Two Faces of Kafka

Today is the birthday of Franz Kafka (books by this author), born in Prague (1883). He was unhappy for most of his life: terrified of his tyrannical father, plagued by a whole host of psychosomatic illnesses, and tormented by guilt and anxiety. He described himself as "peevish, miserable, silent, discontented, and sickly." He wrote surreal, dark, and pessimistic stories like "The Metamorphosis" (1915), "In the Penal Colony" (1919), and "The Trial" (1925). That's the image of Kafka that generally survives today.

But he was also a productive and well-liked employee at an insurance company, and worked tirelessly to prevent workplace accidents in the lumber industry. He kept up a rigorous fitness regimen and loved fresh air: "I row, ride, swim, lie in the sun. Therefore my calves are good, my thighs not bad, my belly will pass muster, but my chest is very shabby." And he found love and happiness in the last year of his life, with a woman named Dora Diamant. Even though Kafka was suffering excruciating pain from tuberculosis, Diamant later said, "Everything was done with laughter," and "Kafka was always cheerful. He liked to play; he was a born playmate, always ready for some fun."

- Writer's Almnac

Wine Biscotti and Pepper Biscotti

If you have never been to Federal Hill, the Little Italy of Providence Rhode island, take the next opportunity even if you live in Nebraska.

Joie De Vivre Cafe

The full moon is not setting the moon is rising! Everyone in the neighborhood is still asleep. It's almost 6AM. I've opened the windows and doors to perfume the neighborhood with my baking breads. I could call my bakery the Joie de Vivre Cafe. Joy of Life Cafe. My sister and brother and I love to bake and cook. I think its because it was the only time we saw our parents happy, when they were entertaining.

The Kindness

I have to test out names for my fantasy cafe. The Kindness diner on Social Street. Years ago when I was freelancing as a magazine illustrator I was in the Conde Nast building in midtown Manhattan, stopping on every floor. "I went to GQ," I told my sister, "and they were so nice!" Of course, they were," she said. It's GENTLEMAN'S QUARTERLY.

Our whole city is like GENTLEMAN'S QUARTERLY. People are kind!

Joy Bubbles

A few times a year joy bubbles wakes me up at 2,3,or 4 AM. I get up and write. This morning I am baking breads in my cast iron pans. The classical music WCRB radio playing. I love the pure early hours of solitude.

Moon over Woonsocket

The full moon is out and so am I. The moon will be setting in the west. The street is quiet except for the hum of air conditioners and the tweeting of birds. My breads are baking. I just stepped out to the intersection with my diner mug of hot black coffee to imagining my fantasy cafe on the corner opposite the market. Would people like my home baked breads? My soups? My environment? The poets cafe.

Magritte Sky

I woke at 3:33 my head was writing so I had to get up and go down to my office, and put paper under me. It goes like this sometimes. I had two buckets of multi-grain sourdough wheat-berry oat, cornmeal, wheat bread rising. I greased my cast iron pans and set up the dough wondering if I had the local neighborhood diner. Imagine that. I like to imagine all sorts of things. I could call it the Bread and Butter Social because its on Social Street and serve my amazing bread and vats of soup and see what happens. I could call it The Woon-Socket-to-ya Diner! I could have live music on the weekends and make pancakes and waffles, sausage and eggs and 12 grain porridge with local cream. I'd be warm unlike spending winter working in my 45 degree house. If I was baking daily breads and rolls I wouldn't freeze to death like I do at home or I could turn the house next door into a cafe bakery. I'd call it "Pomegranate" (my definition) pomme=apples en Francais, and stone=granite). The Ancient Egyptians regarded the pomegranate as a symbol of prosperity and ambition. I am a dreamer!

Quintessential Urban Mermaid

My grandmother Sofia Olshinetski, who became Sophie Olson, was the quintessential urban mermaid. In summer she would get up with the sun in her 711 Brightwater Court Brighton Beach apartment and put on her flowery print tank suit covered by her chenille pink house dress and wore flip flops. She lived on the top floor, floor 6, in view of the water. She'd press the red "B" basement button on the elevator panel 7 flights to the basement. The basement was very clean painted gray and was all ramps, and no stairs. It was the entrance and exit for bathing beauties, the Superintendent's closet and the row of washing machines. Sophie would cross Brightwater Court walking under the boardwalk to be on Brighton Beach. Yes, she was that close. She'd swim in Sheepshead bay before starting her day. She worked as a hostess in lower Manhattan near my grandfather's teensy store on the Bowery, UNITED BLOWER: fans and motors. Grandma swam every morning before taking the subway into Manhattan, which was one block away, on Brighton Beach Avenue "The Avenue" to everyone in the neighborhood. There was a knishery on the corner a pizza parlor a butcher shop with sawdust on the floor, Woolworth's, a fruit store, a newspaper shop, and a Chinese restaurant that my grandparents ate at EVERY NIGHT! Even as a child I knew Grandma, knishes, and her swimming and subway riding was the life. Even when I lived in the tony suburbs, and then spent summers at farm camp in Vermont. Back then I wanted to raise goats, Jersey cows and have chickens, but deep down I knew Grandma had it going on. I still feel this way. Now my life is just like Grandma's and I am the urban mermaid across the street from the water, swimming daily, living in the city.

The Nation's Birthday Party

I've been swimming through the booms and the bangs and the excessive heat. I'm so grateful for the pool.

Nin Andrews New Book Why God Is a Woman

Huffington Post
Part and Parcel: by Hannah Stephenson Poet, Editor, Instructor
In Part and Parcel, I talk with writers and artists about a fascinating facet of their work.
featuring Nin Andrews

Beauty leads to vulnerability, and beauty is most often seen as a feminine quality. These concepts are thoroughly, almost obviously embedded in our culture.

In her newest book of poems, Why God Is a Woman (BOA Editions Ltd., 2015), Nin Andrews brilliantly subverts our notions about gender, identity, appearance, and value. She invents a utopian island where women are known for being biologically wired to be hard-working and in positions of power (while looking like Angelina Jolie); in contrast, men are soft, lovely, weak, domestic, and assigned to master a text called "Relinquishing Self." Men make 70 cents on the dollar as compared to women's salaries, and are often harassed or victimized for their beauty.

What amazes me about these prose poems is that they are never gimmicky. Truly, they are believable, painful anecdotes told to us by a male speaker on this Island. I found myself immediately feeling empathy for this speaker, finding some of the poems sad or funny or alarming. But Andrews also forces us to see that her Island is eerily familiar, and that our own notions of gender and identity are indeed sad, funny, alarming, and in desperate need of critique.

After the mini-interview, you'll find three poems from the book (which appear with the permission of the author) and the author's bio.

Q: As I read your collection, I kept thinking about the concept of discovery and revelation. You feed the reader fragments of the speaker's experience as a man growing up and living on this female-dominated Island. In writing these poems, how did you ration the Island's (and the speaker's) secrets and truths? What aspects of the Island or these poems surprised you even as you invented them?

A: I discovered the story of the Island as I wrote it, so there was no holding back or rationing. It felt like a dream I half-remembered. A place I might have lived in a past life. It seemed so real to me. Or as real as dreams seem when you are asleep. At once beautiful and disturbing, magical and oppressive, the Island was a place revealed to me, bit by bit, through the speaker.

I suppose you could say the speaker, himself, came to me in fragments. The first time I thought of the speaker was many years ago--on an autumn evening when I was teased by young male friends for being afraid to walk to my car after dark in downtown Cleveland. There are street lights, they said. There are people around, and cars driving by. You will be fine. I thought, men don't understand.

I wondered what it would be like if men were the second sex, the beautiful sex, the more common targets of cat-calls and sexual assault. I pictured them then, my beautiful men, with long dark hair and eyelashes, plump lips and thighs, and wings. Yes, wings. These men, I decided, would live on an island--a place isolated from the rest of the world--and be the last descendants of the angels, and everyone would want to ride them. People would come from all over the world, wanting my Island men. But what lives would they lead then? I wasn't sure. So I invented one Islander who would tell me his life story as well as the story of the Island.

What surprised me was the extent to which my Islander as well as his fellow men suffered because they were beautiful. How beauty defined them. In other words, what surprised me is how much women give up to be beautiful. How much peace of mind and how many hours and dollars they spend on their hair, makeup and figures. And how their beauty both shapes and trumps other forms of success. And how they/we are trained in subservience, passivity, acquiescence. How they/we have learned to accept this lower status. And how deeply it's engrained in our culture, our religion, our philosophy.

Years ago, when I studied religion and philosophy, I thought it was funny that Aristotle saw women as one step above slaves, that Plato thought only men have souls, and that the best women can hope for is to be reborn as men in their next life--a belief common in Buddhism. And I laughed at how Christianity blames Eve for the fall from Eden, and preaches that the man must be head of the household. But oddly, it was only when I made these fictional men suffer from these belief systems that I understood how completely demoralizing it is. And how these sexist belief systems still shape our culture, as well as cultures around the world.


THREE POEMS FROM WHY GOD IS A WOMAN


On the Island where I come from


parents worship their daughters. They invest all their hopes for the future in their girls, spoiling them rotten, letting them do and have whatever they wish. When I was a boy, my family was no different. While my sisters were allowed to go out night after night, I was never out of my parents' sight. Like all proper Island boys, I knew I had to remain a virgin. I had to keep my reputation as clean as freshly bleached linen. But by the time I was twelve, I wanted to go out on the town. I wanted to fly around after dark. It's not fair, I complained. My sisters don't have to abide by the rules. Why do I? My father said what he always said. You aren't a girl, son. God didn't make us equals.

Until I was eighteen, my father kept me indoors, checking on me after he turned out the lights. A home-maker and charm-school graduate himself, he was forever tidying the kitchen and garden as well as my hair, my wardrobe and my changing moods. He knew when the first sign of desire crossed my mind, and when I kissed my neighbor, Angelina, on the sly. He knew when I smoked my first cigarette and drank beer with the cool kids after school. And he knew when anger flared beneath my obedient smile. Anger, he said, is unbecoming of a proper Island boy.


On the Island where I come from


there are many stories about why the Island men grow wings. In one story, the Island men are said to be the last living descendants of the angels. Blown from heaven in a moment of God's wrath, the winged men landed on the Island where they were rescued and nursed back to health by Island women. For this reason, they are forever in the Island women's debt. They serve the women however they can, cooking their meals, cleaning their homes, and raising their children. In another story the Island men are considered an endemic species, much like Darwin's finches. The wings, it is speculated, once helped the Island men escape from predators. Why only the men have wings, no one knows.

But in the most popular story, wings evolved as a way for Island men to attract mates. After all, the Island women prefer men with wings. Wings are considered the essence of the Island male's mystique, much as blond hair or large breasts are a part of the feminine mystique in Europe and America. For all Islanders know that men with big wings are the most desirable. And foreign men are as appealing as eunuchs. The wings are what set the Island man apart. Wings are that something extra all Island women seek. Food and sex and money are never enough for her. She wants more, always more. An Island woman wants to fly. And not just in her dreams.


On the Island where I grew up


pubescent boys wear absorbent pads on their backs when their wings are sprouting. The pads soak up the blood, though leakages occur, and boys often complain that they feel like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. By the age of sixteen most wings are fully formed. But in one out of ten cases, one or both wings stay lodged beneath the skin and must be surgically removed. Wing retention is usually caused by poverty or anorexia, for lack of nutrition inhibits proper wing development. Many boys envy their wingless friends who are not seen as sexual targets by the Island women or foreigners who compare our virgin boys to angels and will pay a high price to be the first to ride them.


ABOUT NIN ANDREWS

2015-06-23-1435076911-8232882-NinAndrewsphoto.jpg Nin Andrews grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her BA from Hamilton College, and her MFA from Vermont College. She is the author of numerous books, including Why God Is a Woman (BOA, 2015); Spontaneous Breasts, winner of the Pearl Chapbook Contest; Any Kind of Excuse, winner of the Kent State University chapbook contest; The Book of Orgasms; and Sleeping with Houdini (BOA), named one of ten best poetry books of 2010 by the Monserrat Review. Her poems and stories appear widely in such places as Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems, and elsewhere. Married to Jim Andrews, a physicist and a university professor at Youngstown State University, she lives and writes in Poland, Ohio.

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On Whether he Was A Fool and A Noob

The immediate analysis focused not on the truth of what the mayor said, but on whether he was a fool and a noob for saying it, or whining, or showing weakness at playing Albany chess against a grandmaster.
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Trump Piñata

Ostensia Bonilla, the 56-year-old sales manager at a party supply shop in downtown Mexico City, has lived in the United States. She moved to Illinois in 2007 with her daughter but, after two years, decided to leave.

“I was worried about the crowd she was hanging out with,” she said. “There were too many people selling and using drugs in her circle.”

And like that, the family moved back, to avoid the very thing Mr. Trump has proclaimed that all of Mexico suffers.

“Of course, we do have drug problems,” she conceded, resting her hands on a wooden box filled with candy. “And Mr. Trump has a right to free speech.”

“But we aren’t the ones using the drugs,” she said. “The addicts are in America.”

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Don't!

“Honey, Don't go shooting all the dogs 'cause one of them's got fleas”
― Paul Newman

True Story

They saw Robert Redford in an elevator in NYC. He was covered up under his trench coat collar and sunglasses. They asked him "Are you Woody Allen?"

A Flat tire in Front of Paul Newman's House

A childhood friend of mine got a flat tire in front of Paul Newman's house in CT. She was afraid he'd think she did it on purpose. He came out and helped her. His house revolves very slowly but that's another story.

“It's like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, 'I'm terribly sorry. I'm tired.' [After winning his first Oscar after so many losses]”
― Paul Newman

“I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”
― Paul Newman

“It's been a privilege to be here.”
― Paul Newman, Paul Newman: A Life

“It's always darkest before it turns absolutely pitch black.”
― Paul Newman

“When you see the right thing to do, you'd better do it.”
― Paul Newman

Absorbing other People's Personalities

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
― Paul Newman

To that extent that you can sustain and maintain that childlike part of your personality is probably the best part of acting.

Quoted in "Paul Newman's Road To Glory", interview with Paul Fischer, Film Monthly (2002-07-01)”
― Paul Newman

Paul Newman: Steak at Home

“I like racing but food and pictures are more thrilling. I can't give them up. In racing you can be certain, to the last thousandth of a second, that someone is the best, but with a film or a recipe, there is no way of knowing how all the ingredients will work out in the end. The best can turn out to be awful and the worst can be fantastic. Cooking is like performing and performing like cooking.”
― Paul Newman

There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”
― Paul Newman

“On adultery: "Why fool around with hamburger when you have steak at home?”
― Paul Newman

“There are two Newman's laws. The first one is "It is useless to put on your brakes when you're upside down." The second is "Just when things look darkest, they go black.”
― Paul Newman

“The embarrassing thing is that my salad dressing is out-grossing my films.”
― Paul Newman

“I never ask my wife about my flaws. Instead I try to get her to ignore them and concentrate on my sense of humor. You don't want any woman to look under the carpet, guys, because there's lots of flaws underneath. Joanne believes my character in a film we did together, 'Mr. and Mrs. Bridge' comes closest to who I really am. I personally don't think there's one character who comes close . . . but I learned a long time ago not to disagree on things that I don't have a solid opinion about.”
― Paul Newman

We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
― Paul Newman

“The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.”
― Paul Newman

“Those with a moral deficit put on a good show, and sleep like a baby.”
― Paul Newman

A man with no enemies is a man with no character.”
― Paul Newman

“You only grow when you are alone.”
― Paul Newman

“I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”
― Paul Newman

“I don't like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?”

― Paul Newman

Amelia Earheart

It was on this day in 1937, that Amelia Earhart was last heard from, somewhere over the Pacific. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had set off in May from Miami to fly around the world in a Lockheed Electra. She said, "I have a feeling that there is just about one more good flight left in my system, and I hope this trip is it."
- Writer's Almanac

Hermann Hesse

The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.
- Hermann Hesse

20 Years of Home Moaning

We are celebrating 20 years of home moanership! I've been getting at the 20 year old dusty corners. I'm baking more bread and dusting and vacuuming to spruce things up a bit. It's been so long that dragging a damp rag across the woodwork is like varnishing it.