This spring, when the Trump administration began separating families on the US-Mexico border, Angel Island popped into my mind. The apparent racial bias underlying this policy made me think of this older, racially motivated detainment of immigrants. As in the current crisis, the Chinese immigrants had no control over their situation. Separated by gender and race, they slept in bunkers on thin canvas mats. They were imprisoned for no other reason than they wanted to come to the United States.
While at Angel Island, the Chinese wrote poems on the walls of the detainment center about their situation. I’d been hearing about them for years. There are 200 poems, each a unique documentation of life at the center. In August, I took my six-year-old son on the ferry to see the poems myself.
A funeral is bleak and blunt in its finality, an observance of a life well lived and a reminder of your own mortality. Because of that emotional tenor, it can be hard to consider the food served at funerals or directly afterward in the same category as the meals served at more joyous rites of passage. Take a baby shower, a child’s first birthday, a baptism, or a marriage, all functions organized around cheer and gaiety. I think of my Bengali Hindu family’s own observance of annaprashan, a ceremony that marks an infant’s first intake of solid food. In the case of my two nieces, the ceremony involved me, an uncle, feeding rice to the infants in the form of payesh, a dessert of white rice in sticky-sweet milk, along with potato and eggplant fritters. But what these children eat doesn’t reflect what’s on the table for the hundred or so people who come to celebrate them, which, in my family’s case, were biryanis with chicken and vegetables, and enough samosas to feed a small army.
What Rogak’s 2004 book makes clear is that mourning is a communal affair; whoever’s in charge of cooking for the mourners must prepare enough to feed at least a dozen people. As with other food traditions, what certain groups—bound by ethnicity or religion or regional affiliation—eat at funerals is not static. The customs are malleable, so long as they fulfill a basic purpose: making sure everyone is nourished, before the room clears and each individual is left to live with his or her grief in private.
By the beginning of 1991, Killian was living at the edge of the Mission District on Minna Street. He was a poet. He was married to the writer Dodie Bellamy. A friend and collaborator of many artists, writers, and actors in the city, he helped found the New Narrative movement—a loose arrangement of poets and novelists centered around Robert Glück’s writing workshops at Small Press Traffic. New Narrative, with its emphasis on critical theory and identity politics, offered a fiction and poetry that took itself apart in order to make its inner and outer workings—and worker—transparent: a writing about the writer who’s doing the writing, a kind of authorial heroism, the splaying of the self. (Derrida was a touchstone.) In a conversation with Bruce Boone, the Language poet Charles Bernstein noted that Boone, like his counterparts, foregrounded the author through repeated interventions of a writerly interest in text qua text: “It would be as if Stephen King made [some of the] comments … that you’re making to me, within the novel, and talked about its links with the high and the low European [literature], to French philosophy, and so on.” If the author died in the late sixties, New Narrative attempted to account for the causes of their demise in order to resurrect the corpse in a poetry and prose of flesh and blood—stitched together and electroshocked back to life. The poet Cole Swensen once said that Killian’s work is about the “palpability of being alive.” One lives with it.
Going to the movies shouldn't be an endurance test; I can sit through a three-hour movie without an intermission, but that doesn't mean I want to. It isn't even healthy to sit for the average Hollywood runtime!
Dorren's conclusion that English "is the end of Babel — or rather, it's the end of Babel as a problem" might not sit well with speakers of other languages (Mandarin, Dorren contends, is "just too damn difficult" for non-native speakers to learn), but he's careful to note it's only because of the English language's ubiquity and America's position as a superpower that it's so widely spoken.
But the great thing about Babel is that you don't have to agree with Dorren's conclusions to enjoy it — it's a book that's as joyful as it is educational, and above all, it's just so much fun to read.
As previous biographers have discovered, it’s difficult to write an endearing biography of Bellow. “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Bellow inquired on his deathbed. Leader put the question on the first page of Volume 1, and it bookends this two-volume opus. Nevertheless, he has managed to write a sympathetic, judicious, 700-page second volume here, which one can recommend on its own merits. I even came to admire Bellow more at the end than the beginning. How on earth did Leader do it?
If Future Politics focused only on the power of tech giants it would be a useful book covering familiar ground. But Susskind’s ambition is far greater. His subject is the full spectrum of disruption to the way humans have organised themselves since antiquity. It is an attempt to disassemble the fundamental concepts that underpin political life – justice, liberty, democracy, equality, property – and put them back together again in the context of a tech-driven revolution. At the very least, it is an impressive feat of intellectual organisation.
Perhaps the novel's most memorable strain is the way that characters in this world can't ask for what they want for fear of not getting it, or of getting it and inspiring jealousy, or of getting and losing it, or perhaps just of getting it and not being able to bear such a large and foreign and terrifying thing as happiness. Hence what middle sister calls the "wrong spouse" phenomenon, when you marry someone adjacent to the person you really love, the way you would avoid looking directly at the sun. But despite all that, Milkman still contains a sideways kind of hope. Because, as middle sister discovers, fear isn't as bad as numbness. Behind fear, animating and sharpening it, is the possibility, however tenuous, of joy.