In the rare books collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a large tome tied with string sits in an ivory box that looks like it came from a bakery. At one point, the book belonged to Edwin Hubble, who revealed that galaxies exist beyond our own and that the universe is expanding, among other things, at nearby Mount Wilson Observatory. Between the well-worn leather cover boards, I find some of the first detailed maps of the lunar surface, illustrated and engraved in the 17th century. As I delicately place the volume back in the box, the covers leave a light brown residue on my fingertips—a small remnant of one man’s quest to tame the moon.
The book, titled Selenographia, was created by perhaps the most innovative Polish astronomer since Copernicus. But Johannes Hevelius, as we call him in the English-speaking world, has been somewhat more forgotten among history’s great scientists. Selenographia was the first book of lunar maps and diagrams, extensively covering the moon's various phases. More than 300 years before humans stepped onto the moon’s surface, Hevelius was documenting every crater, slope and valley that he could see with his telescope. He conducted these observations, as well as others for a comprehensive star catalog, using his own equipment in a homemade rooftop observatory.
“In five years, 10 years, we’ll either say, ‘Wow, “Black Mirror” was a real turning point for interactive content,’ or we’ll be going, ‘That was another false start,’ ” said Yellin, the Netflix executive.
Still, he has great hopes. “We have our eyes and ears wide open to the creative community — writers, producers, directors — for more ideas that would leverage this art form,” he said. “What are the new storytelling conventions that can be invented? We’re meeting with people now.”
Around 40 people had gathered on a recent weekday evening in SoHo at the Lamy store, a 600-square-foot ground-floor showcase of contemporary Germanic pen design. Packed around a table with notepads and test pens, the group, ethnically diverse but mostly men, lacked the slick appearance you expect of customers at a luxury boutique.
In fact, it quickly became clear that these were nerds. Twenty-first-century pen nerds.
In the United States, music coverage now often comes in the form of “20 songs you need right now.” Websites offer features that masquerade as listicles detailing “10 reasons you should listen to so-and-so” or brief posts built around new singles, new videos, artistic feuds, and trending memes. Don’t get me wrong — I need music news, and I love a good list ranking ABBA’s 25 best songs, which is 23 more than I knew existed. I also love being whisked away in a story. Music is the thing that unites all people, and immersive music writing can provide as pleasurable an experience as an hour alone with your streaming service.
This isn’t a uncommon opinion: Many people I know enjoy reading and writing narratives about bands old and new. We love stories about memorable tours, obscure historical incidents, influential songs, personal obsessions, and overlooked music, like Julian Brimmers’s oral history of the short-lived genre Chipmunk Soul. We love career retrospectives and in-depth examinations of gender, race, culture, and our own identities as listeners; same for stories about lost albums, underappreciated musicians, and personalized political pieces like Ellen Willis’s “Beginning to See the Light,” an important dissection of feminism, fandom, and punk rock. These narratives aren’t pegged to a local show, or built around an upcoming album release or Super Bowl performance, which then highlights an increasingly relevant question: Without these news pegs, where do writers send them? For those of us who will likely never write for big slicks like The New Yorker or GQ, and who can’t just write books about the music we want, it’s very difficult to find nationally distributed magazines willing to publish unpegged longform music pieces. Many stories are important enough for us to try to tell, but American newsstands are now practically devoid of music magazines. Where did they go? Assessing the state of music writing requires a look at recent history, which can easily seduce you into discouraging nostalgia.
Regardless, for now, we can consider our own embodied encounters with cruel sections of text versus their cinematic counterparts. On paper, the queasy devastation might feel no less protracted and visceral, but, for this reader at least, her focus isn’t quarantined to wondering when it will stop, and her response entails the heart as much as the stomach.
“Who flies on New Year’s Eve?” an automatic impulse made me ask myself, with an implicit “when they should be out celebrating” trailing close behind. But as soon as I shook off the dandruff of cultural conditioning, I knew exactly what sort of person would fly — and alone, no less — on New Year’s Eve: me. That’s who.
I embraced the scheme, as though, like some kind of strategic mastermind, I’d planned it that way all along. Flying on New Year’s Eve provided a ready excuse to turn down invitations (or to feel fine if I didn’t get any). I also didn’t mind saving a couple of hundred bucks. Plus, I’d heard a rumor that the airlines serve Champagne, gratis, to their New Year’s Eve guests.
One has no doubt that Michelle Obama exercises freedom of thought. One wishes that her memoir made a similar demand on its readers. What if she had chosen to forgo the vocabularies of empowerment and inspiration and patriotism? After all, she is a person who can make herself heard. The language she chooses to use will be incorporated into hundreds of thousands of minds and become infallible truth.
And the girl at the beginning, who refused to put disingenuous words into her poetry: I did in the end hear her read a poem, at the memorial service of a friend of hers. The realest life has no use for symbolic language – that was my thought when I heard her words.
We now know that the brain truly can’t be trusted to hold or remember more than a few thoughts at a time. That’s why I decided to pick up bullet journaling, a system created by Ryder Carroll that organizes your to-do list, your schedule and your journal in one notebook while giving you free rein to design it according to your lifestyle. It has become a social media sensation over the last few years, with more than three million related posts on Instagram alone and a dedicated following inspired to create blogs and innovations to the original system. I was drawn in by its flexibility and the beautiful spreads created by others, but in practice, I couldn’t keep up the momentum.
In his new book, “The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future,” Carroll goes back to basics, explaining the practice and his reasoning behind each element, which include an index or table of contents, a future log for upcoming events or tasks, and daily and monthly logs for more granular planning. One can create custom collections, blank pages that can take any form, even just a simple list. “It’s not about how your journal looks, it’s about how it makes you feel and how effective it is,” writes Carroll in “The Bullet Journal Method.”
But Yan’s fable, joining a long lineage of so-called “records of anomalies” in Chinese literature, forces readers to reflect on the side of the world that is “too absurd, too cruel and too unpleasant.” This makes “The Day the Sun Died” a relentless and even brutal experience. Yet its description of a society seized by its worst impulses, enacting the repressed hatreds and nightmarish obsessions of its inhabitants, felt more familiar the more I considered it. Yan’s subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today’s global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision.
Away from home during one of her husband’s health crises, Gubar finds comfort in the love poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Beethoven’s “Fidelio” always provides solace, as does the long, wise letter from aged father to young son that provides the narrative in Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead.” Beckett’s ruthlessly nihilistic “geriatric farce,” “Happy Days,” is unconsolingly arid but, perhaps, necessarily corrective. One perceives in her rereadings what an outstanding teacher Gubar was. And, we may rejoice, still is.