Asked to name the two most important things about Pinocchio, most Americans would answer: First, his nose grows when he lies, and second, he is a wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy. At this, Carlo Collodi would most likely shake his head. The 19th-century Italian author, who wrote the book that inspired the Disney movie and countless other adaptations (including the live-action reboot released last week and another version from the director Guillermo del Toro coming out later this year), saw his character very differently.
A radical political commentator who turned to children’s literature late in life, Collodi wrote a complex, unsettling novel—miles away from the morality tale that Pinocchio’s story has become. Collodi’s is a multilayered work of fiction that, although primarily aimed at young readers, is imbued with social criticism and pessimistic humor, and can be read, among other things, as an irreverent attack on established authority.
I’m at the Venice film festival, in a hyper-real city square, surrounded by lapping blue water and tourists who move in mysterious ways. There is a ginger cat here called Dorian who walks on his hind legs and speaks with a French accent. Dorian is showing us how to walk and turn and jump and crouch. He’s concerned by the tourist who can’t get herself off the ground. Dorian explains that if we ever get lost we should press the “respawn” button which will put us right back where we began. He sighs heavily and says: “Sooner or later everybody gets lost.”
It is the fear of getting lost – this terror of the unknown – that scares many punters away from Venice Immersive, which sits behind the big Mussolini-era casino that hosts the film festival proper. That and the boat ride, the headsets, the schedule, the stress. The movies on the main programme: they’re largely a known quantity. Whereas the “extended reality” exhibits out on VI island are almost too much to process; we lack even the grammar and the language to frame them. To misquote Bob Dylan, something is happening here – but no one, it seems, can definitively say what it is.
But these relatively portable, double electric breast pumps that make it possible to routinely, remotely provide breast milk have been around for only about 30 years.
Before they arrived in the 1990s—hidden away in discrete, business-professional cases—contraptions for expressing breast milk already had a long and fascinating story, one that stretches back thousands of years. This history reveals a checkered evolution of perplexing innovation, dubious medicine and shifting ideas of parenthood. Today, amidst infant formula shortages, new American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines to support breastfeeding for two years, the repeated failure of efforts like the proposed PUMP Act to safeguard pumping rights for workers and a spate of new laws severely limiting abortion access after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, pumping is poised to suck for more people than ever.
Over the last few decades, nearly every kind of fast food chain — local, regional and national — has set up in Ming’s epicenter. I’ve driven up and down that miracle mile of mass-marketed goodies dozens of times, watching lines of cars form in drive-thru lanes that appeared unique. Even so, I had a tough time identifying what was really happening.
A little more research uncovered that in recent years, Bakersfield — and Ming Avenue specifically — has become the proving ground for some of your newest fast food faves and (more often) near misses. And I’d been absent for all of them.
As I look at this quilt with its intricate details and workmanship, I see the framework that mirrors her life, a collection of scraps turned into a final entity of beauty. No shortcuts, just determination, and a double dose of hard work. For Ms. Ruth, failure was never an option, even though the road to success may have been the road less traveled, especially for a woman. She encountered many bumps, detours, and even some obstacles that required going back and starting over. Yet, she stayed focused and goal-oriented.
Fantasy has always been the province of the bored housewife. Over the monotonous passing of hours and days, she crafts escapist visions that wise readers know will never be realized. The dreaming, of course, is the point. In a life devoid of meaningful agency, these momentary detachments from reality offer a necessary pleasure. The question posed by Ling Ma’s speculative story collection, Bliss Montage, is: How long can fantasy really sustain you?
The header “NO” halts your progress, followed by “Wait, before they got to the hotel …” and the story rewinds like an old film strip. Then there’s another “NO.” And another. “Wait, go back behind the trailer,” you read, as the narrative is respooled, reconsidered and put back on course toward a revelation that takes your breath away.
It’s the sort of literary effect — technique intersecting theme to create epiphany — that writers tell their grandchildren about (or at least their grad students), and it’s a good example of why Means is considered a modern master of the art.
Telling the untold story is the heart of Natural History, and indeed all of the related collections and novels Barrett has written. In Ship Fever, the opening story, “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” creates space for invention around the lives and discoveries of scientists such as Gregor Mendel, comprehensively setting the tone for the collection, and features stories told successfully or unsuccessfully, told in a bid to connect or to be withheld. Natural History revolves around Henrietta Atkins, whose story, the book suggests, is one that needs to be told.
Not fruit but the moment before fruit. Not thought but the moment before thought.
The entire body poured into almost thinking it. What