Darnielle’s creative direction is a scholarly and practical one: all of his protagonists have to have jobs, because he doesn’t believe in writing characters that aren’t working, that aren’t like most of the adult world; he made an album of songs all derived from Bible verses; one section of Devil House is written entirely in Arthurian language, or, as he calls it, a “dimestore version of Middle English, but still a discursive, generous style of thought”; he conjures a comparison of true crime writers’ absorptions of real-life gore to the contemporary plights of Facebook content moderators.
But Darnielle’s work joins the likes of entertainers attempting to achieve crossover appeal, though he’s not entirely interested in having his music and novel-writing successes intersect. “My ideal situation is somebody who can’t stand my band but reads my book and says, ‘He’s a good writer, but I don’t care for his music,’” he told me over the phone, chuckling.
This sense of relinquishment — of setting aside reason to take up freedom — is what drives Phyllis and also works on her author in the middle of her late career: the freedom from having to polemicize and explain. “The great privilege of the novelist actually — which I believe quite strongly — is that at their best, [one] doesn’t actually need to take sides,” she says.
But in a business where the reinvention of classic dishes is commonplace, where does inspiration by another chef's work end and plagiarism begin?
Stuart Roosa, one of the Apollo 14 astronauts, took a small canvas bag of tree seeds with him on the journey. While his fellow astronauts walked on the lunar surface, Roosa and the seeds flew round and round the moon until the crew was ready to come back. A few years after the astronauts returned home, some of the seeds—sycamores, redwoods, pines, firs, and sweetgums—were planted across the United States, to see how they would grow, or simply to keep a piece of moon history close by.
When cocooned in the darkness for months on end, many on Antarctic expeditions have lost their minds. This is no surprise, especially for those experiencing it for the first time. It is not only dark, cold and claustrophobic, but being marooned on a mysterious land thousands of miles away from civilization can be difficult to get your head around. These pressures would take their toll on even the most hardened of individuals. Indeed, on the Belgica expedition, the crew succumbed to a mix of scurvy and “cabin fever.”
Even those on the Discovery who kept their sanity found the conditions difficult. As temperatures outside dropped to as low as minus 62 degrees Fahrenheit, most decided to stay on board, but even then, ice still formed on the cabin walls. In these uncomfortable conditions, many of the men grew homesick, while being trapped in the same place and seeing the same people, for months on end, quickly began to grate. Any natural tendency to irritation, depression, pessimism or worry was magnified and, in the absence of loved ones, the natural, indeed the safest, outlets for pent-up feelings were diaries and letters home. That’s human nature, and even more so on an expedition where sensibilities can become extreme.
Today, the waterway is more reminiscent of an oversize storm drain than a river, with just a slow trickle of water flowing down the center of the concrete-lined channel. The images it conjures for most people are the settings featured in famous movie scenes, like “Grease” or “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
But tucked in a little corner of Los Angeles, underneath the intersection of two highways, lies a neighborhood known as Frogtown — along with a small and lush section of the Los Angeles River.
More than 25 years later, Koi Palace Daly City is the restaurant group’s oldest property, a place where servers can split a whole fish among a table of eight with just one hand and wok cooks have committed hundreds of off-menu dishes to memory. But as the years have gone by, both the restaurant’s loyal customers and employees have grown older. Willy Ng worries that younger customers might feel uncomfortable in Koi Palace if they’re unfamiliar with Cantonese cuisine and the Chinese language. “You will feel like you are a stranger … think, ‘Maybe [Koi Palace] isn’t my place,’” he says.
So Willy Ng now faces a new challenge: making Cantonese cuisine that’s accessible to new generations of clientele, and reproducible without a classically trained kitchen staff. His solution? Sleek restaurants serving multicolored dumplings and a behind-the-scenes commissary kitchen powered by machinery and a staff of 60.
The Greyhound was escape and pursuit all in one — the old life in the rearview mirror, another brighter one ahead. This was especially true immediately after leaving the bus stations, which were unfailingly peopled with distressed, red-eyed women, and bristly jawed, ruined-looking men. To a person, they looked as though they clutched a switchblade inside their jacket pocket. Their eyes dared you to ask them the time.
The truth is, the glory days of the Greyhound were over long before they folded. The only thing I can ever remember the bus delivering to our little prairie town was my Granny once a year. By the time she arrived in Manitoba from Vancouver, even a seasoned Greyhounder like her looked as haggard and unshaven as the rest of the passengers.
“Vladimir” contains far too many uncomfortable truths to be merely fun, but — especially for those of us with feet in the worlds of academia and literature — it remains, by turns, cathartic, devious and terrifically entertaining.
“In this country there are always calamities, and it’s not hard to connect them to some life event,” the 100-year-old Violeta writes to a shadowy figure in Isabel Allende’s new novel. Violeta could as easily be describing the epistolary epic that frames her own life, which is also rife with calamity: the dissolution of a family fortune, a tempestuous marriage interspersed with love affairs, the machinations of family and friends over a century, all set against political upheaval in her homeland, an unnamed Latin American country.
One bright afternoon not long ago, Wendy Mitchell saw her father in her garden. She was inside with a mug of tea and he was standing on the lawn in his baggy green cardigan, smiling at her. She saw the yellow of his nicotine-stained fingers and the shine of his black, Brylcreemed hair. They stared at each other, happy to be together again. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone and the sunlit lawn was empty.
Her father had been dead for more than 20 years and the sighting of him through the glass door was simply one of the many visual hallucinations that ambush Mitchell: the escalator turns into a waterfall; a marble floor is a swimming pool; a patterned carpet writhes with creatures; a person dressed in black becomes a disembodied head floating on air. Seeing her dead father could have been scary, confusing or painfully distressing, but instead Mitchell accepted the trick that dementia was playing on her as a gift, a moment of grace.
From cave paintings to Toy Story, via expeditions to Egypt, Russian gulags and a hundred other directions that manage to be both weirdly relevant and usually fascinating, this is the physics and family history of everything that goes into images on screens.