Jazz was in a sense always a late style, a timekeeper’s music out of time. In the 1920s, while jazz musicians were playing early show tunes and improvising with rudimentary harmony, the Second Viennese School was pushing ahead into total chromaticism and atonality, and Stravinsky, Milhaud, Prokofiev, and Ravel were experimenting with jazz’s musical signature—its fixed pulse, syncopated rhythm, and emphasis on flattened thirds and sevenths. Jazz was modern long before Modern Jazz was named in the 1940s, for the harmonic modernity of bebop was the chromaticism of Liszt, Chopin, and Wagner. In the wider chronology of Western music, jazz’s harmonic development is a long game of catch-up, finished too late—around 1972, when Miles Davis heard Karlheinz Stockhausen for the first time. Davis had already reached the same conclusions as the joyless German but without losing the funk.
No jazz musician incarnates the legend of late style more than the saxophonist John Coltrane. His early style is undistinguished; he was a bluesy sideman whose grasp of the instrument falls short of the reach of his ear. His middle style, stertorous and ambitious, began in his mid-1950s stint with Miles Davis’s quintet. Coltrane in this period is still less melodious than Hank Mobley and less witty than Sonny Rollins, but his chops are catching up with his ear. Only Johnny Griffin has fleeter fingers and only Rollins can beat him for persistence. Coltrane thinks aloud and never stops thinking; he is the perfect foil for Davis, who is also ironic and intellectual, also latent with eroticism and violence, but who never shows his working, only the finished idea. Coltrane’s sound waves are square and heavy, metallic and dark like lead. He is both implacable and lazy, like a bull elephant: You never know where the charge will take him, only that—as he himself admitted to Davis—once he gets going, he doesn’t know how to stop.
More and more, biologists are discovering that organisms thought to be different species are, in fact, but one. A recent example is that the formerly accepted two species of giant North American mammoths (the Columbian mammoth and the woolly mammoth) were genetically the same but the two had phenotypes determined by environment.
There are many conflicting uses of the term epigenetics, and this as much as anything has led to great dissension among and between scientists, as well as between scientists and science journalists. This is not an isolated incident: There are many cases in science where specific terms are used in quite different contexts, by different scientists, where the same word takes on disparate meanings; as a consequence, confusion can arise. In the past decade alone, there have been an increasing number of books, popular articles, and scientific reviews concerning epigenetics and in them there has been a diversity of meanings and ways that the word has been used. (And, according to many critics, overused.)
With parkways and expressways offering far quicker passage, no practical person would opt to drive the length of Route 25 with its changing speed limits and hundreds of traffic lights.
But a recent daylong jaunt along the entirety of the route — following the 25 East signs and stopping frequently to sample life along the way — showed how a single road could tie together vastly different worlds extending from the ethnic pockets of Queens to suburban sections of Nassau and Suffolk Counties to bucolic stretches of the North Fork, furthest east.
A reasonable person might ask, “Why would you travel 6,000 miles to China and eat pizza?” It is only with a small amount of shame that I admit that for the longest time my favorite food to eat in China was pizza. I was always a picky eater, perhaps as a result of some weird genetic tick, or because I was coddled so much by my parents, or — as I half-heartedly theorize — possibly something to do with my weird neuroses and mental hang-ups about growing up as a second-generation Chinese American.
At 94, Lewis Smith is the last living sibling of culinary icon Edna Lewis, arguably the most important figure in American regional cooking. In 1976, after nearly three decades of work as a chef and caterer in New York City, Lewis brought the traditions of refined, farm-to-table Southern cooking, and the black foundation of American food, to national attention with her second, best-known cookbook, “The Taste of Country Cooking.”
After editing a book examining Lewis’s life, work and legacy this year, I was invited by Lewis Smith to attend the family’s reunion in Galesburg, where Lewis Smith now lives with her daughter and son-in-law, Mattie and Jerry Scott.
When I arrived, the household was already in high gear.
One evening not long ago, my fifteen-year-old son, Noah, told me that literature was dead. We were at the dinner table, discussing The Great Gatsby, which he was reading for a ninth-grade humanities class. Part of the class structure involved annotation, which Noah detested; it kept pulling him out of the story to stop every few lines and make a note, mark a citation, to demonstrate that he’d been paying attention to what he read. “It would be so much easier if they’d let me read it,” he lamented, and listening to him, I couldn’t help but recall my own classroom experiences, the endless scansion of poetry, the sentence diagramming, the excavation of metaphor and form. I remembered reading, in junior high school, Lord of the Flies—a novel Noah had read (and loved) at summer camp, writing to me in a Facebook message that it was “seriously messed up”—and thinking, as my teacher detailed the symbolic structure, finding hidden nuance in literally every sentence, that what she was saying was impossible. How, I wondered, could William Golding have seeded his narrative so consciously and still have managed to write? How could he have kept track of it all? Even then, I knew I wanted to be a writer, had begun to read with an eye toward how a book or story was built, and if this was what it took, this overriding sense of consciousness, then I would never be smart enough.
Now, I recognize this as one of the fallacies of teaching literature in the classroom, the need to seek a reckoning with everything, to imagine a framework, a rubric, in which each little piece makes sense. Literature—at least the literature to which I respond—doesn’t work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art. This is why it’s often difficult for writers to talk about their process, because the connections, the flow of storytelling, remain mysterious even to them. “I have to say that, for me, it evolved spontaneously. I didn’t have any plan,” Philip Roth once said of a scene in his 2006 novel Everyman, and if such a revelation can be frustrating to those who want to see the trick, the magic behind the magic, it is the only answer for a writer, who works for reasons that are, at their essence, the opposite of schematic: emotional, murky, not wholly identifiable—at least, if the writing’s any good. That kind of writing, though, is difficult to teach, leaving us with scansion, annotation, all that sound and fury, a buzz of explication that obscures the elusive heartbeat of a book.
Gloucester Crescent in north London has been celebrated ever since the 1970s: Mark Boxer’s String-Along cartoons satirising the affluent liberal intelligentsia were followed by books and films such as Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van and Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it was home to a constellation of intellectual celebrities who, like the Bloomsbury group, combined talent, idealism and luck with adultery, rivalry and a sense of entitlement. All that has been missing from the mix is a worm’s (or child’s) eye view. This memoir, written by Jonathan Miller’s son William, provides this in spades.