It’s getting harder and harder to run a stoplight here, because there are fewer and fewer of them around. Every year, at intersections throughout this thriving city, traffic lights and stop signs have disappeared, replaced with roundabouts.
Lots and lots of roundabouts.
It supposedly had some of the best paella in Mallorca, Spain’s largest island. And my wife and I were determined to try it on a recent trip.
But the tiny, rustic eatery clings to a wind-swept, rocky promontory jutting into the western Mediterranean, a site so remote that you can only reach it by sea or on foot.
I’m frying the crackers this year, an adaptation I learned about from my colleague Alexandra Raij. I met her when she was a line cook at Prune, just a couple of years out of culinary school. Now she is a chef with her own restaurants and her own kids. She may not have invented the technique of frying crackers, which is a tradition in the American South, but she might be the first person to bring it to New York City — nutty, salty crisp saltines that she stacks next to her ceviches. Now that I’ve had them fried, I’ll never go back to “raw.” It’s one exhilarating change to a tradition that makes a lot of sense.
In that sense, The Anomaly is an entertaining philosophical critique, suggesting that nothing is as it seems, knowledge is imperfect, and the human predicament will perhaps always be more inexplicable than we can admit to ourselves. Le Tellier introduces a counter-factual context, but he does not seriously expect readers to accept a sci-fi answer to the problems he has posed. Rather, he wants to undercut our pride in human reason with a healthy dose of epistemological skepticism.
Sebald’s genius was to see the “fiction in facts,” Carole Angier writes in “Speak, Silence,” the first major biography of the author. Angier sets out to find the facts in the fiction. Interspersing chapters on Sebald’s life with essays that dissect his books, Angier canvasses virtually everything Sebald ever said and wrote about his childhood, his family, and his career, with the same kitchen-sink exhaustiveness that marked her biographies of Jean Rhys and Primo Levi. “I remind you of the truth,” Angier writes in her introduction. “It’s why writers don’t want biographers, and I know Sebald wouldn’t want me. But I would say to him, You’re wrong.” As the defensive tone suggests, Angier didn’t write the book without a fight.
The courier asked if I was back
but he knows I refuse to harvest.
I only collect, marred by yellow