The Kindle ad equates modernity with mobility: the freedom to marry who you want with the freedom to read wherever you want. Expanding on the theme two years later, Amazon marketers began to solicit photos with the hashtag #haveKINDLEwillTRAVEL. The resulting flood of images—a white man holds a Kindle on a dirt road; a white man reads silhouetted against a bell tower; a pair of white palms cradle a Kindle in a windowsill overlooking a cliff—measure the power of the device by the sublimity of the landscapes that it blots out. (Only the most riveting read can compete with the Taj Mahal.) Borrowing Microsoft’s metaphor of the “window,” Amazon’s al fresco scenes naturalized an otherwise daunting new technology. The wage slave might hunch over a computer in a fluorescent-lit cubicle, but the Kindle’s user remained a free spirit, shaded by trees that memorialized now-obsolete wood-pulp paper.
Yet Amazon’s 2013 ad’s celebration of the latest legal decision turns out to look oddly atavistic. Amazon’s his-’n’-hers contrast harks back to a paperback-era New Yorker cartoon where the symmetry of identical bedside reading lamps belies the contrast between a woman’s book and her husband’s antennae peeking out from behind his newspaper.
So I eschew all those perfect little spaces in my house. My secret reading spot is a banged-up 11-year-old car covered in the dust of the dirt road on which I live. There are almost 150,000 miles on this vehicle, and every one of them has unspooled in the company of an audiobook.
Perhaps you consider this cheating? Listening, I know, is different than reading, but I cannot think of a single way that I’d rather spend time. Being read to is a special treat: In the hands of a talented reader a great book becomes even more magnificent.
This week, ESPN turns 40 years old. I sought out Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I had my reasons. The voice they created while cohosting SportsCenter from 1992 to 1997 still ranks as one of the best and most miraculous things ESPN ever produced. But I think we’ve been appreciating them too narrowly.
On their self-titled Big Show, Patrick and Olbermann took a low art form, doing highlights, and wrested it away from the howling Champ Kinds of local news. Patrick and Olbermann quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson and Monty Python and Johnny Most. They became one-name, Beatles-like categories. For a time, every wannabe sportscaster was a purring, FM-quality “Dan” or a transgressive, scenery-chewing “Keith.”
Two years ago, Paul Eng decided to confront a reality he had been facing most of his life: He was the heir to a tofu tradition who had no idea how to make tofu.
Where does one start with “Ducks, Newburyport,” the new novel by Lucy Ellmann, with its single, sinuous sentence tracking a middle-aged Ohio woman’s perambulations of thought? It seems vacuous to dwell on the look of the thing, but, well, look at it: thick as a phonebook, red and blue, with an upside-down duck on the cover. Open the book, which has been short-listed for the Booker Prize, and you are greeted by block upon block of forbidding text. (There are no paragraph breaks.) Each section of the sentence, which runs for about a thousand pages, starts with the phrase “the fact that”: “the fact that I think Frances Borshun likes her new dog better than she likes her first grandchild, the fact that she’s nutty about that dog.” Wordplay, snippets of music, and loopy associations multiply. Every so often, the story of a female mountain lion breaks in, told in crystal-clear, pared-down prose.
This could easily have been one of those novels about what it is to be a man, where men are defined as those whose comprehension of their own circumstances is limited by appetite, material need and a tendency not to talk much. Instead, it turns into something more lyrical but at the same time colder and more shocking, much more self-aware. Contemporary Irish fiction prizes delivery, daring and an implicit trust in the reader: Lynch demonstrates a control over his ideas that comes from a pure lyrical telling, a speech act that, if you let it, will take you anywhere. Beyond the Sea is frightening but beautiful.
We need her now, more than ever, and this biography keeps her defiantly alive: argumentative, wilful, often right, always interesting, encouraging us to up our game as we watch her at the top of hers.