Could the associate editors write a newsletter so long they couldn’t read it?
To-do list:
Follow us on Twitter, follow the Washington Review of Books on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter, and tell us what you think about white manicures.
Links:
We loved the American Girl dolls as young DC professionals in this week’s Girl’s Guide to DC by Evie Solheim.
N.B.:
Food:
Amy made this
It was a big week for chicken in Clare’s (parents’) kitchen. One night she made chicken thighs with pastina (a new pasta shape for her!) and then on Saturday cooked a whole chicken on the grill with her dad. Both pictured below.
She also had a traumatic experience where she tried to make a nice breakfast and it in fact looked really pretty! But it sucked. The worst part about it was this matcha latte with strawberry tree honey that was an affront to women (because it was yucky even though it looked nice). She’ll post it below. Let not its comely face deceive you, for in it lies only stench and ruin.
Sarah was pretty under the weather this week and went on vacation. Her mother and sister cooked a lot of really yummy food, like barbecue chicken, mac and cheese, chicken nuggies, tacos, these really amazing chocolate chocolate chip cookies, and ice cream. The best part of vacation was watching her little cousins (mischievous, goofy) eat grapes.
Nails:
Croissant finally got a white manicure
Guppy thinks white nails are gauche but Joan thinks they’re nice! This debate is tearing the associate editors apart.
Poem:
Dreamtigers
When I was a child, I came to worship tigers with a passion: not the yellow tigers of the Paraná River and the tangle of the Amazon but the striped tiger, the royal tiger of Asia, which can only be hunted by armed men from a fort on the back of an elephant. I would hang about endlessly in front of one of the cages in the Zoo; and I would prize the huge encyclopedias and books of natural history for the magnificence of their tigers. (I can still recall these illustrations vividly—I, who have trouble recalling the face or the smile of a woman.) My childhood passed and my passion for tigers faded, but they still appear in my dreams. In the unconscious or chaotic dimension, their presence persists, in the following way: While I am asleep, some dream or other disturbs me, and all at once I realize I am dreaming. At these moments, I tend to think to myself: This is a dream, simply an exercise if my will; and since my powers are limitless, I am going to dream up a tiger.
Utter incompetence! My dreaming is never able to conjure up the desired creature. A tiger appears, sure enough, but an enfeebled tiger, a stuffed tiger; imperfect if form, or the wrong size, or only fleetingly present, or looking something like a dog or a bird.
Jorge Luis Borges, from The Maker, trans. Alastair Reid
[Last week, a work of prose that might as well be poetry; this week, a prose poem. I love Borges, and I love tigers; I find myself, like Borges, unconsciously fixated with them, having gotten Blake’s Tyger as a tattoo about a year ago, and having compiled a wardrobe that has as its theme representations of tigers—their colors, their patterns—almost without thought. This poem, to me, feels like a bow to Blake’s, the master of tiger poems, a poem that is at its heart a prayer of humility and awe in the face of our divine Creator: “Did he who made the Lambmake thee?” Borges, appropriately, takes a posture of inferiority: his tiger doesn’t quite live up to Blake’s, let alone the real thing—or, if it does, it is for such a negligible amount of time it doesn’t meaningfully exist. How odd and funny is it that our weak imaginations gesture at the Holy of Holies? Well. That’s how it is, I am told. Anyway, I came across this poem this past week, the day I sprained my ankle, when I had nothing to do but read. Then, from some flimsy attempts to translate Borges from his native tongue, I came across the Spanish word for “honeysuckle,” which is, madreselva. A compound word that directly translates, mother of the jungle. Imagine that: honeysuckle: a fearsome, authoritative creature, winding through the vegetation that she alone owns, for her earthly time: the rapid, winding, striding flower a word incarnate: a holy and fitting vessel for what it signals: a sweetness. How fearsome and commanding and rare.]
What we’re reading:
Amy isn’t sure what to read next. Please recommend something 💘💘💘
Sarah finally finished up Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor and The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman. Now she is reading Hinds’ Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard. As a child, she would read a beautifully illustrated abridged edition of this story. Now she is finding the full version very challenging and moving. The book is a Pilgrim’s Progress-style allegory that draws heavily from Song of Solomon and dwells on sorrow and suffering as our teachers in love. It turns out that Hannah Hurnard was a bit of a universalist but as in the case of George MacDonald we can overlook this for her beautiful and ennobling writing.
Clare read some more Borges, clearly. And a little more Nabokov, which made her laugh out loud.
Exhortations:
Paint your nails however you want. Don’t let us tell you how to live your life. [This advice is just for girls. –Sarah]
Request for approval:
Is this okay?