In January 1962, on my sixth birthday, I was taken to Melbourne Zoo, where I rode an elephant. We children climbed a scaffold and perched on rough wooden benches atop the elephant’s back, where my fingers furtively reached for a feel of its wrinkled skin. A few months later, elephant rides were discontinued, for safety reasons, at most zoos in Australia, Europe, and the US. I was dimly aware of the danger involved in mounting such an enormous beast, and the hooked ankus, or elephant goad, held by the mahout alerted me to the possibility that the creature led a miserable life. Yet I am grateful for the experience, since it sparked a respect for and love of elephants that has persisted all my life.
The Asian elephant is the second-largest land mammal on earth. Highly intelligent, immensely powerful, and with life spans as long as humans’, they have forged a unique relationship with us. Jacob Shell is a geographer whose new book, Giants of the Monsoon Forest, posits a novel and challenging view of this association. While acknowledging that elephants can suffer at human hands, Shell believes that the relationship has helped both Asian elephants and the humans who work with them to survive in the modern world.
In retrospect, what these shows most decisively had in common was their old-white-man obsession with American History, an insistence on an essentially Gibbon-shaped trajectory for what happened after the end of the cold war, the luxury, corruption, and decline that followed victory. Put differently, capitalized American History haunted them with the conviction that they were living at the end of American men, at the point at which it was no longer possible to be and live the way you had always thought it was your birthright to be and live, and that winning, inexplicably, had turned out to be losing. But the capitalized problem in all of these shows was successful capitalism, whether that be The Wire's Greek Tragic sense of its omnipotence, Deadwood's portrayal of how civilization brought empire-building corporate politicians and closed the frontier, Tony Soprano's half-articulated moment of revelation that he "came in at the end," or Mad Men's proleptically foregrounding the obsolescence of everything you saw on the screen. Capitalism eats it all up, especially for the men who win the game.
The Seine begins to awaken at dawn. The first barges of the morning move downstream. The river police begin their patrols in fast-moving inflatable boats. The garbage trucks rumble along the quays picking up the refuse from the revelry the night before. Dogs bark. Crows caw.
I have found on the Pont de la Tournelle a special place and time in which to make Paris my own.
All that contemplation whets my appetite, and from here, I walk along the quay on the Left Bank until I reach Le Depart Saint-Michel, a 24-hour café-brasserie. A touristy place to avoid at lunch and dinner, it is a great place for people-watching over an omelet and an espresso at early rush hour and a fitting way to savor the magic of a Seine River bridge at dawn.
A few weeks before the wedding, changing my name came up. We had talked about it before then, but it had seemed theoretical. Maybe I could just be Hannah Howard professionally. After all, names are important to writers who have been publishing for a while. They go right there next to the title, announcing the source of our work. My name is on the front cover of my book, which was published last year. But personally, I would go by Hannah Mulira. That’s Tony’s last name. It’s a nice name. In fact, it’s a royal name — did I mention that Tony is a Ugandan prince? If people wanted to invite us to a fancy party, I could envision it calligraphed in script on thick stock paper: “Dear Mrs. and Mr. Mulira, we request the honor of your presence…”
But I had no intention of changing my passport or even my Facebook page. And Tony and I are so very often, almost strangely often, in agreement.
Like its predecessor, Olive, Again is made up of interconnected stories all set in a small town in Maine. It is two years since Olive’s husband, Henry, died, and grief has not mellowed her: she is still brusque, unforgiving, formidable. But beneath the hard carapace – and this is where part of Strout’s genius lies – is compassion, empathy and vulnerability, as Olive starts to feel aware of her own mortality.
Here we have five varnished moments in time, each pulled out for inspection, each decorated with italicised flourishes (which readers will recognise from the recent trilogy) that serve to represent decoupage imports from other writers (particularly “Brother Bill” – William Burroughs), or the increasingly confident imposition of Self’s own writerly voice. If, as he says early on in the book, “there’s nothing remotely exciting about heroin addiction”, there’s more than mere nostalgic pleasure in this gleefully self-lacerating memoir of drug abuse and rehab.
Not knowing which end of the walker to use.
Not being sure how to turn off a water faucet once it was on.