When Wiseman’s face came onto my laptop screen for the first time, he appeared to be in a garret. In the background, I could make out rough-hewed ceiling beams, a window, a messy bookshelf. His friend and longtime Cambridge neighbor Christopher Ricks, the English literary scholar and critic, told me he’d once heard Wiseman described as a Jewish leprechaun. I could see it. The sly expression, the slightness of stature, the ears befitting a fable. We spoke for nearly two hours that day, and as the Parisian afternoon advanced, light began to pour through the window directly behind him, casting his face into ever-deepening shadow. Occasionally he would lean forward, silhouetting himself entirely but for some unruly wisps of gray hair, which glowed like a nimbus. I wondered if he’d framed the shot this way on purpose, the better to mask his expression whenever it suited him.
Dillon does not tout these as perfect examples of what sentences should do or be, but includes them because of his own affinity and admiration: “I knew at once that I had no general theory of the sentence, no prescriptive attitude towards the sentence, nor aspired to write its history. If I must (and I felt I must) write about my relationship with sentences, I would have to follow my instinct for the particular.” The book is a representative collection of sentences that have stuck with him, moved him, and in assembling it in this way, Dillon has eschewed what is sometimes called critical distance but which in reality is often a rejection of the ickiness of personal feeling or appreciation.
The latest entry in this increasingly crowded field is Lou Stoppard’s Pools from the house of lavish itself, Rizzoli. Like the editor of most such books, Stoppard is light of touch and low of word count, including just a few choice paragraphs to accompany photographs that are intended to speak for themselves. But what are they saying?
I read a lot of books, and I take chances on a lot of them: I’ll come across a promising review and take a plunge. The Kindle has made me more daring that way. The books are slightly less expensive, but more importantly, if I don’t like a book, I don’t have to deal with it physically — I simply move on to the next one I’ve downloaded.
In all this time, I’ve yet to encounter a single person who loves Arby’s like I do. I’ve celebrated birthdays at Arby’s — sincerely as a kid, and half-jokingly as an adult. I get the same thing just about every time: plain roast beef with curly fries on the side. When I worked as a cog in the machine of a Midtown office building, I would reward myself with a weekly pilgrimage to the Arby’s near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It’s the kind of nonplace that gets left out of reminiscences for a pre-quarantine world, but Arby’s is a blank space I find myself missing in these times: somewhere to just exist anonymously for a little bit, certain you’ll never run into anyone you know.
But of course, like so many other businesses, the La Cocina Municipal Market never did open this year. For the culinary industry, this wash of a year has meant massive financial losses and closings, but also the pause of long-in-the-works projects that, due to the pandemic, are now deferred indefinitely.
We used to look at the landscape through rose-tinted glasses. Quite literally – as Susan Owens makes clear in this evocative and crowded chronicle of the ways in which artists and writers have responded to the topography of the British Isles.