In the beginning was the rhythm. The rhythm was a row of buckets in the shapes of sounds. These sounds were syllables of different dimensions in weight or length: unstressed and stressed, or short, short, long. You tossed words into the rhythm from across the playing field. The playing field measured exactly the distance between your mouth and someone else’s ear.
It was a game. You might say, “I’m working on this,” or refer to a work-in-progress, or a book of poems as a “project,” or call a poet’s books “works” — but deep down, you knew this was different from waiting tables or preparing a PowerPoint for the quarterly meeting. That was work, and if you could get time off from it, you would play this game.
Yet adapting Agatha Christie as mass 21st-Century entertainment is not without its complications: they are products of the time they were written in, the mid-20th Century, and arguably reflect some unsavoury attitudes not least when it comes to racism, xenophobia and colonialism. The question is therefore: how do you translate and update Agatha Christie – or not – for the modern age?
But I am also delighted, in a different way, by authors whose books come out years and years apart. I’ve started to notice that having to wait six or ten years between books makes me think about those books in a different way. It’s not that I think a book that takes ten years to write is somehow more worthy than a book someone writes in two months (ugh). It’s simply that I have a different relationship with them, even before I pick them up.
Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart.
I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them.
Having a movie you love, I realized, isn’t only about you. Wayne’s World first bonded me to my best friend, made me realize how important she was to me, how we could play different roles but be in the same play. Years later, it made me fall in love with my father-in-law. It allowed me to appreciate his best qualities — his humor and attention and interest.
Sure, they sometimes get together for good (see: Jim and Pam on The Office), and sure, these relationships can eventually get a little exhausting as they go through their millionth iteration of the drama (uh, see: Ross and Rachel again). But the will-they, won’t-they is a TV staple for a reason. We love to see people fall in love, and TV loves a story that goes on and on and on (and on).
For me, however, TV has never topped the original will-they, won’t-they couple — Sam Malone and Diane Chambers from Cheers, the NBC sitcom that aired from 1982 to 1993.
If this book is a continued examination of Heti’s long-held obsessions — how to be and also how to make things; how to capture the texture of living without destroying your actual life — it is also a more mature take on those questions, more settled and retrospective. There’s more grief and earnestness, less sex. It feels both as thrillingly inventive as she’s ever been and also defiantly and satisfyingly middle-aged.
In Nigerian, “wahala” means trouble — an apt title for Nikki May’s highly entertaining debut that manages to be an insightful look at racism, classism, female friendship, heritage and jealousy, while straddling a fine line between a light mystery and a hard-edged novel.
Passionate, well written, and accessible, its story of the vigor, struggle, and fleeting success of seven immigrant women offers a counternarrative to conventional understandings of success and failure in the food world. One hopes that the book will stimulate further awareness of the deeply entrenched xenophobic prejudices that disadvantage immigrants in America.
As erected by Duncan, this set of thoughtful rhetorical signposts ushers the reader smoothly, even soothingly, along a fascinating, immensely pleasurable journey through previously uncharted terrain.
I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific. Torrents of rain
shirr the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps
soundlessly in her bed. Her áo dài of the whitest silk.