As the years pass I find myself wondering more and more if what I remember about my childhood are the events themselves or merely a memory of those events. There is a half-awake feel about these memories, a sense of being twice-removed, as if somewhere along the way the direct chain of cause and effect had broken, replaced by a more vaporous connection. Still, I am aware of something deeper that is just beyond my grasp. Events don’t seem only distant in time, they seem more like scenes from a movie that keep flashing through my mind that I struggle to place because I’m no longer sure I’ve even seen the film. Yet I am aware of myself as a player in those scenes. The more I try to wring meaning from these memories the more I realize that the way to do it is to unveil the universals that lie beneath them. Only then will they reveal themselves as more than a collection of unrelated episodes grown hoary with time.
Here's something to think about as you sip your latté (or your piña colada) while listening to Beyoncé (or Mötley Crüe): Just how important to the English language are accented characters? And will they withstand the test of time?
I usually skip past “Starry Night” when I’m at MoMA: too crowded, too familiar. But even art critics need the odd refresher course — so as an adieu to MoMA’s Taniguchi era, I committed to spending half an hour with the museum’s most popular painting. I went at the worst possible time: late Friday afternoon, when the museum offers free admission. It was mobbed.
Many city dwellers have all but given up on seeing a night sky glittering with countless cosmic specks. We settle for a sprinkle here and there, if we’re lucky, or the moon. Even outside dense urban centers, light pollution has become inescapable for most people on Earth, and things aren’t getting any dimmer. Some light-loving crusaders have proposed adding more artificial light—even an artificial moon—to the night sky, raising an uncomfortable but intriguing question: what if we gave up on the stars altogether?
What if, instead of sentencing ourselves to many more years of starless night skies, we constructed a new one, furnished with artificial objects launched high into space, engineered to do the twinkling instead?
In a story, as in a house, there is a door to open and a door to close. Replace “houses” with “people” (and other objects), and the answer will be the same. A novel is a container, whether it holds a gingerbread house or a gingerbread girl. Some stories are easy to “open,” others not. Once we are invited through the opening, an exceptional guide like Oyeyemi points us in the direction where answers come in questions. Oyeyemi’s characters are readers too, and in their reading, of their lives and one another, we see ourselves more clearly.
At the end of Life with Picasso, as Picasso tries to prevent Gilot from leaving, he sneers, "'You imagine people will be interested in you? ... Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life has touched mine." Reading Life with Picasso exclusively as art history or feminist history would fulfill Picasso's cruel prophecy. The book's intellectual heft is in its art criticism, even as its emotional arc lies in Picasso and Gilot's unequal romance. Only by appreciating both can readers accord Gilot the respect she deserves.