culture

Remembering Gil Marks and his contribution to Jewish books and cooking

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Last week, Gil Marks passed away at the untimely age of 62. He was a legendary food writer, known not only for his recipes, but for his contribution to our understanding of Jewish food. He did extensive research on the details of recipes, their cultural connections, and place in history. Because I trained as an anthropologist, his ethnological approach to Jewish food made him by far my favorite cookbook author.

Remembering Gil Marks and his contribution to Jewish books.

His most famous books are The World of Jewish Cooking, Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World and Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. That final title is my absolute favorite cookbook of all time. It actually makes fun reading even if you make not one recipe. Marks also wrote extensively for periodicals, such as Emunah Magazine.

Twenty years ago, most people thought of latkes, kugel, kishke, and borsht when they referred to “Jewish Food.” Marks changed that and became among those who popularized Sephardic and Mizrachi cuisine. Continue reading →

Professional empathy: writing and anthropology

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author and anthropologist

The incomparable Zora Neale Hurston

Earlier this week, Google celebrated the 125th birthday of Zora Neale Hurston. Best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching G-d (which has one of the most suspenseful and gut-wrenching scenes I’ve ever read), Hurston was also an trained anthropologist. Much of her non-fiction work consists of the retold folktales she uncovered during interviews in the deep south during the Great Depression.

Anthropologists as writers

This got me thinking about the whole issue of writers with training in anthropology. While I never actually “practiced anthropology” professionally, I have a Master’s in Applied Anthropology and feel that the reading, classwork, and fieldwork I did during my training has had a deep and lasting influence on my writing (and teaching and pretty much everything else I do, by the way).

Hurston and I are in good company. Continue reading →

Is poetry as we know it dead? Goldsmith speculates the “meme machine” has taken over.

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This week, The New Yorker book blog published a post by Kenneth Goldsmith about the proliferation of rather un-poetic  “poetry” spreading across the internet. He writes:

[T]he Canadian media scholar Darren Wershler…has been making some unexpected connections between meme culture and contemporary poetry. “These artifacts,” Wershler claims, “aren’t conceived of as poems; they aren’t produced by people who identify as poets; they circulate promiscuously, sometimes under anonymous conditions; and they aren’t encountered by interpretive communities that identify them as literary.”

…It’s not uncommon to see blogs that recount someone’s every sneeze since 2007, or of a man who shoots exactly one second of video every day and strings the clips together in time-lapsed mashups. Continue reading →