I’m thinking about one of those default images now: the painted wheelchair symbol that marks out a disabled parking space at a supermarket car park, and the figure on that wheelchair. The stick person appears fused to the wheelchair, suggesting not just that a disabled person can be only a person who uses a wheelchair, but is someone who cannot be separated from it.
All cookbooks are to some degree aspirational, filled with recipes you won’t make. But you could, and that’s the allure: the instructions are printed right there. In general, though, a cookbook’s promise is at least ostensibly culinary, and your guide is the author, and the author is someone who knows about cooking, which is why they have written it.
Cookbooks tied to sitcoms that no longer exist are also aspirational, only the aspiration is to get as close as possible to fictional characters who never really existed in the first place.
At 86, Gregory remains a seeker. He took up painting in his 70s and started rehearsing “Hedda Gabler” at 82 — given his working pace, he remarks, it “could be ready for an audience in time for my 100th birthday.” The zest for living and working he displays throughout this vibrant memoir is a good indication that he’ll be around to give the opening night speech.
In other words, the questions posed by chastened regulators provoked political and historical questions that move us beyond a strictly economic imagination: Which histories bear on the present and why? What now is produced through crisis? What futures can be imagined and forged in its wake? Amin Samman’s History in Financial Times takes as its task “to elaborate and enact a philosophy of history fit for the world of contemporary global finance.” In doing so, it questions two mainstream economic assumptions.