What To Read When You're Worried You Might Be Made Of Cake
We're talking about Frida Kahlo, food justice, storytelling, The Glass Hotel, and more.
Hi pals! I hope you’ve managed to find some good SPF and hand sanitizer.
If the newsletter title this week is lost on you, here’s a relevant tweet. And this great response to it.
This Week in Activism, Local Business, & More
This spreadsheet tracks university responses to the ICE international student ban. You can check to see what commitments to legal action your alma mater made and urge them to act swiftly.
The Trans Women of Color Collective (TWOCC) was organized to “create revolutionary change by uplifting the narratives, leadership, and lived experience of trans people of color.” Donating to the collective funds Black trans health, restorative justice initiatives, and more.
If you’re in New York, Asian Veggies is a start-up service that sells and delivers Asian specialty foods throughout the five boroughs. Founder Joe Boo’s father runs a wholesale business that began struggling during the pandemic, so proceeds go directly to him.
The Articles
How Black Organizers Fed the Occupy City Hall Protests With Restaurant and Homemade Meals, Eater (~5 min). I was glad to see this article highlight community organizers and chefs as pivotal parts of the Occupy City Hall protests. This piece pairs well with one of the many articles about community fridges in New York and selections from this Black Food Justice Reading List.
Never Say You Can’t Survive: The Most Powerful Thing a Story Can Do Is Show How People Change, Tor (~11 min). This excerpt from Never Say You Can’t Survive, a nonfiction storytelling guide with anecdotes and memoir elements, deconstructs the mechanisms that prompt characters in books to change. It also acts as a mirror for us as real-life people, who oftentimes apply the same logic to our own lives and moments of transition.
We don’t just crave fiction because we want to escape reality—but because fiction contains the best and worst parts of reality, without all the garbage that pads it out.
Burned In Paris: Frida Kahlo and the Demeaning Arbiters of Art, The Baffler (~7 min). André Breton, the “emperor of the celebrated surrealist moment in art,” promised to exhibit Frida Kahlo’s paintings in Paris after he visited her incredible home in Mexico City. He did not hold up his end of the bargain: instead “he had trotted back to Paris likely never expecting to pay on his promise...Ever the white man riding around in native lands, the effort had been to acquire, to take back his loot to where it could be transformed from object into artifact.”
The Gay Marriages of a Nineteenth Century Prison Ship, The New Yorker (~7 min). Apparently author Jim Downs was doing research about the history of epidemiology at the National Archives in London when he found the letters of a young convicted lawyer that sowed the seeds of this piece. Archives are incredible.
The Books
This week, I read STAGS by M.A. Bennett (bad) and a number of Sherwood Anderson short stories from Winesburg, Ohio (good). I also started reading A Beginner’s Guide To Japan by Pico Iyer and Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu.
Your Recommendations
I asked friend-of-the-newsletter Steven to review a book he read recently, and boy did he deliver. Steven is a wonderful person to talk about books with (and truly everything else), so I am thrilled he obliged my request. Here’s your reminder that you can complete this Google form or reply to my emails any time to let me know what you’re reading. Maybe you’ll end up here.
Review time: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. The follow-up to Mandel’s National Book Award Finalist, “Station Eleven,” has been called polarizing, but I prefer “insufficient.”
While some reviewers have tugged in one direction, carping over the novel’s uneven approach, others have championed it—calling TGH’s dive into human behavior during unprecedented times serendipitous for having arrived during a pandemic.
I land somewhere in the middle.
*Spoiler* In 2015, I interviewed New York Times investigative journalist Diana Henriques, whose true crime book, The Wizard of Lies (also adapted into an HBO film) about famous fraudster Bernie Madoff, was used heavily as reference for a principal character in Mandel’s book. Having that prior knowledge, in my opinion, not only enhanced the “Glass Hotel” experience but made it palatable in the first place. The depth and span of such a scheme absorbed me further into Mandel’s Madoff counterpart, Jonathan Alkaitis. This in turn made her protagonist, Vincent, more interesting and relatable. Without that, however, I would have preferred a story about Vincent’s brother Paul—a semi-successful composer who deals with a heroin addiction while studying at the University of Toronto. We join Paul spottily, but more so early on in the novel during a night of frivolity that I found to be the most captivating part of the book sans disgraced financier.
All to say, Mandel’s ability to write with economy and her knack of turning away from the crisis to instead turn toward the people it affects, meant nothing for The Glass Hotel were it not for what I already knew about both the former and the latter. If you don’t, you may be SOL.
Learn more about the infamous Ponzi scheme before you get into this one, or else you’re at risk of putting it down and losing out.
If you’d like even more reading inspiration, Samantha Irby kindly curated a list of fiction by Black authors in her recent aptly-titled newsletter; Vulture’s Read Like The Wind recommendations for July are out; and LitHub’s team has compiled a list of recommended summer reads.
See you next Sunday.