building pasteurization plants in Cuba, Germany, Palestine, the Philippines, and beyond. And he did it all at great cost to himself: his milk depots were money-losing ventures.
To many of his fans, Straus was as flawless as his dairy—“a man,” as one admirer put it, “whose heart is bubbling over with the sterilized milk of human kindness.” Arthur Brisbane, the eminent newspaper columnist of Straus’s era, compared Straus to other men who had “really done something,” such as Galileo, Edison, and Pasteur himself.
The reality, however, is more complicated. Straus was neither a Galileo, nor an Edison, nor a Pasteur. He was guided by a businessman’s intuition, not by science, and his philanthropy embodied the triumph of capitalist efficiency over scientific deliberation—a narrative that would define America’s march toward pasteurization as a whole.
No matter what Brisbane or other devotees might have said, Straus's success stemmed from a heart that was far from sterile. In a 1993 edition of New York History, the quarterly journal of the New York State Historical Association, the historian Julie Miller wrote that Straus, “Like today’s AIDS activists…turned his rage on governments that did not adequately do their jobs.”
Straus had a “rather know-nothing attitude towards science—the very discipline whose advances made his own work possible.” Although Straus argued that “no competent authority has ever disputed the fact that pasteurization kills the germs of disease, while it in no way impairs the nutritive value or the digestibility of the milk,” there was in fact much division over whether or not pasteurization was necessary. Many doctors were in favor of raw, “certified” milk, which was inspected by medical commissions to ensure its cleanliness, and debates about pasteurization’s impact on nutritive value and digestibility proliferated. (Infants fed pasteurized milk were thought to be more susceptible to scurvy, for example.)
Straus considered scientific proof of the effectiveness of his work unnecessary: “It is sufficient,” he once wrote, “for me to point out that wherever I have been able to supply the babies with pasteurized milk in place of raw milk, excessive death rates have been cut to less than half what they were.” Pasteurization was “practical,” its fruits known from “practical experience.” “As a businessman,” Straus told New York City’s board of aldermen in 1907, “I want to get down to the practical at once.”
Health professionals often believed certified milk to be as safe as pasteurized—or even safer. But certification was costly, relying on large teams of milk inspectors. Since widespread distribution was impossible, a certified-milk standard, in Straus’s view, was merely “theoretical.”
The milk depots eventually vanished, made obsolete as industrial pasteurization and milk-industry consolidation laid the groundwork for modern distribution. Still, Straus’s fierce advocacy had mattered: in 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt, who knew Straus from his years in New York politics, organized the first major federal inquiry into impure milk, which stated that “no discussion of the subject is complete without recognition of the debt the world owes to Mr. Nathan Straus.” And even as Straus’s depots were on the way out, the milk world was filled with his capitalist spirit.
In Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink, Erna DuPuis describes 1910’s New York Milk Committee Conference on Milk Problems, which set out to reach a scientific consensus about how to handle the city’s dairy products. “In many ways,” DuPuis writes, “this particular conference represented a culmination of seventy years of discussion about milk.” The participants, “public experts hired to present scientific information,” were actually unusually opposed to pasteurization, and most of the officials considered certified milk superior. The critical question, however, was whether New York would expand its milk inspection force to safeguard the milk supply the same way private inspectors monitored certified milk, or whether it would embrace mandatory pasteurization.
The answer did not hinge on science so much as business. “Private companies, particularly larger companies, through their capital investment in pasteurizing technology, would enable the state to supply the guarantee of milk safety without imposing further public costs.” Within a year, New York would pass its mandatory pasteurization law.
Several of the health experts who came to this businesslike conclusion had also attended a 1906 conference at which Nathan Straus had made a prediction: the solution to the milk problem would be “not scientific but practical.” And that is exactly what their decision was. It was a validation of the belief, as Straus once put it, that inspection was “an ideal dream”—that “we are practical men, you and I, and we must meet conditions as they exist, not as we would wish them to be.”
Daniel Fromson
By Daniel Fromson. It’s quite possible that America’s modern fear of unpasteurized dairy products would not exist if it weren’t for a long, narrow building that was opened on June 1, 1893 at
What Does it Taste Like?tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15932011-08-18T15:33:15Z2011-08-18T15:33:39ZSome gifted writers have alighted on the topic. Montaigne fantasized in high style about the Tupinamba of Brazil who made jolly feasts out of their enemies conquered in war; Melville wondered whether the peaceful communistic Typee valley people of Polynesia, among whom he had dwelt, could, as was claimed at the time, be cannibals, deciding that there was no evidence for the accusation, and that these good folk had been traduced by colonialist prejudice; and the Brothers Grimm had their wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel lay in wait for stray children in the forest, and when one fell into her hungry clutches she killed it, cooked it, and ate it. None of these writers, however, indulge us with so much as a hint as to the gustatory delights or otherwise of human flesh, because unsurprisingly none of them had a clue.
So what does it taste like? “Like good veal” wrote journalist William Seabrook in 1931. A New York Times correspondent heavily under the influence of the English occultist and black magician Aleister “The Great Beast” Crowley, Seabrook obtained what he vaguely described as a “hunk of human flesh” stolen from the local morgue by a medical student friend of his from the body of a young man killed in a Paris auto accident. Like any reporter willing to break with convention for a good story, the intrepid American took it home, roasted it, and washed it down with Medoc. “It was mild, good meat” he declared.
It somehow seems quite natural that it was once again in Paris, the self-proclaimed capital of gastronomy, the city where Marie-Antonin Carême, the “King of Cooking,” and Auguste Escoffier, his acolyte, once ruled, that another feast of human flesh led to the most detailed account of people eating on record.
It had been half a century since Seabrook’s stunt. In the summer of 1981, a thirty-two-year-old Japanese man named Issei Sagawa, a literature major studying in Paris for his doctorate, tucked into a meal consisting of body parts cut from the corpse of a female Dutch exchange student, a colleague of his at the Sorbonne whom he had murdered in his apartment the day before. “Human meat is extremely tasty,” he told Vice magazine in 2009. The interview must rank as a first in the sordid annals of gutter journalism. Never before had a cannibal talked. And he, ever the lit major, talked up a highly articulate storm: “George Battaille believed that the kiss is beginning of cannibalism—and I agree.”
He was not bashful, Mr. Sagawa. What does it taste like? “It’s widely believed that human meat doesn’t taste good” he carefully explained. “In fact it’s the tastiest of all meats…Odorless, without a hint of gameyness”
And which is the choicest cut? he was asked. “The neck”, he said with a gleam.
How was such an interview with a true life Hannibal Lecter allowed? After he was spotted trying to dump his victim’s remains in a lake in the Bois de Boulogne following his feast, Sagawa was arrested. Upon examination by psychologists he was declared insane and unfit to stand trial. The French authorities incarcerated him in an institution for the criminally insane, but his rich father hired the best attorneys money could buy and got him released. Sagawa was returned to Tokyo where the authorities tried to prosecute him for murder. The French, however, by refusing to hand over vital evidence to a foreign jurisdiction, forced the hand of the Japanese judiciary. In 1986 all charges had to be dropped and, from that day to this Issei Sagawa has been a free man.
How does he explain himself? Quite matter-of-factly. Weak and small from the moment he was born, he became obsessed as a teenager with beautiful, tall women like Grace Kelly who were physically his opposite. “I was short and ugly and sought out women like that. Eventually I began feeling a strong desire to bite into them…My cannibalistic urge is a sort of sexual appetite.”
According to the interview, after the murder Sagawa was still not cured of his addiction. “I think about wanting to eat someone again before I die,” he told Vice. This time I’d like to eat a Japanese woman. As far as preparing the meat, I think sukiyaki or shabu shabu [Japanese hot pots] may be the way to go.” As a “celebrity cannibal,” he has become a gourmet-about-town in Tokyo, the city with the most three-star establishments in the world, writing restaurant reviews for the Japanese magazine Spa.
Interview with Issei Sagawa from Vice TV:
Peter Foges
By Peter Foges.
The Mastery of Fishtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15882011-08-11T16:00:23Z2011-08-12T17:21:25ZFish farming is, however, growing at a fast clip. Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic organisms, is the fastest growing form of food production in the world, increasing at three times the rate of world meat production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In the early 1950s, fish and shellfish farming yielded less than 1 million metric tons per year. In 2008, it had increased to 52.5 million metric tons, worth $98.4 billion, according to the FAO. In 2009, aquaculture for the first time provided 50% of all the seafood consumed on the planet, according to a study published in the Natural Proceedings of Science. It’s a major transition for the use of our oceans, from hunting and gathering our seafood—commercial fishermen are the last great hunter-gatherers on the planet—to farming it.
It’s impossible to tell exactly when humans first started farming fish. While archaeological evidence shows fish and shellfish were parts of the diets of early man, it has a harder time proving whether that seafood was wild-caught or farm-raised. Colin Nash, author of The History of Aquaculture, writes that “a Neanderthal man stepping into a twenty-first century kitchen at dinner time would easily recognize the aroma of grilled fish, broiled mussels and oysters, or smoked eel, as an inviting meal was prepared.”
The earliest historical record of fish farming comes from China in the form of a treatise on how to raise carp in ponds written by Fan Li in 475 BC. (Carp, though no longer as popular as a food fish, played a big role in the early history of aquaculture because of its hardiness and versatility. The rustic fish does still play a big role in modern day aquariums—goldfish and koi are smaller, ornamental varieties of the carp family.)
One of our best primary sources on Roman agriculture, Columella, who lived during the first century in what is today Spain, dedicates half a dozen pages of his tome, De Re Rustica, to farming what he refers to at various times as “aquatile cattle” or “scaly flocks.”
Columella suggests in his chapter titled “Of Fish-ponds, and of Feeding of Fishes,” that a major driver of Roman aquaculture was so the upper classes—“that ancient, rustic progeny of Romulus and Numa,” the first and second kings of Rome, respectively—could maintain a high standard of living when they left the city to spend time at their country villas. They “thought it a great matter, that, if rural life were compared with a city life, it did not labour under the want of, or come short in, any part of riches or wealth whatsoever. Wherefore, they not only stored the fish-ponds, which they themselves had built with great numbers of fishes, but also filled the lakes, which nature had formed, with spawn, or young fishes, brought from the sea.” (The Romans also were said to have the curious ability to train fish “to live in wine,” according to an article titled “Fish Culture” from a 1862 issue of Harper’s. Perhaps this published falsity proves just how mysterious aquaculture remained even in the late nineteenth century.)
Columella highlights the major difference between the aquaculture practiced in ancient and medieval times and that of modern fish farming: the collection of young fish from the wild to stock holding ponds versus the artificial fertilization of eggs and breeding of fish in hatcheries.
While today’s fish feed is a highly formulated mix of ingredients—from fishmeal and fish oil in the case of carnivorous species, to cereals and vegetable proteins—early suggestions for what fish farmers should feed their “scaly flocks” were not so scientific. Columella mentions feeding fish everything from “green fruit of the apple-kind” and “new cheese or curds out of the milk-pail” to “rotten sardines” and “all the garbage of salted fish, which are swept out of fishmongers [sic] shops.” The Englishman Roger North writes in his treatise, “A Discourse of Fish and Fish-Ponds,” published in 1713, that “Chippings of Bread” and “Tap-droppings of good strong Beer or Ale” are perfect food for carp. North also suggests another, rather morbid, feeding option: “One Way of feeding Fish,” he writes, “is laying a dead Carrion upon Stakes in the Middle of the Water, and it will breed Maggots, which falling into the Water, feed the Fish very considerably.” He does thoughtfully point out that this method is “not fit to be us’d in Waters that you ever look upon.”
The birth of modern aquaculture can be traced to Ludwig Jacobi, a wealthy Hanoverian landowner from what is today Germany, who wrote in 1763 about his artificial fertilization and hatching of trout and salmon. That was followed by a collection of books on the subject from across Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, an amateur naturalist in Ohio named Theodatus Garlick also figured out how to artificially fertilize trout eggs and breed the fish in 1853. The spread of modern aquaculture at this point was driven at least in part by the rise of amateur naturalists who began to notice a problem we still face today: fewer wild fish due to over fishing.
By the late nineteenth century it was “an ascertained fact that we can cultivate our salmon in the same sense as we can grow our own mutton or breed our own turkeys,” according to a June 1863 issue of The Reader.
Today, the aquaculture industry provides an increasing amount of protein-rich food for dinner tables around the world. Since the time of Fan Li and his early experiments with farm-raised carp, China has grown into the largest producer of farmed fish in the world, while the United States has lagged. In 2008, Chinese fish and shellfish farmers produced 32.7 million metric tons of seafood. The United States produced only 500,000 metric tons the same year. In this country, we import 81% of the seafood we consume, nearly seven million tons a year, resulting in a seafood trade deficit in 2008 of $9.4 billion, the country’s third largest behind oil and automobiles.
Perhaps we should take the suggestion of Roger North, who suggested that all the ills of everyday life, or at least the everyday life of landed gentry, will be solved by farming fish:
We were not made perfect, but must live in perpetual Disease; the only Point is, which Way to lessen it; and that must be by Employment, which diverts the Sense of our innate Misery. What can be a greater Torture, than to live chain’d to a Bed, tho’ the best in the World, and have no Company nor Business? Therefore court Business, if you would pass for an Epicurean, and let it be such as brings Comfort to Nature, and not Pain and Torment in the Consequences; that is to say, lawful, profitable, obliging, and temperate. So you avoid offending the Publick, increase your Store, win your Friends and Family, and preserve your Health; all which, I take it, are accomplish’d, in great Measure, by the Mastery of Fish.
Whit Richardson
By Whit Richardson. Weoley Castle near Birmingham isn’t very noteworthy. No memorable lords dwelled there, no legendary battles surged against its walls, no knights rode out from its gates, across its moat,
Our Daily Grubtag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15712011-08-04T14:55:16Z2011-08-04T15:21:19Z In the critical furor was lost Holt’s meticulous and eminently reasonable case. Thrift was certainly a concern, but it wasn’t the only one. Nutrition also bore heavily on the issue, and Holt considered insect flesh as comparing altogether favorably to that of swine or cow. What a bug eats determines its dietetic value. Neither feces-swarming bottle flies nor necrophagous churchyard beetles should ever appear on bills of fare. Instead, insects “clean, palatable, wholesome, and decidedly more particular in their feeding” than those feeding on them should adorn boards and larder shelves.
Holt buttresses his scientific argument with appeals to history, citing the insectivorous precedents set by John the Baptist, who famously subsisted on wild-honey locust schmears, and by Aristotle, who frequently snacked on cicadas “heavy with their burden of eggs.” Yet Holt enlists the past to address present exigency. He published “Why Not Eat Insects?” at a time when a long economic depression had Great Britain in its grip as a consequence of tight monetary policy. Adding to the misery were several crop failures that left the swelling ranks of poverty-stricken Britons with empty stomachs. The prospect of mass starvation prompted scientists, both amateur and professional, to seek answers to that perennial nineteenth-century question, “What is to be done?” They considered every kind of conceivable nutriment from mushrooms to lobsters.
In his own search, Holt looked no further than the creepiest of crawling things. Deliverance from want would arrive on diaphanous wings—and not only for the poor but for all classes. He envisioned an elegant system in which the lower orders were put to work on farms “hand-picking…destructive insects” from crops. The poor could claim these pests as their wages with which they could prepare “toothsome and nourishing…dishes.” A diet of insects was thus no mere culinary preference; it was the basis of a most benignant political economy.
This “Let them eat katydids!” attitude downplays the real iniquities of Holt’s time: the gentleman journeys home to his mutton, and the pauper to his millipedes, a situation that discounts the fact that meals mean much more than sustenance. Seldom have such notions as “calories” or “protein” inspired gatherings, after all. Conviviality and fellow feeling consecrate our feasts, and they depend on dishes evocative of these ideas. Roaches served in place of roasts simply won’t do. For all of its apparent utility, there remains something about Holt’s modest proposal that, well, just kind of bugs you.
A dinner gathering at chez Holt would likely feature the courses listed on a menu that appears at the end of his pamphlet:
Menu
Slug soup.Boiled Cod with Snail Sauce.Wasp Grubs fried in the Comb.Moths sautéed in Butter.
Braized Beef with Caterpillars.New Carrots with Wireworm Sauce.
Gooseberry Cream with Sawflies.Devilled Chafer Grubs.Stag Beetle Larvae on Toast.
Christine Baumgarthuber
By Christine Baumgarthuber. Peppered, salted, sprinkled with finely chopped parsley, fried in butter, and dunked in vinegar, locusts make a dish whose savor is rivaled perhaps only by pan-seared stag beetles fattened on
Floating Hotelstag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15642011-08-01T18:07:10Z2011-08-01T18:07:59Z
According to the New York Times, the diners were not passengers, but 300 guests of the Cunard Line invited to inspect the "new quadruple turbine liner [...] at her pier." Built in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear in the North-East of England, by the Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson Company, work on the Mauretania began in 1903. The ship was launched by the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe, September 20th, 1906, and fitting out completed by 1907. Maury, as the ship came to be known, weighed 32,000 tons, was 790 feet long by 88 feet wide, with room for 2,165 passengers and 800 crew. When launched she was "the largest moving structure ever built". During speed trials security surrounding news of the Mauretania's performance was so tight that carrier pigeons were used to maintain confidentiality.
Twenty eight different woods were used to decorate the ship, and furnishings and tapestries were hand made to the height of Edwardian taste. Harold A. Peto, an architect famous for country house interior design work in Britain was hired to oversee decoration. Scientific American described the Dining Saloon as arranged on two levels and decorated in a style known as Francois Premier, with richly carved woodwork and panelling, a "loftily groined dome [...] the crown of which terminates in a gilded convex disk, round which runs a balustrade sheltering hidden electric lights." Beneath the enormous glass dome, chairs and tables were arranged to give diners a good view of their fellow passengers. After their meal, diners could smoke a cigar in the plush, Walnut pannelled First-Class Smoking Room, or relax in the First-Class Lounge. They could order coffee in the very first covered Verandah Cafe, or take a stroll around the the ship's observation deck, situated under the Pilot House and the first to offer protection from the elements.
The Mauretania made her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York, November 16th, 1907, and was waved off by a crowd of over 50,000 well wishers. The ship was widely anticipated to break the westbound tranatlantic crossing record set by the Lusitania two weeks before and capture what would informally become known as the Blue Riband. Unfortunately rough weather meant that this did not happen - although the title would be captured two years later - but despite this there was still great interest surrounding the ship's arrival in New York. British and American newspapers covered not only the story of the Mauretania's maiden voyage, but also her commissioning, construction, launch, and speed trials.
With the arrival of the Lusitania—or Lucy—and the Mauretania, Cunard not only reclaimed the Blue Riband, but also cornered the market in luxury and opulence in a way that it had hitherto failed to do.
Cunard began life in 1839, as the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, created ostensibly to win a contract to ship the Royal Mail from Great Britain to Canada and the United States. The business came to be known as the Cunard Company, after founder Samuel Cunard, a Nova Scotian shipping entrapaneur. Inspired by the revolutionary work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his "mammoth" steam ship the Great Eastern, Cunard, and his business partners George Burns and David McIver, envisioned a network of Transtlantic shipping lanes along the lines of, and completing links between, railways and roads in Europe and America. He realised that ships powered by steam would not depend upon the wind to get them from A to B, and so could operate on a schedule with the same punctuality as the railroads.
Cunard commissioned the construction of five transatlantic steamers, the first of which was the Britannia. In his book The Cunard Story, historian Howard Johnson describes the Britannia as an inelegant paddle steamer, a "two-decker with one tall orange-red funnel amidships." Launched in 1840, the 207-foot long, 1,145 ton Cunarder made her first voyage July 4th that year, sailing from Liverpool bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia and Boston. On board were 63 passengers (including Cunard and the Bishop of Nova Scotia and his family), 93 crew, Her Majesty's Mail, and one cow: the latter to supply fresh milk. The ship was commanded by one Captain Woodruff, R.N., who barked orders at his crew through a speaking trumpet. When the sea was rough it took as many as four sailors to man the ship's wheel. The steamer completed her journey in 12 days and 12 hours, and would go on to hold the record for the fastest eastbound Atlantic crossing. The same journey by sail could take as much as 35 days.
The image above shows the Britannia in full sail. Sails were seldom used as a method of propulsion, but rather to help stabilize the ship in rough weather. The Royal Navy preferred sail to steam until 1869, and transatlantic steam ships kept their sails until the 1880s: the last Cunard ship to have sails was the Etruria, launched in 1884.
In 1842 Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine were passengers aboard the Britannia. According to the ship's passenger list, they set sail from Liverpool bound for Boston, where the 30 year old author was to begin his first tour of the United States. Dickens wrote about the 18 day voyage in some detail, in the second chapter of American Notes. Seemingly something of a gourmand, he included a description of the food served on ship.
At one, a bell rings, and the stewardess comes down with a steaming dish of baked potatoes, and another of roasted apples; and plates of pig’s face, cold ham, salt beef; or perhaps a smoking mess of rare hot collops [slices of meat]. […] At five, another bell rings, and the stewardess reappears with another dish of potatoes - boiled this time - and store of hot meat of various kinds […] We […] prolong the meal with a rather mouldy desert of apples, grapes, and oranges; and drink our wine and brandy-and-water. The bottles and glasses are still upon the table, and oranges and so forth are rolling about, according to their fancy and the ship's way [...] (26-27)
Conditions aboard early Cunard ships were spartan. The cabins were typically eight by six feet, with two bunks, a hard settee, a commode with two wash basins, two water jugs and two chamber pots. Dicken’s described the saloon, where passenger’s dined, as resembling “a gigantic hearse with […] a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards [warmed] their hands.” (24)
An unnamed passenger travelling from Boston to Liverpool in 1840, wrote to his father that the food was “carried over open decks [and] sometimes cold, […] fresh food for the first three days and thereafter the fish and meat is salted. Britannia has two ice rooms and the fruit is stored there […] During the journey I counted pea soup nine times and the ubiquitous Sea Pie was on the menu everyday.”
Rules on board ship ordered that "state-rooms (cabins) be swept, and carpets taken out and shaken every morning after breakfast. To be washed once a week if the weather is dry. [...] That bedding be turned over as soon as passengers quit their cabins. That slops be emptied and basins cleaned at the same time. Passengers are requested not to open their scuttles [portholes] when there is a chance of their bedding being wetted. [...] The Wine and Spirits Bar will be opened to passengers at 6 a.m., and closed at 11 p.m."
Though the Britannia did have some luxury furnishings, "carpet's and brocades" for instance, these were removed once a voyage began, as the majority of the rooms, corridors and cabins, were soon awash with sea water, and possessions were often soaked. In addition to this passengers suffering from "mal-de-mer" had a habit of "tainting" the finery once the "vessel commenced to roll." Stewards would tend to sea sick passengers, running from cabin to cabin, issuing rations of brandy to the numerous and unfortunate land lubbers. If passengers could stomach it, the bar was open at 6 a.m. and here diners could order steak with a bottle of hock. The Britannia continued to steam back and forth across the Atlantic until she was sold to the North German Navy in 1849, and renamed Barbarossa. She reputedly ended her days rather ignominiously, as a hulk used for target practice, sunk by the Prussian Navy.
What early Cunard ships lacked in luxury, or even comfort, they made up for by being safe and reliable. Cunard steamers were well-built, with experienced and reputable captains and crew, initially hand picked by David McIver, himself a former ship's captain. Dickens, despite not having the most pleasurable of journeys, was, once on dry land, full of praise for the ship's captain, one John Hewitt. He addressed captain Hewitt as a man who would live in the memory, and who had returned his passengers to "the pleasure of those homes and firesides from which they once wandered, and which [...] they might never have regained." Between 1840 and the First World War Cunard lost only three ships. Of those, the Columbia (1841), one of the original five Cunarders, was wrecked off the coast of Seal Island, Halifax, and the Oregon (1883) sank in 1886, with no loss of life (or mail) in either case.
In the 1850s Cunard's main competitors were the Collins Line (or Arctic, Pacific and Baltic Line), founded in 1850 by New Yorker Edward Knight Collins, and the Inman Line, set up in 1850 by William Inman, a shipping company that pioneered transporting emigrants to the New World.
Collins Line ships - notibly the Arctic, Atantic, Pacific and Baltic - were bigger, faster and more luxurious than those of the Cunard fleet, and came with bathrooms, steam-heat, flowered carpets, velvet sofas, and barber shops. The Collins Line was an instant hit, eclipsing the popularity of Cunard, especially as the latter's ships were taken out of service to act as hosptal ships and troop carriers during the Crimean War. The Inman Line introduced two ships, the City of Glasgow and the City of Manchester, both featuring new double iron-screw propulsion, replacing paddles, and freeing up space for more passengers. In 1852 the former was adapted specifically to carry 400 steerage class passengers, the first ship to do so. The Inman Line soon cornered the market in emigrant passengers, and was also a commercial success.
Unfortunately both shipping lines, like many of Cunard's competitors in the mid to late-nineteenth century, were accident-prone. The Collins Line lost the Arctic in 1854, with the loss of 322 lives, including Collins's wife and daughter, and the Pacific, with the loss of 186 lives. The Inman Line was similarly beset with tragedy: between 1854, with the sinking of the City of Glasgow and the loss of 480 lives, a further eight ships were sunk, burnt or wrecked in bad weather. Both companies were heavily hit by these losses and either disappeared or were swallowed up in mergers.
Under pressure from new shipping companies like the White Star Line, Guion, and Norddeutscher Lloyd, Cunard started to focus on offering speed and comfort as well as safety in their passenger liners. The official Cunard web site suggests that "the great international race for supremacy of the North Atlantic" started with the launch of two ships, the Campania and her sister ship, the Lucania, built by the Fairfield Co. Ltd, in Glasgow, and launched in 1893. Each was constructed of steel, weighed 12,950 tonnes, used the latest twin-screw propellors, and had a top speed of 21 knots. They were the biggest and fastest transatlantic ships of their day, carrying 600 First Class, 400 Second Class, and 1000 Third Class passengers.
The Lucania was the first ship to have single birth cabins, and suites (two cabins with a sitting room between them). Each principal room had a fire grate, and the drawing room was decorated with satinwood walls, cedar mouldings, and a ceiling of ivory and guilding. The ship was furnished with Persian carpets, velvet settees and chairs, with brocade, and a grand piano and an American organ. The ladies rooms were scented with freshly cut geraniums, and the Italian-style dining room included Ionic columns and Spanish mahogany walls. First Class passengers could expect to dine on Little Neck Clams, Chicken Okra, Petit Filet de Boeuf ala Parisienne, Timbales a la Richelieu, Roast Qual on Toast a la Monglas, and Neopolitan Ice Cream. Over a breakfast of Broiled Sausages, or Veal Cutlets with Tomato Sauce, passengers could read the very latest news: thanks to onboard experiments by Marconi, the Lucania featured the first ship's newspaper to appear daily with news recieved by wireless.
Despite these advances Cunard still lagged behind her competitors, who continued to build bigger and better ships. Determined to become market leaders once more, Cunard began negotiations with the British government to secure loans to build two massive luxury ocean liners, ones that would capture not only the Blue Riband, but also more passengers. Prime Minister Arthur Balfour gave the go ahead for a state-funded loan to build the Lusitania and the Mauretania, on the proviso that they be constructed to be "convertible to the requirements of the Admiralty as auxillary armed cruisers in time of war." The Lusitania never saw active service: she was sunk by a German U-Boat in 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives. The Mauretania never became an armed cruiser - she was too big - but spent much of the 1914-18 war transporting troops, most notably 10,000 soldiers to Gallipoli. Later she operated as a hospital ship, finally returning to the North Atantic as a high speed troop carrier, transporting many thousands of US troops to and from the conflict in Europe.
Following the war the Mauretania returned to civilian service, operating between Southampton and New York from 1920 on. Maury became something of a celebrity. In 1922 when the ship returned to the Tyne for a refit thousands of spectators turned out to welcome her home. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man not fond of sea travel, described the ship as having a "soul that you could talk to." Novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote
It was a beautiful thing all told - it's long cherry-wood panelled halls, its heavy porcelain baths, its dainty state rooms fitted with lamps, bureaus, writing desks, wash-stands, closets and the like. [...] the bugler who bugled for dinner! [...] as if to say "This is a very joyous event, ladies and gentlemen. We are all happy; come, come; it is a delightful feast."
The Mauretania was even the inspiration for a song, written by Goodwin and Brown, titled "He's On A Boat That Sailed Last Wednesday (He's Coming Home)." The ship remained Cunard's premier liner for most of the twenties, until 1929, when the Blue Riband was captured by the German liner Bremen. In 1930 the ship's captain opened up the engines and made one last attempt to recapture the record, reaching a creditable 30 knots, but this wasn't quite quick enough. With a new decade the ship's Edwardian fixtures and fittings seemed old fashioned, and so, following a spell cruising the Caribbean, the Mauretania was decommissioned. Steaming past the Tyne and the Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson shipyard, on her way to the breaker's yard in 1935, Maury signalled the men who had built her: "Goodbye, Tyneside. This is my last radio. Closing down for ever. Mauretania." Thousands of people lined the shore, while a flotilla of ships accompanied her on her way, and the assemble crowd sang "Auld Lang Syne." One eye witness reported seeing his father, and dozens of other men like him, who had built the ship, their faces "wet with tears."
Cunard would go on to build bigger, faster and perhaps more famous luxury Express Liners, most notably the ship that was to replace the Mauretania, the Queen Mary, and later the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth 2. By the 1950s and 60s, however, with the advent of commercial air travel, the era of the great transatlantic ocean liners was drawing to a close.Philip Sutton
By Philip Sutton. This post is published in conjunction with the New York Public Library’s What’s On The Menu? crowdsourcing project, which will digitize over 10,000 menus from the library’s collection to
The Tea Party Parties Ontag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15562011-07-26T15:06:11Z2011-07-26T15:06:27Z
In 1876, such themed dinners were replicated throughout the country. Below is a charming handbill advertising two consecutive dinners given by the Ladies Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Jackson, Michigan in January. These 35-cent church suppers were served on thirteen tables representing the colonies that became the thirteen original states when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The program also features various tableaus.
The next handbill comes from a church supper conducted at Foster’s Tavern in Antwerp, New York in March of that year. The bill of fare features traditional colonial dishes, such as baked pork and beans, “cowcumber” pickles (using an old word for cucumber), and “rye n’ injun” bread—a bread made with both rye flour and cornmeal (Indian meal) that is commonly known today as Boston brown bread.
Yet another handbill, shown below, is from a fund-raiser held by the Belvidere Library Society in Belvidre, Illinois on April 19, 1876. The bill of fare includes pan dowdy, old-fashioned doughnuts, and “lection” cake, referring to the yeast-leavened fruitcakes, or plum cakes, that were traditionally baked on election days in New England, beginning a few years before the Revolution.
In the 1890s, when colonial-themed dinners came into vogue again, they reflected a more generalized societal fascination with the colonial period. Although the menus were similar to those from 1876, the underlying tone of these dinners was distinctly different, more an expression of the new-found historical interest than a celebration of a particular event. This is evident even when a specific anniversary is referenced. The Ladies’ Aid Society of the Congregational Church in Mendon, Michigan cited the 115th year of Independence as a rather weak rationale for their “Olde Tyme Supper” in 1891. Printed on seemingly hand-made paper, the handbill below features many of the same dishes that were served years earlier during the centennial celebrations, except perhaps for the cider that was now absent in keeping with the “temperance tymes.”
Also printed on old-style paper, the handbill below advertises an “Old Tyme Supper” held in Willimantic, Connecticut three years later in 1894. By this time, the organizers of such events seem to have abandoned the idea that they needed a special anniversary to justify the theme of their church supper.
In some ways, the second wave of these themed dinners was a reactionary movement, reflecting a desire by some people to return to a previous era. Perhaps unnerved by the waves of immigrants then arriving in the United States, some of the county’s well-established citizens began to form hereditary societies in the mid-1880s, restricting membership to those who descended from a particular ethnic background, or whose ancestors participated in certain historic events. Organizations based on this type of social exclusion included the Holland Society of New York (1885), National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution (1889), and the Daughters of the American Revolution (1890). As it turned out, colonial-style dinners fit nicely with the organizing principle of some of these newly-minted associations, as seen on this menu from the Society of Colonial Wars (1892) whose members were descendants of those who lived in the American colonies during the period ranging from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 to the Battle of Lexington in 1775. Commemorating the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, their banquet in 1894 at “Young’s Tavern” (Young’s Hotel) in Boston features high-end fare such as roast venison, roast black bear, and pigeon pot pie, along with a few simple dishes, including bean porridge, baked beans and pork, and pumpkin pie. Although similar bean dishes were served at the “Boston Tea Party” in Melrose in 1873, the two events were not the same in spirit. The Society of Colonial Wars lists the names of its members on the menu, giving their dinner a whiff of exclusivity, whereas the earlier program is distinguished by those quirky tableaus.
The passion for colonial ancestry even found expression in interior design during the early 1890s when it became fashionable to set aside space in your home to display sacred family heirlooms. It was around this time that the modern-day antiques business was born, providing heirlooms for those who had no such patrimony of their own. While antiques dealers were here to stay, the second phase of the colonial-style dinners would only last a few short years.Henry Voigt
By Henry Voigt. The first populist tea party movement came in the form of colonial-themed dinners during the Centennial Celebration, marking the country’s hundredth birthday, in 1876. The festive gatherings featured the
<![CDATA[Marie-Antoine Carême, Cake Boss]]>tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15672011-07-20T18:17:48Z2011-07-20T21:02:03ZMeredith Hindley
By Meredith Hindley. In March 1811, Napoleon and his new wife, Marie Louise, welcomed the birth of a boy, the longed for male heir needed to carry the Bonaparte line forward. A grand
The Cheese That Stands Alonetag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15622011-07-14T15:42:00Z2011-07-14T19:23:11ZLimburger stuck Americans as funny “ha ha” but funny “strange,” too. In Twain’s 1882 gothic parody “The Invalid’s Story,” a man agrees to take the remains of a deceased friend home by train, but is mistakenly given a pine box (full of guns). Placed near it is a package of Limburger, which the narrator knows nothing about. The smell gets so bad he and another passenger in the car try to move the crate but can’t. Instead they risk riding outside the train car in a numbing winter freeze to avoid the smell before learning it was not a dead body at all, but the cheese.
Twain’s joke echoed an odd truth about Limburger—it’s strangeness attracted the macabre. It was as if a dark, evil-smelling sprite had escaped the Black Forest of Germany and wafted its way to the New World. In 1884, a troubled woman in upstate New York tried to burn down her family’s Limburger cheese plant. In 1885, police arrested Mrs. Teresa Ludwig in downtown New York, for attempting suicide while intoxicated by leaping off Pier 1 on the North River. An Irish woman, Mrs. Ludwig complained that she had married a German who ate Limburger in their apartment and then made amorous advances while it was still on his breath. April 1895, a strike broke out at a Newark butter plant when a Swedish prankster smeared Limburger on his coworkers’ lathe, arousing anti-Swedish slurs, a fistfight, and a walkout of Swedish workers until the American apologized. 1909, Denver chemist Philip Shuch, Jr., grief-stricken over his mother’s death from cancer, swore that he would find a cure. His quest led him to the leper colonies of Venezuela, where he struck on a new idea—that the bacteria found in Limburger could act as a cure for leprosy. Shuch advocated smearing a mixture of pulped Swiss cheese, bacteria-ridden Limburger, glycerine, and quicklime on diseased skin.
Nor was Limburger welcome everywhere. In March 1902, the New York Times reported that Louisville, Kentucky’s health officer, Dr. M.K. Allen, banned Limburger and promised to prosecute any and all Limburger dealers. Determining that its bacteria made it “unwholesome,” he declared: “In fact, animal life is what makes Limburger pleasing to the taste—I mean to the taste of some people. I propose to stop the Limburger cheese traffic.” “Some people” undoubtedly meant the German immigrants who protested at his office. New York Germans and health officials who perhaps understood bacterial science better were appalled. “What do you want?” said an exasperated 6th Avenue deli owner, “When it is fresh it is bad and it has no smell. It has to be kept some time in order to become ripe…that Dr. Allen, he doesn’t know anything about cheese.”
Limburger was then, and is now, an artisan cheese. It requires specific skills, knowledge, and patience to make. Today, the last Limburger-manufacturer Myron Olson uses a bacteria originally cultured in 1911, one kept in a moisture and temperature controlled, closely-monitored setting. As fromagere Tia Keenan sees it, “Limburger lost fashion during the great food migration to refrigeration, when food became ‘cleaner,’ ‘safer,’ less smelly and more sterile than ever before.”
By 1911, Jacob Andrea knew he had problems. But he could not have foreseen his cheese receiving one of the more sustained cultural beatings ever given to an ingestible substance not made of heroin. Yes, he may have known of the popular pro-wrestling villain, Limburger Samson, “The German Hercules.” He may have heard the very first Victor 78 rpm recording ever made, comedian Burt Sheppard’s monologue “Limburger Cheese” (1901). He may have seen the movie, Oh! That Limburger: The Story of a Piece of Cheese (1906), in which two boys slip Limburger into their father’s pockets, after which he is chased out of his office by his co-workers.
Still, it’s doubtful Andrea foresaw how the new media of silent films aimed at younger, modern audiences would offer up Limburger as a comedy star. They include Limburger and Love (1910) and, conversely, Love and Limburger (1913), A Strong Revenge (1913), Adventures of Limburger and Schweitzer (1914), Limburger’s Victory (1915), A Case of Limburger (1915), A Limburger Cyclone, (1917), and the Katzenjammer Kids cartoon, Down Where The Limburger Blows (1917). In Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918), the comedian plays a GI at the front who receives Limburger in a care package. He needs a gas mask to get near it, and then throws the cheese into an enemy trench forcing thirteen German soldiers to surrender. As a war hero, Limburger found one of its few positive images.
Yet on its return home, Limburger hardly received a thank you for its service. The passage of Prohibition in 1920 put a stop to the sale of alcohol and ended the tavern culture that made it so popular. Indeed, born-again preacher Billy Sunday saw it as the devil’s cheese itself, exhorting one Manhattan temperance rally: “The Holy Spirit will not live among a lot of Limburger cheese and beer cases.”
“Prohibition kind of put a stop to Limburger,” explains Myron Olson. “Limburger was always the working man’s sandwich. They would have it at noon as the Limburger sandwich at the tavern in town and wash it down with a beer…They say that when prohibition first came in there was such Limburger excess that they wound up having to take it back and feed it to the hogs.”
As Limburger sales suffered, the enterprising cheese maker, J.L. Kraft of Chicago, consolidated his Kraft Cheese empire via modern processing, packaging, and marketing. He offered what we recognize today as Kraft American Cheese, i.e., mild, with no smell. Kraft’s 1928 acquisition of Philadelphia Cream Cheese allowed him to corner the market. By 1930, Kraft sold a reported 40% of all cheese in the United States and promoted it by sponsoring the popular Kraft Music Hall radio show, which featured suave crooner Bing Crosby.
Instead of Crosby, Limburger got the Three Stooges in Horses’ Collars (1935). In that, Jerome “Curly” Howard uses Limburger as a tranquilizer to calm his berserker rages of slapstick, inspiring his most famous catchphrase: “Moe, Larry, the cheese! Moe, Larry, the cheese!” In 1935, a mid-western border war erupted when Warren F. Miller, postmaster of Independence, Iowa, banned all Limburger from Monroe, Wisconsin after an Iowa mail carrier grew nauseous carrying it in his mail truck. The lowest moment came during the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. Aviator Charles Lindbergh’s toddler son had been kidnapped and murdered by German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and tabloids reported Limburger as the killer’s favorite jailhouse snack. When your celebrity spokesmen are the Three Stooges and the Lindbergh baby killer, you have a branding problem.
World War II pressed Limburger into service again, this time with Daffy Duck. In The Commando (1943), Daffy thwarts a Nazi general, who he dubs “Von Limburger.” After the war, science set about curing Limburger of its smell. Odorless but sharp Limburger, that Holy Grail, was confidently predicted several times by the Oppenheimers of cheese—but they failed, too. No smell meant no taste.
Instead, by 1949, cheese science advanced the Kraft “single,” uniformly cut slices for fast, easy sandwiches. What was science to Limburger? In Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Lou Costello gets a slice dropped into his glass bubble space helmet and is trapped in it, begging for mercy—and that was about it.
Limburger hit noir bottom in the postwar 40s. In a jailhouse interview, Ohio mass murderer Richard Murl Davis spoke to local reporters as he waited to hear if he would get the electric chair. On September 17, 1948, the Youngstown Vindicator reported him ripe with gallows humor and Limburger sandwiches, brought to him by his ailing mother. “I’ll burn,” said Davis, cackling at his guard. “You come and have my last meal with me. We’ll show them how to pack it away, won’t we boy?”
By the 1950s, Limburger’s last fans bid it adieu, resigning it to its fate as a dish that baby boomers might see their grandparents eating. At sixty, literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in his diary that it was time to quit Limburger:
One evening…I drank a whole bottle of champagne and what was left of a bottle of Old Grand-dad and started in on a bottle of red wine. I was eating Limburger cheese and gingersnaps. This began about five in the afternoon—I fell asleep in my chair, woke up when Beverly came, thinking it was the next morning, and felt queasy for the next twenty-four hours. Otis told me this afternoon that a brother of his mother’s had died the next morning after a combination of home brew and Limburger at night.
Today, Limburger has dwindled to a taste for arch-loyalists and adventurous foodies for whom fromagere Tia Keenan feels “it’s a badge of honor to try foods some people might consider strange or intense.” And yet while Keenan tries for innovative pairings of foods, she too has found Limburger difficult to move past its saloon origins. “Mustard, onion, dill, vinegar, beer, caraway,” Keenan says are her usual accompaniments. “There’s something retro about Limburger which must come from our collective American cultural memory.”Ben Schwartz
By Ben Schwartz. One hundred years ago, Limburger cheese maker Jacob Andrea of Monticello, Wisconsin gave a talk to the annual meeting of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association. His topic was the
Late Nights at the Congress of Viennatag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15582011-07-13T15:48:11Z2011-07-20T21:37:26ZDaniel Rose
By Daniel Rose. The Congress of Vienna was one of the most important political gatherings in the history of Europe, and also the most splendid. It was an evening of homage to
The Monster Ate Vegetablestag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15592011-07-11T14:54:38Z2011-07-11T15:19:39ZThey’re somewhere between Russia and the North Pole, near the end of the novel, when Frankenstein’s monster kills the bunny. It’s the first and only time he kills for food, but the bunny is not for him. It is for Victor Frankenstein, his creator, his enemy. Frankenstein, who has chased the Monster through the freezing wastelands of the North, to right the wrong he inflicted upon mankind when he spawned this murderous, godforsaken beast, to track him down crush him. Afraid that Frankenstein might be losing strength, that their fatal game of cat and mouse played across the vast Arctic ice might be taking its toll on his maker, the Monster rustles up a meal he supposes appropriate for an enraged man on an epic voyage of vengeance and leaves the animal in his wake, with a note. Here’s a dead hare, the Monster writes, eat and be refreshed. The time will come when we wrestle for our lives. But not yet, not yet. There are many more hours of miserable life still to enjoy for us both.
Earlier in the novel, long before the Artic adventure that leads to their mutual destruction, Frankenstein had decided to erase his monster from the earth. On that occasion, their first meeting on the Mer de Glace, the Monster was living in despair. Yes, he had (accidentally) strangled Frankenstein’s brother to death, but his life didn’t start out like that, he told Frankenstein. The Monster feels sure that if Frankenstein would just listen to his tale, would just give him a chance, he would be convinced that the randomly assembled life the scientist had fashioned has something to say.
Frankenstein’s monster—let’s call him Monty—was born a creature of gentle sensibility. In the woods, after quitting the lab, he told Frankenstein, Monty lived the simple life—his music was birdsong, he ate whatever nature easily provided. “My food is not that of man,” he explained. “I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.” Monty survived on a diet of peace and wonder. Just being filled him with awe, and though he was often confused, and sometimes angry, he was happy in his way.
But the vegetarian life was a solitary existence. Nature gave Monty everything he needed, but nothing felt right, because he understood that he was alone. He longed for little else than to be part of humanity. Monty lumbered behind bushes and lurked about open windows in secret, hoping to be seen, afraid to be seen. He peeked into the conversations of men, and learned that they were capable of great love. He wanted to be like those kind, loving people. Mostly, he wanted to be loved by them. This would be Monty’s undoing.
To gain entry into mankind, Monty would have to work hard to be slightly less menacing. He discovered that humans were celebrated if they were rich, or handsome, or learned. Monty had no money; his looks were deformed and loathsome. If he had to be honest, he wasn’t even really human. So Monty turned to the virtue not dependent on nature or luck: knowledge. This would attract others to him. He taught himself English, and started to read lofty books—Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, The Sorrows of Young Werther—books about human desire. He liked feeling lofty, and he found company in the characters. Like Werther, Monty was dependent on nobody and he was free. For Mary Shelley, Monty’s vegetarian diet is an expression of that independence and sensitivity. Still, his freedom was depressing. The more he read, the more depressed he got. Monty soon realized that the path to enlightenment wasn’t bringing him closer to the object of his desire—love. Why wasn’t the study of desire making him more desirable? Reflection quickly turned into self-reflection. Was he really good, Monty wondered, or was he just a monster? Finally, he told Frankenstein, sick of waiting for love to come to him, Monty introduced himself into the world, with disastrous results. I love you, he said to people. But he looked like hell. People could not be persuaded to love him back. They didn’t want to feel compassion, did not want to listen to reason. They didn’t want to be told that they should act against their instincts. All they saw was a monster.
Like an Adam to his God, Frankenstein’s vegetarian monster tells his maker that he feared exile and feared it was inevitable. As he recounts his tale for Frankenstein, Monty’s calm begins to break. He swings from mildness to despair, from justification to anger to indignation, back to gentleness and then to rage. He thus demonstrates for Frankenstein the typical mode of argument for every vegetarian who has ever been forced to plead his case. “Instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you,” Monty says. “Let [man] live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear…”
Monty’s desire that Frankenstein acknowledge his suffering looks like a plea for compassion; it is actually a demand for justice. Though compassion may instigate a vegetarian life, it is justice that drives the desperate vegetarian. I am benevolent and good, Monty tells Frankenstein, but I will not be a slave. I wish to live in a world of sympathy, but if the world acts otherwise, I will become fiendish in kind. “O praise the eternal justice of man!” Monty cries. The invocation is a celebration of justice, and a cursing of it too.
And when Monty cannot compel Frankenstein and the other humans with compassion, with reason, with justice, he resorts to the final weapon of the monster, and the vegetarian—righteousness. At last, it is righteousness that drives the good monster to murder. Monty is so totally baffled by the failure of people to conform to his beliefs, he turns to violence. And then he feels bad. So he destroys his creator, and finally destroys himself.
It’s the perfect dish for a vegetarian monster to serve, the slaughtered hare, a vegetarian monster who has lost all sense of purpose. Monty didn’t want to kill the bunny—but when he sacrificed love for righteousness, he also sacrificed his freedom. Monty’s appearance made others look upon him as a monster. In the end, it’s Monty’s anger and his (failed) will to power that makes this vegetarian act monstrously. “If I cannot inspire love,” Monty tells Frankenstein, “I will cause fear.” It is the monster’s song. And the vegetarian’s too.Stefany Anne Golberg
By Stefany Anne Golberg. Mary Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein. We wonder how a teenager could come up with this uncanny tale of a young student who, becoming obsessed with the
The Fried Chicken Wartag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15572011-07-07T15:17:11Z2011-10-06T22:15:23ZGeorge Harding was a Mountain House regular. He summered there as a bachelor and later as a husband and a father. It was said that he and Beach, who had been proprietor of the Mountain House since 1839, were friendly and that Harding was a valuable member of the resort community.
In the summer of 1880, like many before, Harding and his family were relaxing at the Mountain House. But that year, according to one version of the tale, Harding’s wife and his daughter Emily were suffering from illness and unable to eat red meat due to a restricted diet. Harding asked the waiter if fried chicken could be substituted for the beef that was on the menu, but was told that the resort allowed no substitutions. The lawyer sought appeal from Beach but was further rebuffed, allegedly adding that if Mr. Harding so desired fried chicken, perhaps he should open his own hotel.
Harding took Beach’s suggestion literally. After a few set backs caused by inclement weather, massive winds, and clumsy construction, the Hotel Kaaterskill opened in 1881, just one year after the two men declared war. Harding’s desire to fry the Mountain House’s chicken, so to speak, was successful: roughly a mile away from the Mountain House, with 900 rooms, 50 with their own bathrooms, Hotel Kaaterskill was called the largest mountain hotel in the world.
Fortunately, the New York Public Library’s menu collection includes a Hotel Kaaterskill bill of fare from September, 1881—just a few months after their opening day—but guess what’s not on the menu?
This is not to say that the war between Harding and Beach didn’t happen. In fact, it’s a well-documented tale, although with differing versions. Recent histories prefer the taste of fried chicken in the story, while contemporary New York Times articles cover at least two other variations: one indicates that Hotel Kaaterskill stemmed from a dispute between Beach and Harding over vegetables; Harding requested hot, Beach served cold. The other—Harding’s New York Times obituary from November 19, 1902 in which the Kaaterskill is called the “spite hotel”—does mention chicken, but the culprit is broiled.
The obituary suggests that Harding’s greater frustration lay with the Mountain House’s adherence to the American Plan of dining with a set menu and set hours, rather than a European Plan where diners have the option to dine on what they want, when they want: “‘Well, then,’ said Mr. Harding, according to the story as generally related in the Catskills, ‘I will build a hotel where I can get chicken when I want it.’”
Image: The original Hotel Kaaterskill, 1881. Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan, courtesy of NYPL.Rebecca Federman
By Rebecca Federman. This post is published in conjunction with the New York Public Library’s What’s On The Menu? crowdsourcing project, which will digitize over 10,000 menus from the library’s collection to
The Complete Syllabus: "Food" tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15442011-06-30T15:17:00Z2011-10-13T18:59:15ZThe Editors
By The Editors. With our Summer issue, Lapham's Quarterly is hoping to start a tradition of collecting the books used in each issue of the magazine as a kind of syllabus for
The Hunttag:laphamsquarterly.org,2011:/roundtable//3.15542011-06-26T16:07:38Z2011-06-29T16:07:54ZScott Korb
By Scott Korb. My reconsideration of food writing in the current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly describes, in part, a syllabus I teach in an undergraduate food writing course called “Setting a Fine