It is interesting that two groups, musicians and the clergy, have been re-examining the implications of their traditional costumes in recent decades. Since the Second Vatican Council, priests and members of religious orders have changed the way they dress. Almost no nuns today still wear traditional habits, and many musicians, particularly soloists, have stopped wearing the white tie and tails that were de rigueur for so many years.
Both groups now desire a greater informality and have expressed this through dress reform. But are we better musicians or priests if we wear a particular costume?
Writers lead pretty solitary lives – working alone more or less comes with the turf – and those who write about their, and our, tea are no exception. According to Diana Henry, a leading light of the modern genre, perhaps the single most important aspect of cooking for one is to view it as an opportunity: “You don’t have to please anyone but yourself,” she says, “and that’s a real bonus. And plan your meals for the week, so you have things to look forward to.”
Ladies, picture this: you’ve come home from a long day of work and a commute which you spent scrolling through a wasteland of garbage takes about the US primaries, climate change, neoliberalism, and what makes the perfect woman. Your partner is already at home, curled up on the sofa with a book. He has not put the water on to boil like you asked because he was too engrossed in reading Normal People. Over dinner, he wants to discuss the book, and also have you read that 10,000-word essay in the New Yorker about prison abolition that he sent you last week yet? He moans loudly about the fact that Love Island is back on TV; “why do people enjoy watching brain-dead idiots with plastic surgery sit around all day?” he scoffs, as you daydream about leaving this man and a new life spent running your tongue up and down one of the 21-year-old-contestant’s rock-hard abs. You imagine a different, simpler life… one spent alongside a man who can’t read.
In Good Boys, Megan Fernandes’s second volume of poetry, Fernandes considers the many ways that one can be “good.” In poems that fizz with both irony and vulnerability, Fernandes points out that sometimes being “good” simply means being obedient, the way we say Good boy! to a well-trained and affectionate pet. Yet, the poems also remind us that it can be dangerous to consider submission a form of love.
“Study Bach,” Johannes Brahms wrote. “There you will find everything.” This advice has endured for good reason. When listening to Johann Sebastian Bach’s astonishing creativity, which appears to be routed in many disciplines, we hear and feel what it is to be human. In Philip Kennicott’s immensely moving memoir, “Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning,” The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic dissects Bach’s complexities while excavating difficult emotions at the time of his mother’s death. As Kennicott grieves, he decides to finally learn the formidable Goldberg Variations, arguably Bach’s most important keyboard work. Throughout this process, the author seeks to understand who his mother really was; how she loved him, failed him and shaped him during his childhood in Schenectady, N.Y. With gorgeous prose and granular inspection, Kennicott has created a subtle and profound portrait of love, loss and the human condition.