Favorites of the week: pity for the unknown – culture

Literature: “You should urgently change your pen”

Writing is easy. You just have to leave out the wrong words. Said Mark Twain. And that said everything on the subject. But what are the wrong words? Whole professions are now based on the promise of driving out wrong words from writers. Adult education courses, writing workshops, guides who recommend writing for 20 minutes in the morning so that something useful slips out. Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, who died in 2012, had her own way of giving tips to authors. From 1968 she wrote for the Krakauer Zeitung Życie Literackie (literary life) the “literary mailbox” column, in which she replied to people whose manuscripts had been rejected.

Suhrkamp recently published the full splendor of Szymborska’s charming bitingness in the form of the column booklet: “You should urgently change your pen”. Sharp, funny and so merciless that one often feels sorry for the hopeful senders without knowing their work. She judges poor Halina W.: “You are too gullible and have a heart that is too pure to be able to write well.” A literature student named Eva wrote poetry. The answer: “All lovers have a fleeting talent, but rarely, very rarely, does it withstand the test of an emotional lull. Better try chemistry, Eva.” Ouch. And to someone who wanted to foist a “cyclops of passion” on her: “Sounds dangerous, but at least better than a one-eyed cyclops.”

Szymborska uncovers plagiarism just as coldly as spelling weaknesses, incompetence (“The lack of literary talent is no shame!”), overambition, underambition, exaggerated seriousness, and she leads the lost back on the right path: “Give up medicine? Friedrich’s field of study Schiller?” And how does one become a good author? At least not with the writing of guidebooks. Because: “An author who knows a reliable recipe for literary success would make use of it himself and not earn his living writing manuals. Right? Right.” Christian Lutz

Photography: “Walkietalkie” on Youtube

Photographing on the street requires perseverance, courage and passion. To what extent, Paulie B shows in his inspiring series “Walkietalkie” on YouTube. “Paulie”, real name Paul Baldonado, accompanies street photographers in New York. While the mostly young men are photographing people with their analogue Leicas from a very short distance, he films and interviews them. How they avoid confrontations, how often they take to the streets, how they motivate themselves. Her passion goes beyond imagination. Some have given up their jobs somewhere in the US just to shoot in New York: morning, noon, evening. They are addicts for whom nothing matters but a good photo. “Only when I’m on the road, I don’t have to hate myself,” says one. And another describes the longing that drives every photographer: “I want to be in this life.” Great. Marc Hoch

Cookbook: “The kitchen of the poor”

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With a shopping list like this, you go to chic, rather expensive shops these days: tofu, algae, lentils, chickpeas. Sushi, tacos and shakshuka have long been among the favorite dishes of the sophisticated urban prosperity. Amazingly, all of this can now be found again in the book “The Poor Man’s Kitchen”, which was first published in French in 1970. The März-Verlag has re-translated and published it in a modernized form.

Apparently nothing more could be found out about the author Huguette Couffignal. Which is a pity, as characteristic as her voice sounds in the text part of this cookbook. She tells of the everyday life of the poor in different parts of the world, of barter transactions, the rituals of hunting and the dividing of meat in different communities, about how to cook under the simplest of conditions and how to preserve food. And about the “hunger deceivers”, coca, peyote, liquor, with which people everywhere try to delay their next meal.

In the recipes in this book you begin to look for ideas, with a guilty conscience because you are absorbing them to the full. At least that’s how much the vegetarian part corresponds to everyday life in our consumer society. The hedgehogs, elephants and lizards that Couffignal knows how to prepare are further away. Editors’ footnotes show what has happened over the past half century. However, the author already had a keen eye for the exploitation of natural resources in the 1970s. She calculates “what it costs to produce one animal calorie compared to the production of one vegetable calorie. Milk, for example, only recovers 15 percent of the energy used, eggs 7 percent, beef at most 4 percent”.

But she also seems to anticipate how the prosperity gap will change. Those who live scarcely, but from what the surrounding nature provides, seemed happier, writes Couffignal. On the other hand, in the kitchens of the poor today there is often highly industrially processed food, which is now cheaper to live on than chickpeas and vegetables. It produces bodies and symptoms more outwardly resembling those of affluence of yesteryear, while the rich find themselves skinny beautiful. Marie Schmidt

Pop: “Stick Season (We’ll all be here forever)”

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Folk singer Noah Kahan’s songs feel like secret journal entries, deep conversations with close friends, or an extended therapy session. In 2022, the bearded young man from Vermont released his third album, Stick Season. Accompanied by his acoustic guitar, he sings about alcoholism, childhood insecurity, his parents’ divorce and the feeling of not belonging. The 25-year-old keeps giving insights into new songs on Tiktok. They’re so well received by his fans that this year he released the deluxe version of his last album, Stick Season (We’ll all be here forever). His extended album is an ode to growing up, to the longing for normality and adventure, to the ambivalence of feelings of home and the urge to discover the world. Sonya Dawson

Design: Tesla litter box

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“The best things in life are… edible!” This comes from the lazy, gluttonous and wise cat Garfield. This begs the question of what Tesla’s latest, unfortunately inedible invention has to offer. Because the litter box – some also see a cat bed in it and the product description talks about a “multifunctional cat’s nest” – which has been available in Tesla China’s e-shop for the equivalent of eleven euros for a few days, is made of multi-layer corrugated cardboard. Even if Garfield’s favorite food is lasagna, it’s not made of cardboard. A cat habitat made of polygonally folded cardboard is rather dysfunctional as a toilet, bed, nest or lasagna. That’s exactly why the latest creation from the Tesla madness could at least be a reference to the similarly shaped “cybertruck” that should be available next year in Europe, where we were missing exactly this car: a third pick-up, one-third SUV and one-third idiocy. Anti-advertising hasn’t been so beautiful since Helmut Dietl invented it for the “Munich Stories”. Incidentally, the construct for Garfield is out of the question as a cardboard toilet. The load capacity ends at 15 kilos. Gerhard Matzig