The most plentiful items in the canal – other than wine bottles and mobile phones – were bicycles. Nine years earlier, in 2007, Paris had launched a bike-share scheme, Vélib’, in which 14,500 rental bicycles were introduced across the city. As the waters were drawn off, the skeletal forms of dozens of Vélib’ cruisers could be seen half-buried in the sludge on the canal floor. There were scores of other bikes, too, of various makes and vintages, some of which appeared to have been maimed before being sent to their watery grave. There were bikes with bent and twisted wheels, or no wheels at all. There were bikes whose wheels and frames were intact but whose stems and handlebars were missing: headless corpses.
So we went out to see how dire the newspaper-acquisition situation really is. There are 276 licensed newsstands left in Manhattan, according to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, with more than half of those between 14th and 59th Streets. On a recent summer day, though, roughly half of the stands in Gramercy and Chelsea were closed, even on arteries like 23rd. They’re not being replaced, either: There were 66 applications for newsstand licenses in 2019, but fewer than 20 every year since. The dedicated news store (like Casa Magazines on 12th Street and Eighth Avenue, or Newspapers on 23rd, which stocks Chinese-, Spanish-, and Greek-language newspapers as well as the Jewish Press and the Irish Voice) is nearly extinct.
If newspapers-on-newsprint are in decline, then newspapers-delivered-by-kids-on-bikes seem like a relic of the even-more-distant past. But no one seems to know exactly how recently they disappeared.
The five stories in Banana Yoshimoto’s collection “Dead-End Memories” — first published in Japan in 2003, it is her 11th book to be translated into English — are strange, melancholy and beautiful. At the center of each is a woman negotiating the quiet fallout of personal history.
The British scholar Graham Robb is a modern-day “rooster to donkey” impresario. He is the kind of writer you want to sit down with over a fine Armagnac and say, “Tell me your best stories about France.”
In “France: An Adventure History,” Robb does just that. With joy, curiosity and more than a dash of ambition, he brings 2,000 years of French history to life, escorting readers from Gaul all the way to the eve of the pandemic. As a historian, Robb buries himself in national and local archives. As a vacuum cleaner of contemporary detail, he chronicles events by collecting whatever he can find: video footage, politicians’ speeches, press commentary, photographs, travel brochures, caricatures, street graffiti.
Words slip away; sentences are left unfinished. We are in the mind not only of the poet's mother but of the poet himself. Quite often, and this is deliberate, the precise location of the speaker is not clear. There are works which are monologues from the mother and others which are from the poet. Still others replicate the frustrating dialogues which inevitably are also part of the disease.