A man is crying—no, convulsing with sobs—on-screen inside a theater in downtown Los Angeles during a pivotal scene in the film The Farewell. He’s at a wedding banquet and he’s supposed to be toasting the newlyweds, but he’s shifted his attention to his mother instead—and, as if at a funeral, he’s weeping. His mother watches, baffled at the way he’s doubled over in grief, not joy. It’s intense. It’s quiet.
And then: Someone sitting close to the screen laughs. The cackle cuts sharply through the silence, and it catches the film’s writer-director, Lulu Wang—there because it’s the L.A. premiere of her breakout hit—off guard.
“The last time I saw [The Farewell] with an audience was at Sundance, and I don’t think there was as much laughter during [that] speech, when he breaks down,” Wang told me the next day, late in June. “It usually gets really quiet and tense in that moment, and then the laughter comes once the camera cuts away from him … But last night, it was almost like—” She raises her voice and mimics the laughter. “Ah ha ha ha! Like, laughing at him?”
Don’t get her wrong: She wasn’t disturbed by the reaction. “I’m not the kind of filmmaker who feels like, You have permission to laugh here, but not there,” she explained. Rather, she was delighted by the unexpected liveliness. “I was just really hoping people didn’t hate it, because it is so personal, and it is my family. If they hated it, then they hate us, in a way, you know?”
One day, I happened to read an essay called “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature” by Robert Louis Stevenson. He was talking about sentences, but instead of repeating platitudes, he showed how to construct sentences on the basis of conflict. Instead of just announcing a single thesis, a sentence begins by setting out two or more contrasting ideas; the sentence develops a conflict, intensifying toward a climax, a “knot” Stevenson calls it, and then, after a moment of suspension, slides easily toward a close.
Suddenly, I understood both how to write those lovely lengthy compound-complex sentences and also how to write paragraphs that had nothing to do with topic sentence, body, conclusion patterns (because I could construct a paragraph the way Stevenson constructs his long sentences). Suddenly writing a sentence became an exciting prospect, a journey of discovery, a miniature story with a conflict and a plot, the outcome of which I might not know at the outset.
Writers, like all artists, are willing to give up a lot to keep doing what they love best. But sometimes, reality bites, and dreams have to be put aside in order to put food on the table. That's what happened to Adrian McKinty — but then, with a little help from some friends, he found a way to keep going. The result is his new book, The Chain.
In the summer of 1962, Walter Schirra — who would soon become America's third man to orbit the Earth — walked into a Houston photo supply shop looking for a camera he could take into space.
He came out with a Hasselblad 500C, a high-end Swedish import that had been recommended to him by photographers from Life and National Geographic.
"He was sort of an amateur photographer," Jennifer Levasseur, a curator in charge of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum's astronaut cameras, says of Schirra. "Somewhere along the line, the decision was made that he could select what camera was flown on his flight."
For many years the origins of this script was a mystery to me. Each time I passed a sign, I would notice the unique and memorable shape of another hand-drawn Chinese character. The English characters, by comparison, were almost always lettered with dull precision. Like their British counterparts, Hong Kong roadsigns use the typeface Transport for their English language text. But the English alphabet, with it’s fifty-or-so glyphs (26 uppercase 26 lowercase and sundry), is hardly the fifty-thousand-odd glyphs in the full repertoire of written Chinese. I guessed that, in the absence of a comprehensive typeface, someone was making one up—sign by sign.
One consequence of this way in which a pilot’s work is so neatly contained is that each flight starts to echo everything else that has an obvious beginning, middle and end. And as I fly through middle age, that’s an increasingly lovely thing. I want to tell my family and friends about it all: how the trees, and much else, were suddenly below me, and how that sight reminded me of the years when that was all I wanted.
But the difference between the 16-year-old who got airborne from Pittsfield and the 45-year-old who touched down in Islamabad is that somewhere along the way I’ve acquired an unexpected love of wholeness. And it’s landings, even the ones in the farthest-off cities, that again and again complete a simple story: I went up and away, and it was marvelous, and then it was time to come home.
It starts
with a blank sheet,
an undanced floor,
air where no sound
erases the silence.