The poems in this collection are appetizing and remind us of the complexities of the simplest things. We can’t afford to take food for granted if we are lucky to have it. In a sense, the political elements of the collection are a protest against infringing on another’s choice of sustenance when food is a blessing. The international scope of the anthology, ranging from India, the United States, Iceland, Spain, Poland, England, and Nigeria, shows us how connected we are and explores the ways this connection is possible. Using imagery, situation, history, ritual, and humor, these poems tell a story beyond the common act of consuming we take for granted. The cultural specificities of the poems and their choices of subject are somewhat offsetting for the uncultured (or region-specific) reader, but footnotes offer insight into their backgrounds. The collection is not only commentary as such but also a wonderful place to garner insight into foods and customs across the world.
Shakespeare, as usual a step ahead of everyone else, summed up this paradox in a few feet of iambic pentameter: “So all my best is dressing old words new, / Spending again what is already spent: / For as the sun is daily new and old, / So is my love still telling what is told.”
But for literarily inclined members of my generation, the key text on sentimental education was Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2011 novel “The Marriage Plot.” Madeleine, the book’s 22-year-old heroine, meets her boyfriend, Leonard, in a semiotics seminar at Brown. Alert readers know this is not a good sign. The book is set in the 1980s; poststructuralism is all the rage. Naturally, the seminar’s syllabus is heavy on French theory — Derrida, Barthes — that “deconstructed the very notion of love.”
Social scientists have a term of art to capture a person’s overall happiness and sense of well-being. They call it “life satisfaction” and find it strongly correlates with time spent with those who care about you and about whom you care. A regular dinner with family and friends is a marvelous way to create that time. Which is not to say that life satisfaction will arise from your very first meal, or even your fifth. I think it accrues only over months and years, as you cook food and share it. Regularity matters. Standing dinner dates, at their best, are simply special occasions that are not at all extraordinary. They become that way over time.
Back in 1929, McKay told a journalist that it would take readers another 30 or 40 years to understand his fiction “in its true light.” His hubris should be taken with a grain of salt, but perhaps he underestimated what Cloutier has called the belated timeliness of his art. It seems fitting that, nearly a century later, McKay’s name takes its place as part of the cityscape, as a landmark nailed quietly above the hustle and bustle at the water’s edge.
If you’ve just read The Snow Was Dirty because you were encouraged to do so by the Reading Group, I should both apologise and congratulate you. The apology because, oh god, this book is bleak. The congratulations because it’s also an immortal masterpiece.
Through Lizzie’s thoughts and observations, Weather invites us to consider an unusually expansive perspective on our relationship to the rest of the planet: “The only reason we think humans are the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things,” Sylvia lectures. “For example, if we privileged the sense of smell, dogs would be deemed more evolved…If we privileged longevity, it would be bristlecone pines.” This type of birds-eye-view sweeps through the novel, jarringly woven into everyday anecdotes to stop you in your tracks again and again as the interconnectedness of our world is laid bare in your hands.
Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You is three eloquent books in one: memoir, essay collection, and treasure trove of cultural analysis, all coming in under 250 pages. Ortberg is as nimble a storyteller as they come, so the shifts from painful personal revelations to pithy observations about Lord Byron turn on a dime while still mostly feeling part of the same whole.