“Godine at Fifty” amounts to an autobiography of sorts, the story of a book-making life, and also an elegy for a kind of publishing — beginning back when books were signed up by companies that were not part of huge conglomerates, still printed with hot metal and sold almost exclusively in brick-and-mortar stores — that is no longer possible.
“Did I emphasize the look of the books too much?” Godine said last month while spreading some books out on his dining room table. “Maybe. The text is what really matters — I know that. And that means the author matters. But so do binders and paper makers and typesetters and designers — all those unsung talents that go into making a book.”
At the heart of every black hole sits a problem. As they sizzle away into nothingness over the eons, they take with them a small piece of the Universe. Which, quite frankly, just isn't in the rule book.
It's a paradox the late Stephen Hawking left us with as a part of his revolutionary work on these monstrous objects, inspiring researchers to tinker with potential solutions for the better part of half a century.
Before I arrived in Japan, I was intoxicated by its tradition of wandering poets. They weren’t roaming around lakes and hills like Wordsworth, but proceeding along a rough, pointed path, in the way of Matsuo Basho. His most famous work—Narrow Road to the Interior—could suggest both the remote areas of northern Japan through which he was walking, and the inner terrain that the act of walking would awaken. Monks in the Zen tradition are called unsui—“drifting like clouds, flowing like water”—to enforce the sense that they follow Buddha on his daily path, sometimes quite literally as they walk around each morning with begging bowls, collecting food.
Wait — have I reasoned myself into a corner? Does this mean we can’t eat anything at all, or at least not without guilt? So much of morality is about legislating pleasure, either because it distracts you from what really matters or because it harms others. The harm in the case of the lavish meal is still unclear. When we decry the price of the golden steak, are we trying to shame diners into atoning by giving an equivalent sum to the poor? (At the opposite end of the debate, there are those who criticize people on public assistance for occasionally using food stamps to buy crab legs or birthday cakes, as if only the rich deserved such delights.) Is outrage a genuine weapon, an attempt to disrupt and correct the system, or is the best we can hope for a little more consciousness of the world’s ills and gratitude for one’s own privilege and dumb luck, as when parents exhort children to clean their plates because people elsewhere in the world are starving? Is it all performative?
I’ve arrived on my own lazy gardening philosophy: Try your best to reciprocate the contempt and indifference that nature has for you. When your bougainvilleas refuse to offer up their blooms despite your halfhearted efforts, regard them with the same mild, healthy disdain that you reserve for things that disappoint you, but are not really your problem.
Segura effectively balances the realities of Carmen's personal and professional challenges with the joy of creativity and friendship in a novel that manages to be thought-provoking and fun. The last ace in this deck is the consistent pacing and intensity of the plot; it's full of twists but free of red herrings. Secret Identity is a satisfying choice for lovers of comics, twentieth century historical fiction and mysteries that make you think.
“The story of one is the story of us all,” say the mushrooms. When I Sing, Mountains Dance, the second novel by Catalan writer and artist Irene Solà, is nothing if not inclusive: men, women, children, ghosts, witches, dogs, deer, mountains, clouds, even mushrooms, all get a chance to tell their tales.
Given the global influence of the rap, breakdancing, graffiti, and DJ culture that flowered in the South Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, one might guess that a work of scholarship about that place and time would focus on hip-hop. Bronx-born Peter L’Official, a literature professor at Bard, acknowledges that “hip-hop was, and is, the Bronx’s social novel for the ages”—and that Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, Jeff Chang, and others have already covered that ground. In his recent book, Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, he deliberately and skillfully reads the borough instead through novels, movies, art, journalism, and municipal records, looking to both unpack and undo its mythology. The result is a vibrant cultural history that gestures beyond the tropes of the boogie down and the burning metropolis, those pervasive narratives of cultural renaissance and urban neglect that have dogged the area for half a century.