“The sense wasn’t physical at first,” he went on, “just this really nice, strong awareness of her. And then I had the distinct sensation of her arms around me and her leaning in close against my back. It was tactile and fantastic. I felt warm. I was completely calm and happy, smiling from ear to ear. That hardly ever happens to me.” His nervousness about the rain ebbed, and it occurred to him that Katharine was there to keep him safe on behalf of their two sons. She—her presence, her spirit—rode behind him for twenty minutes or so. “What I know is that it did not feel at all like a product of my imagination,” he said. “It felt external to me. It felt real.”
He wasn’t prepared to name what the experience pointed to: that he had been visited by my sister’s ghost. Like other secular North Americans, he is aware that we must uphold a certain paradigm and say “this cannot be.” After all, Doug considers himself a rationalist: the son of an engineer, himself an amateur astronomer. Nevertheless, the sensed presence mattered deeply to him. “It was,” he said, “a remarkable, indelible experience.”
Anyone who has worked in politics will testify that the story is a set text for candidates, their advisers and those who watch them. It is revered for teaching timeless and universal lessons about power and authority, when to assert it and when to show restraint. Many is the fast-talking aide – whether in Westminster or Washington – who will identify a weak link in the campaign team or around the cabinet table as Fredo, the middle Corleone son, or an emerging threat who must be dealt with as Moe Greene. I know of one UK politician who instructs all new staffers in the example of Amerigo Bonasera, the undertaker who opens the novel: the moral of his story is that the right favour to ask of someone is the favour that they can do and do well.
Yet it is difficulty that perhaps best exemplifies the medium’s strange overlap with modernist art. Difficulty is baked into video games, even when they’re easy, insofar as obstacles to progression are an essential part of the form. Moreover, in certain games, like in certain modernist works, difficulty can obtrude as the work’s defining feature. Here one might object that difficulty in games — say, that of guiding an anthropomorphic slab of meat through a maze of whirring blades in Super Meat Boy — is intellectually and aesthetically empty compared to that of parsing Gertrude Stein’s enigmatic repetitions or tracing T. S. Eliot’s classical allusions. Yet in fact, as Leonard Diepeveen notes in his cultural history The Difficulties of Modernism (2003), during its heyday modernism was often dogged by the critique that its difficulty was of a purely gamelike kind, akin to that of a crossword or picture puzzle. If gameplay challenge initially seems like a far cry from the difficulty of the modernist artwork — with its solemn claims of revealing fundamental truths about language and perception as such — history also licenses us to turn this distinction on its head, and to ask whether difficult games might reveal something about modernism.
Rather than chafing against isolation, though, Australians these days are more willing to smile in the mirror. Island living looks like a privilege when the world is pestilent. Those gnawing questions about travel, recession and the loss of global experience are being shoved down, below a more immediate appreciation for home and a search for silver linings.
Such a treat a bright blue sky is after a morning of gray in the Pacific Northwest. Even more special is when the equally bright white elongated clouds line up just so, creating a perfectly complimentary background of blue and white for a group of dark earthy green conifers, towering over unremarkable manmade structures and people too busy to pause and look upward to notice how proud they look, standing tall enough to pierce the clouds, without self-consciousness or apology. Theirs is a quiet kind of confidence, such an enviable quality. How wise they seem to me. How I admire them. But these are not my trees. Even after living with them for twenty years, they feel foreign, a constant visual reminder that this is my second home. My trees are two thousand miles away and don’t reach the clouds.
Our dream of belonging, so often viewed in recent years as nearing attainable, remains tantalizingly out of reach. On the other hand, it is that very striving that makes for the quintessential American story: the outsider who tries to make it big, gambling it all on a phantom target somewhere at the nexus of money, love, and esteem, like that shifting green light at the end of the dock in “The Great Gatsby.”
Susie Yang’s trenchant debut novel, “White Ivy,” about a young Chinese-American woman’s misguided quest to marry up and fit into the white East Coast upper class, recasts this classic narrative of the huckster and its dynamics of striving and disillusionment through a potent Asian-American lens.
Hungry is a story about food, class and families and the distance travelled between a terraced house in Carlisle and multimillion-pound London restaurants that quake at your arrival. Above all, it’s a gorgeous, unsentimental tribute to the relationship between Grace Dent and her father, George. It’s about the ways in which love is communicated in a working-class family that doesn’t do “touchy-feely” and what happens when a man who has never been one for intimate talk slowly slides out of reach into dementia.
Fueled with visions of giant tortoises
and blue-footed boobies, I lace up my boots.
A surprise snowstorm lurks just hours away;