It was a rainy, snuggly night in November 2018, perfect for making mushroom barley soup or stuffed cabbage. I was walking home from the train when I saw it, inexplicably abandoned at the Little Free Library on my block. There, lying on its side as if after a long day of work, was that unmistakable thick white tome with the feisty red lettering on its spine: Joy of Cooking.
I didn’t need it, of course. I’d brought my copy, used so relentlessly the backstrip dangled like a hangnail, when my partner and I moved in together—even though he, no slouch in the kitchen, had his own. No, I didn’t need it. But taking it felt like a moral imperative. It was the same as if I’d seen a stray kitten cowering under a bush. I told my mom, and later my best friend, who was at the time a new mother, about the intense reaction I’d had to the sight of an abandoned Joy. They both said they would have felt exactly the same way.
Anonymous works of art and literature tend to rend and vex their audience. Debate still simmers over whether the UK street artist Banksy’s fugitive identity is a compelling act of cultural critique, or an annoying and cynical publicity stunt. The same goes for the elusive, self-created pseudonym of an Italian novelist, Elena Ferrante: is the ‘real’ Ferrante’s absence making an important feminist point about anonymous authorship, flipping a genuine middle finger to the publishing industry and the capitalist culture of self-promotion, or is it a glorified money-spinner, a bare strategy of generating interest and sales, a joke, as it were, on us? Because anonymous works leave a crucial gap as a placeholder for the author’s ‘rightful’ position, they open themselves to the wild and contradictory gamut of responses. They can also give rise to other electric acts of creativity, responses stretching from conspiracy theories, to informed speculation, to new ways of understanding authorship, to new works of art and criticism.
He became America’s most reliable comic star without ever leaving his comfort zone. So what’s he doing in this year’s most anxiety-inducing film?
When do you get to see intelligent people who actually respect each other disagree so passionately that it’s as if sparks are ricocheting off the screen? There was chubby Roger Ebert, often the meaner of the two, with his barbed complaints about his partner’s latest opinions, and there was the tall, balding Gene Siskel, the gentler and kinder one, more likely to throw up his hands in exasperation. With Siskel and Ebert, you got to peek into the unvarnished moments where they wanted to throttle each other, and it was an intellectual exercise in rhetorical gymnastics, layered with the antics and drama of World Wrestling Federation. It was a bedazzling polemical display.
On this day, they've done what mothers and fathers do all the time: A child presented them with a choice. They talked about it. They made a decision. They followed through. It was, by almost any measure, a fairly ordinary act of parenting. Except for this: Josh is not their son.