Learning a new language is a lot like entering a new relationship. Some will become fast friends. Others will hook their arms with calculus formulas and final-exam-worthy historical dates, and march right out of your memory on the last day of school. And then sometimes, whether by mere chance or as a consequence of a lifelong odyssey, some languages will lead you to the brink of love.
Those are the languages that will consume you – all of you – as you do everything to make them yours. You dissect syntax structures. You recite conjugations. You fill notebooks with rivers of new letters. You run your pen over their curves and cusps again and again, like you would trace your fingers over a lover’s face. The words bloom on paper. The phonemes interlace into melodies. The sentences taste fragrant, even as they tumble awkwardly from your mouth like bricks built of foreign symbols. You memorise prose and lyrics and newspaper headlines, just to have them at your lips after the sun dips and when it dawns again.
It began with butter, a surreal amount of butter, glistening with tiny pinpricks of fat. It was studded with fragments of fresh herbs and whipped nearly to a foam. There was bread as well, but it was a supporting character. It, too, was excellent, a dark rye loosely stacked in rough slices on the right-hand side of a plate-size slab of black lava rock. The butter was mounded up on the left side, a lump the size of a Christmas orange, melting gently where it lounged against the warm stone slab. The stone itself was of the same sort found in the walls of the restaurant and rimming the pool of steaming azure water outside the window. This stone played hide-and-seek among the drifting snow from here to Reykjavík. I took a moment to gaze out on the falling flakes and on the tall blond bathers revelling in the shimmering water. Some perched on the rocks, and others floated in the pool’s volcanic embrace. I’d spent the morning there, and after the meal and perhaps a short period of digestion, I would return. But, for now, there was butter.
When my grandmother died she owned no property, personal or real; no goods, durable or consumable. Personal property is also called movable property, personalty, movables, chattels (chattels first meant goods and money, and later came to be associated with a beast held in possession, livestock, cattle; chattel, as slaves, came into use in the seventeenth century), and under U.S. law can be further divided into tangibles and intangibles. Tangible property can be felt or touched and intangible property is immaterial. Personal effects are tangibles; debt and goodwill, intangibles. (And then there was paraphernalia, a specifically female version of personal effects: these are called her paraphernalia< … the apparel and ornaments of the wife, which also included tableware and sometimes her bed.) Real property, with its echoes of real estate, realty, royalty, realm, kingdom, is immovable property, land and the structures on it. Durable goods, also known as hard goods, have a useful life of three or more years, and consumable goods, also known as soft goods, get used up or discarded; a further subset is known as perishables, goods prone to disintegration or decay. Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions. She didn’t leave a thing, save her body and that, of course, would be gone soon, too.
Night after night, my father and I distracted ourselves, temporarily, from our own lives by watching the unchanging world of “Jeopardy!” Unfortunately, it was precisely then, in the middle of this consolatory ritual, that the terrible news crossed over. In March, Trebek announced that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. This was hard to accept. It almost didn’t make sense. It was like the Grand Canyon getting leukemia.
Microdosing LSD has become fashionable over the last few years, with some users reporting improvements to mood and productivity. Reading Irenosen Okojie’s stories is more like taking an old‑fashioned megadose: familiar reality peels away to reveal a world of bizarre transformations, stutters in time, encounters between gods and humans, and the fragmentation, or even the dissolution, of the self.
“The Innocents” is a work of lyrical naturalism dressed as an allegory. Crummey isn’t interested in chronicling his characters’ journey to spiritual salvation. Religion is repeatedly rejected in the novel. Evered declines an offer to be baptized by Mr. Clinch and only grudgingly permits an after-the-fact funeral for his parents. For the orphans, the celestial realm is “dry goods and flour and salt meat and tea.” Their quest is not a search for divine grace, but the slow and arduous acquisition of the skills and habits that will allow them to eke out an existence in this hardscrabble place.
If Pyongyang embodies the architect’s dream of a model city, its facades are also suggestive of a Potemkin village. In their new monograph “Model City Pyongyang,” architects Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapic lead readers on a panoramic tour of the North Korean capital while borrowing the visual language of the country’s propaganda posters. In these photographs, the sky appears in dreamy pastel hues, thanks to photo editing, replicating the sense of “fictional reality” the authors say permeates their journeys through the city as foreign visitors.
Year after year you keep on being gone, gone
after years and years of gone, of marginal, mute,