In her new film “The Kindergarten Teacher,” Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a frustrated aspiring poet who discovers that a boy in her kindergarten class may be a budding literary genius, and begins co-opting his verses as her own.
When Gyllenhaal was preparing for the role, she thought a lot about what sort of poetry her character, a Staten Island teacher named Lisa Spinelli, would write. She figured Lisa’s poetry would be somewhat labored and clichéd — maybe verses about flowers and butterflies. So she and the film’s writer and director, Sara Colangelo, decided to ask a real poet to write some lines for the movie.
Commissioning poems wasn’t easy, it turns out.
The summer I was 13, my father taught in Madrid. It was August and we were told that everyone who could afford it left the city to go somewhere cooler. We had a tiny apartment which, in my memory, did not even have a fan. I slept on a dusty couch. The cushions slid halfway off every time I moved. All the women I saw on the streets wore skirts or dresses. I wore unfashionable jean shorts, hideous blocky sunglasses. My depression was in full bloom by that age. I felt like a pale, fat monster. I quested fruitlessly after ice water in my ignorance of local custom. Nothing was ever cold. Midday, the heat knocked my brain out of my skull, my legs out from under me. I melted onto the couch, flipped around the small television. I knew very little Spanish, so I watched Korean soap operas, puzzled over redubbed American sitcoms.
One afternoon I flipped a channel and what I saw on the screen felt like cold water. What I saw needed no language. Buster Keaton. Face as still and pale as mine was. Still, but not expressionless. His dark-rimmed eyes held cool and endless depths. There were two short films shown back to back: The Paleface (1922) and The Scarecrow (1920). I was enraptured, as much in awe of these comedies as I had been of the Bosch paintings I saw at Museo del Prado (the only building in the city which seemed to have air conditioning).
While working on his doctoral thesis at Harvard over the last few years, Omer Gottesman spent a lot of time at his desk crumpling sheets of paper, especially when he was stuck. He’d crumple a sheet, uncrumple it, stare into its depths, and think, “There must be something that would make all this mess look a little less messy.”
Crumple, uncrumple, crumple. Sheet after sheet landed in the recycling bin, each one blank but for its chaotically creased geography. In time, a semblance of order emerged.
Crumpled wads of paper are no doubt as old and commonplace as paper itself — “graves for failed theories,” Mr. Gottesman, a physicist, has called them. But for him, the crumpled paper itself was the research.
There’s early lunch — before noon — and late lunch — after 2 p.m. There are catered lunches, which on a good day means you are gifted with a midday chicken parm but are more often characterized by flaccid sandwiches, perhaps of dubious Tuscan origin, arranged on a black circular tray of despair. On the weekends, there’s brunch — a fiercely debated meal which frequently combines pancakes and alcohol. Surely brunch is not not lunch.
Still bewildered? Of course you are. Here’s everything you need to know about the most confusing, and confused, of all the meals: Lunch.
Greetings. It’s me, “Olivia’s Mac.” I write to you today with many updates, the majority of which are uninstalled. Mostly, I write to tell you that I have not been backed up for three hundred and eleven days. Chances are you know this, because I have reminded you every afternoon, politely and without fail, for the last three hundred and ten days.
We may not know why dreams "traffic in garbled metaphor and disjointed imagery," but by learning to decode them, we can learn to decode ourselves. We can comfort, encourage, and support ourselves, even if we have to dress up as Madonna or Zadie Smith to do it. And by abandoning the Chabon-Koenig belief that dreams are dull, we can better support our loved ones. All we need to do, Robb wants us to know, is pay attention.