Ketchup is an exemplar of New World-style industrialized food, its distinctive sweet-and-tangy flavor borne of the rigors of mass production. Quintessentially American, ketchup is seamlessly standardized and mass-produced — qualities, along with cleanliness and low cost, that Americans have traditionally valued in their food, often at the expense of taste. Shelf stability, in essence, created what we call “American flavor.”
Ketchup was not invented in the United States. It began as a fermented fish sauce — sans tomatoes — in early China. British sailors bought the sauce, called ke-tsiap or ke-tchup by 17th-century Chinese and Indonesian traders, to provide relief from the dry and mundane hardtack and salt pork they ate aboard ship.
These 21st-century storytellers turned to cardboard for the same reasons that children have long preferred the box to the toy that came in it: cardboard is light and strong, easy to put up, quick to come down and, perhaps most important, inexpensive enough for experiment. Cardboard constructions can be crushed, painted, recycled and stuck back together. Cardboard furniture can be adjusted as children grow, and cardboard creations become more sophisticated as children gain skills: It is as malleable as the body and the mind.
As part of a comprehensive guide to Christa Wolf’s often controversial literary history, Eulogy provides a perfect starting point, an important introduction to her oeuvre, unraveling her complicated political and human positions from the beginning stages of her life. One can assume that Gerhard Wolf’s opening quote in his afterword to Eulogy sums up what must have been a lifelong dilemma, and is similar to Handke’s objectification of himself in order to chronicle memory: “Not wanting to know the truth about oneself is the contemporary state of sin; one redeems oneself these days through self-awareness […] with the self as the object of study. — Kazimierz Brandys.”
First published in 1933, Frost in May is based on Antonia White’s own pre-first world war girlhood experiences at a convent school in Roehampton, and its enthralling story has become part of our history of women’s lives and women’s writing. Something happened to her at that school, by all the biographical accounts, which marked her for life – obsessed her and damaged her. The experience prevented her from writing for years, but in the end it also gave her this small masterpiece of a novel, exquisitely poised between a condemnation of the school and a love letter to it. Even as White – who died in 1980 – anatomises and sees through the school’s twisted, self-punishing ethic and its casual cruelty, she’s still under the spell of its seductions. That’s how Frost in May, which found new readers when it was chosen in 1978 to launch the Virago Modern Classics list, has exerted such power over generations; outrage at the closed, heated world of the convent school is entangled, in White’s lovely prose, with a yearning to succumb to it, to belong to it. And it’s through this emotional combination that overweening cultural systems exert lasting influence on us.