Taking a stroll with Shane O’Mara is a risky endeavour. The neuroscientist is so passionate about walking, and our collective right to go for walks, that he is determined not to let the slightest unfortunate aspect of urban design break his stride. So much so, that he has a habit of darting across busy roads as the lights change. “One of life’s great horrors as you’re walking is waiting for permission to cross the street,” he tells me, when we are forced to stop for traffic – a rude interruption when, as he says, “the experience of synchrony when walking together is one of life’s great pleasures”. He knows this not only through personal experience, but from cold, hard data – walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier.
We are wandering the streets of Dublin discussing O’Mara’s new book, In Praise of Walking, a backstage tour of what happens in our brains while we perambulate. Our jaunt begins at the grand old gates of his workplace, Trinity College, and takes in the Irish famine memorial at St Stephen’s Green, the Georgian mile, the birthplace of Francis Bacon, the site of Facebook’s new European mega-HQ and the salubrious seaside dwellings of Sandymount.
What narcissism means to me as I write these words is, among other things, a memory of when I first met Tony Hoagland. It was late November 2002, though I remember the day as spring-like, a couple weeks after a Dylan concert that happened a few days after the first George W. Bush mid-term, when the US firmly set course to make a war that re-routed history. By poetry carbon dating, it was post-Donkey Gospel and during the gestation of Tony’s next book, the one with the marvelously loopy title that got me started on this essay.
Apparently many people have negative associations with the name Hezbollah, because it is associated with violence and war. If you can set aside the mental image of bombings, I chose “Hezbollah” for the joke because it really does have a lovely mellifluous ring to it as a name, Lebanese militant group aside. And I wrote “Lamoisha” to suggest a feminine form of the venerable Yiddish name Moishe, and because it sounded silly.
It was upon receipt of this email, delivered to his AOL inbox, that my grandfather learned his first great-granddaughters were not Greens. He learned they were Schoenfelds, and he lost his fucking mind. Not seeing the family name carried on was the most upset anyone had seen him in eighty years. It was worse than the Holocaust. He had once described Buchenwald as “messy.” In the hierarchy of horrible events that ever happened in his life, number one was when my grandma Hilda died. Number two, his great-granddaughters not being Greens, and then a distant number three, the Holocaust. That was his ranking of the worst things. We tried to talk him down but he wrote a letter instead.
Put the director Guy Nattiv and his wife, the producer Jaime Ray Newman, on a short list of people who received Oscars for a side gig. “Skin,” this year’s winner in the live-action short category, has a twin movie that opened Friday. Running feature length, it has the same title as the short and similar subject matter (a white supremacist faces the implications of his racism). But it has a markedly different focus.
Features, especially from independent filmmakers, often have their origins in shorts that screen at film festivals. In recent years, “Pariah,” “Short Term 12” and “Whiplash” have traveled that path. What’s more unusual with “Skin” is that the feature is not simply an expansion of the short, but, in Nattiv’s view, its opposite.
Richard Russo’s new novel, “Chances Are. . .,” opens with a cascade of charm. Three old friends, all 66 years old, arrive at Martha’s Vineyard for a last hurrah. Russo introduces them one at a time, setting each man in a nest of youthful anecdotes that have been polished to a high luster. But if this is a story steeped in nostalgia, it’s also a story about the inevitable disruption of nostalgia.
Fiction debuts this accomplished don't come along very often at all, and Marilou Is Everywhere proves that Smith is a writer of immense talent and rare imagination. Her voice is nothing short of angelic, and this novel reads like a miracle.