My mother achieved real competence in Irish, and then gradually lost it. Her exertions were motivated by unrequited love, her ambitions, and even her politics. After she died, I found all these great propaganda pamphlets from the early 1980s, with titles like “Britain’s War Machine in Ireland.” All of it aimed at Irish Americans like herself. But it was hard, in the exurbs of New York with a dying mother and a growing son, to keep up the social circles that support a language. And gradually even we stopped using the ornamental bits of it.
And right now, the ornamental bits of it are almost all I have. When I’ve gone through my cycle of rebel songs, I have tried soothing this baby girl by counting in Irish. Or whispering, over and over, Mo chroi, mo thaisce. My heart, my treasure.
It may seem strange for a bookstore chain to be developing and selling artisanal soup bowls and organic cotton baby onesies. But Indigo’s approach seems not only novel but crucial to its success and longevity. The superstore concept, with hulking retail spaces stocking 100,000 titles, has become increasingly hard to sustain in the era of online retail, when it’s impossible to match Amazon’s vast selection.
Indigo is experimenting with a new model, positioning itself as a “cultural department store” where customers who wander in to browse through books often end up lingering as they impulsively shop for cashmere slippers and crystal facial rollers, or a knife set to go with a new Paleo cookbook.
“I was feeling like life was not meant to be lived,” Armstrong says, sitting on her living room sofa one spring morning. “When you are that desperate, you will try anything. I thought my kids deserved to have a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I had tried all options to be that for them.”
Armstrong lives on a quiet, leafy street in Salt Lake City, at the bottom of the snow-capped Wasatch mountain. She shares a home with her boyfriend Pete Ashdown, an early internet mogul and fellow ex-Mormon, and her two daughters, 15-year-old Leta and 9-year-old Marlo.
Armstrong is tall, thin, and blonde — precisely the stereotype of a successful blogger. Except, she notes with a sly grin while petting her Australian shepherd, Cocoa, “I’m also an irreverent ex-Mormon who is willing to speak her mind.” She admits she has a tendency for melodrama. She curses often and exaggerates frequently.
And yet The Guardian is here again an especially noteworthy exception. It’s the sort of institution where Wikipedia can note “The Guardian has been consistently loss-making” and there’s not even a [citation needed]. The BBC calls it “a culture in which constant, vast losses of the kind most private sector companies would not and could not tolerate had become culturally accepted.” (Perhaps a tinge of meanness from the state-funded broadcaster there?) Whether it was other media holdings within the same group or unrelated investments by the Scott Trust, The Guardian has long relied on someone else’s profits to bring it to break-even.
Until now! The Guardian announced this morning that, in its most recently concluded fiscal year, it…made money? “For the first time in recent history”?
The thing I needed to distract myself from, to erase by pretending it didn’t exist, I could see, was the fact of death itself. Yet my efforts toward immortality were going comically wrong. I’d seemingly exercised my way into not only physical but professional impotence. My period stayed gone, and typing was so painful I often cried. I saw myself as a character in a silent film, full of righteous energy, who slips on a banana peel. In trying so hard to live forever, I realized, I might wind up erasing myself faster.
There is also time for everyone. No one is asked to leave and no one feels anxious about out-staying their welcome. Of course people do leave, but still, staying is not suspicious. No laminated signs about leaving or staying or eating food bought here or elsewhere are on the tables or the walls. Indeed, in the fine Western tradition of hospitality that dates back to Homer’s epics ~xenia ~ no one who is hosted here will be asked to leave and everyone will be fed and watered and allowed to wash without question. No body becomes abject and disgusting through staying and crossing over an ambiguous but clearly defined boundary of time and space (at least not during opening hours). Such provision allows the existence of privacy in public, that is, if privacy is defined as the ability to be present without being suspected of anything. The causes of suspicion in London in 2019 are principally, to have no money, along with the constantly evolving intersectional biopolitics that make skin colour, gender, sexuality and religion causes for anxiety when in public.
Isn't it time we embraced playfulness as a quality worth designing into our urban spaces? Perhaps the trouble is that the word itself seems just too playful to be taken seriously. We need more words for play.
The Finnish language has no shortage of words for play. For Finns, playing a game is different from playing a sport, which is different from playing music. There are distinct Finnish words for children's play and the play that adults engage in. There's even a Finnish word that means both “work” and “play.” This rich vocabulary shows that in Finland, play is a valued part of life that isn't confined just to kids' stuff.
Lie with Me succeeds as a novel because of Besson's graceful writing, beautifully translated by Ringwald. Besson is a gifted stylist, and he infuses Philippe's story with the right notes of sadness and longing.
Fallen Angel shows Brookmyre’s immense skill as a writer at the top of his game, as well as what can be created in the crime/thriller genre. It’s simply compelling.
‘I was in prison once!’ she chirps like it’s a story
about winning the lottery. ‘Really?’ I ask, unsure
if she’s lying on purpose or her brain’s hiding
the truth from her like the queen in a game