Several years ago, I found myself among those assembled to hear Gary Snyder weave questions of nature, the natural world, the wilderness, and the wild with poetry. Of all things Snyder said that evening, one of the most memorable was, in fact, the simplest. As he mulled over the idea of “wild” and the word’s various meanings in our wonderfully versatile English language, he also offered the Chinese definition of the term—in his translation, “self-maintaining.” A wild plant or animal, in other words, knows how to take care of itself.
This appears to be an excellent way to think about the concept of “wild,” until you realize that the longer you look at the definition, the more it begins to shift under the gaze. Is this sense of self-maintenance not also a mark of the way the individual exists within the contexts of various social systems? The “wild” creature also exists within the ecological systems of which it is a part. So how are these two ideas to be reconciled?
During Ramadan, many people sleep through the daytime—the hours in which they are required to fast—and wake up a few hours before sundown, when they are free to break their fast. They’ll stay up all night, stuffing themselves with as much food as possible before the sun rises. Then it’s off to bed, repeating that cycle for a month.
People can’t spend all night eating, though, and that leaves them with plenty of time to kill during the hours they normally spend slumbering. Lots of people sit around in roadside cafes and drink tea, or eat sweets at night markets. Groups of boys and young men play cricket, shouting through the night at every big play.
Others choose to go climbing.
Reviewers, novelists, and Russell herself have credited the strange frequencies passing through her stories to the writer’s supposedly weird home state. There certainly is some truth to that, though only as much as there is to the idea that Stephen King’s novels are terrifying because Maine is kooky, or that Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is so disturbing because she grew up in Georgia. What’s most unusual about Russell’s work is how paradoxically comforting it is, particularly right now, when it takes no great leap of the imagination to picture a world, orange or otherwise, without our species. This is not misanthropy or defeatism. Russell is scared, too, but her new book stands as a reminder that worrying about the future and grieving it are not the same thing.
How far would you go to get away from a narcissistic mother?
If you're 20-year-old Betty Braithwaite, you'd rather face the London Blitz than go back home. But then Betty's mother heads straight for the bombs to fetch her back.
In the last few months, these two venerable food journalists — Levine, the cult figure; Reichl, the titan — have released books that lay out the vastly different paths they followed in the years after they shared that rollicking, invigorating trip in Brooklyn.
“Save Me the Plums” — an allusion to William Carlos Williams’s sweet stanzas — depicts Reichl’s own wild ride as editor of Gourmet magazine, back when its parent company, Condé Nast, still had clout, glamour and enough bank to hire Frank Gehry to design its cafeteria. “Serious Eater: A Food Lover’s Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption” tells Levine’s story of launching Serious Eats with a $500,000 investment from his brother.