What surprised me most wasn’t how difficult this was. I was surprised because it was familiar. It turned out I was already used to living in this gap, stuck in that silence between thoughts and words. Grief had already taken my ability to speak, to write, to be me, and it was a language I’d had to learn alone; I hadn’t had someone to practice with me.
Most of my books are in good condition because I am careful. I don't write in them (anymore). I don't break the spine (at least, not on purpose). I don't drop them into the tub nor dog-ear the pages.
That said, I have a number of books that are falling apart, ripped and torn, drawn in and beat up. I could easily replace them, and yet I don't. They are among the books I love the most, perhaps because each rip and scribble tells a story.
At 62, Grey is ready to take control of a narrative that has been in the public domain for so long, it has achieved mythological status. As recently as 2007, this newspaper referred to “Jennifer Grey syndrome” — the phenomenon of too-aggressive plastic surgery — as if everyone is in on the joke. How long must one woman pay for a personal decision? Why should any human being be boiled down to a punchline?
In the 1963 film Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor's Egyptian queen rejects an invitation from Marc Anthony's envoy, while sitting naked in a milky flower-filled bath, idly toying with a golden boat. The film may have had its issues – famously, the spats between Taylor and her co-star lover Richard Burton – but the iconography is familiar: in ancient Egypt, queens and goddesses were renowned for their power and sensuality, for their deep associations with the natural world, and with motherhood and healing. Taylor's Cleopatra is frequently shown bathing and being pampered, as she would have been in real life: the beauty rituals of wealthy ancient Egyptians were lengthy and complicated, beginning with long milk baths infused with saffron oil.
Neither element was accidental: the lactic acid in milk would have helped exfoliate the skin, while saffron has been used to treat a variety of conditions for thousands of years. The spice is carefully harvested from the orange stigmas of the purple Crocus sativus flower. Grown in the hot dry belt of land that runs from Spain in the west to Kashmir in the east, the spice is known as "red gold" for the intensity and price of its production. Flowers must be picked at dawn by hand, and those thin threads delicately scraped. It takes almost 5,000 flowers to yield just one ounce of saffron threads. Prices are already high and, as climate change threatens farming, they're set to go higher.
In his newest collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, Ocean Vuong masterfully eludes this obstacle. The poet’s language recognizes the trauma of death, but also revels in the glory of life . In this book, Vuong grieves the loss of his mother, but he also celebrates her existence. His strategy is to focus on the small moments in life that give our closest relationships their meaning.
Following the lesson of negative theology, the best way to begin explaining what this book is would be to say what it is not. It is neither a work of traditional art history nor one of literary critical reading. Nor is it a work in the history of ideas, notwithstanding its astonishing erudition. Drawing on all these methods and approaches — and with extraordinary attention to language and style — Paper Graveyards amounts to something truly interdisciplinary. None of the disciplines Cadava draws on is summoned as a mere superfluous illustration of the argument; each is interlaced with the arguments and logic of other disciplines. This is a most challenging way to think, requiring knowledge not only of how different epistemes approach the same question or object, but also how one might fuse those different approaches into a seamless and compelling argument.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh wanted to leave behind her hometown of Derry, Ireland from the start. She grew up in a fractured household with a Catholic mother and Protestant father – an abnormal pairing in the Irish community at the height of the Troubles. Her family home in the Protestant Waterside area shattered into pieces by a petrol bomb one night, causing ní Dochartaigh’s family to escape to new towns. Most of ní Dochartaigh’s life has been an attempt to suppress memories of conflict and danger, and her coping mechanism became the observance of natural forces and suspension into Irish folklore culture. Ní Dochartaigh’s memoir Thin Places tells of how her early days growing up in the Troubles pushed her to flee Ireland, and how finding “thin places” in nature healed her own perceptions of a homeland that was ruptured by religious and ethnic tensions.
On the corner of Boyd and Fox streets in Portland, a mural depicts a classic winter landscape with the message, in large letters formed by chunks of ice: STAY POSITIVE. It was a useful, if serendipitous, admonition as I came to the end of Porter Fox’s book about climate change, “The Last Winter.” In the face of the terrifying statistics that he cites page after page, positivity, if not optimism, is the only way.
Think about the changing climate in terms of seasons, a leading glaciologist tells Fox. Summer is overtaking winter; spring is coming earlier and earlier, permanently shrinking the cryosphere, that world of mountain glaciers and continental ice sheets. This was what drew the attention of the author, a life-long skier, to the dire threat of global warming.
This is what I wanted, isn’t it? This house, quiet
as sunlight, grass on the other side of these windows