In a field observation for our course, my niece and I hunted for something colorful so that we could try making color notations, recording hue and shade of color. We looked at familiar purple shoots of sea kale. Trying to replicate their color is the first time that I’ve noticed the white powdery bloom that dusts their surface, even though I watch them emerge every spring. Drawing sea kale made me see it more clearly.
Words we attach to the acts of drawing and photographing are different. We make a drawing but take a photograph. Taking a photograph is removal — from the scene and in taking something away with you. Looking into a viewfinder puts a camera between you and your surroundings. In contrast drawing or painting leaves room for people to see what you are capturing, and places you within the scene.
“I’m sending you money to buy rice,” my mom texted me in early March. She had gone to the West Coast to help my sister with her new baby and stayed when it became too risky to fly. As news of the coronavirus intensified, so did her fretting.
“I don’t need money,” I texted back. “Also, I have plenty of rice.”
“No, you have an American amount of rice,” she replied. “Go get the biggest bag you can find.”
“Conditional citizens are people who know what it is like for a country to embrace you with one arm, and push you away with the other,” writes Laila Lalami in her meditation on national belonging. I read Conditional Citizens as a first-generation immigrant, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who has been teased for being “a commie” and “a Russian spy” but also complimented on successful assimilation by those who knew nothing of the process. I read Conditional Citizens while holed up in my apartment, immunocompromised and afraid of catching or spreading the novel coronavirus. I read Conditional Citizens as a break from scrolling through social media feeds and learning about ordinary individuals who couldn’t get tested until it was too late, while celebrities got diagnosed and treated. I saw the president lean hard into racism and xenophobia, repeatedly saying “Chinese virus,” and thus tacitly encouraging harassment and violence against Asian Americans. As Matthew Lee observes, the switch from “model minority” to “yellow peril” can happen swiftly and painfully in the United States. This is why books like Conditional Citizens are important. They remind us that the dichotomy of citizen and non-citizen is too facile. Even legal citizenship does not guarantee cultural citizenship, equality under the law, or safety from state brutality.
The Bathroom expresses the absurdity of life: that disorder and randomness prevail. The narrator, staring out of his window at a downpour, watches one raindrop as it falls from the sky; he traces its path, calmly awaiting the moment it splatters against the pavement. The novel presses on the illusion that life gets you somewhere—and behind it we find the reality that life leads only to death, that existence eventually hits up against its opposite. We move like raindrops, hurtling toward the ground, and end in immobility. Whatever meaning exists is our own creation, and we can choose whether or not to worship it.
I know now that I can’t trust life to continue at a particular pace in the same way I can’t trust Amtrak to arrive at a destination on time. It’s futile to move to my couch and plead with the world to stop spinning around me, some facsimile of Dorothy in the tornado. I can’t be promised safety. Every moment, I am vulnerable to depression, a pandemic, my train whining to a pause. No writer, not Toussaint or myself, can truly assume authorial control—for even when we try, we are thwarted by a word’s unruliness, by a number out of order, by a life that rejects reason.
In all its years, the Survey of London has never before accorded an entire volume to a single road. Oxford Street stretches for more than a mile and exhibits, as editor Andrew Saint writes in his lively and erudite introduction, nothing so much as “persistent incoherence”. London’s most famous street, if not the most elegant, has been indulging shopping preferences and fashion fads for more than two centuries. Vogue magazine’s fictional Mrs Exeter might, in the 1950s, have favoured Bond Street, where she window shopped and dreamed expensively, but Oxford Street was already well established as the province of “that increasingly exuberant pair, Mr and Mrs Everyman”. The street and its environs, under the intense scrutiny of Saint and his colleagues, reveals itself as a kind of diorama, demonstrably thriving one moment, jaded and playing catch-up the next.
There’s a whole world in every tree, says Jonathan Drori. Travelling eastwards from his London home, he chooses 80 trees from the 60,000 or so species on the planet. He starts with the London Plane, “a tree of pomp and circumstance”, first planted in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, in 1789. A hybrid of the American sycamore and the Oriental plane, they have set an example to urban planners around the world.
It was the thought that —
if you could watch, if I could leak to the public the film of when I needed to reach you —
that would be one way.