IN THE FOREWORD to the 2004 Vintage edition of “Jazz” (1992), Toni Morrison writes that it was her body that started the book — that the first lines, like so much of the best music, were born of a physical expression of frustration. She’d already picked a time period and mapped out a plot, “read issues of every ‘Colored’ newspaper I could for the year 1926” and knew each character as well as an old tattoo, but she couldn’t “locate the voice, or position the eye.” How could the narrator elude her when the story was so clear? “I know this woman!” she kept thinking. “Angered by my inability to summon suitable language,” she writes, “I threw my pencil on the floor, sucked my teeth in disgust.” Sth.
“So that’s what I wrote” she says, and it became the novel’s first line.
When William Wong took over his in-laws’ Chinese restaurant in 1958, his vision for the place was boundless. He imagined an escapist fantasy in Saugus, on a colossal scale, unlike anything the Boston area had ever seen.
Inspired by his Hawaiian honeymoon, and eager to capitalize on America’s postwar fascination with the South Seas, William would over the next few decades transform the humble eatery into a Technicolor Polynesian paradise, big enough to seat 1,200 guests. He outfitted it with faux palm trees, gurgling fountains, and ceiling lights that mimicked the night sky. He installed a mural of a dazzling volcanic lagoon in one of the dining rooms; in another, he lodged a replica of a ship.
He renamed the restaurant Kowloon, in homage to the Hong Kong peninsula where he began his safe passage to the United States from China in 1939, amid the Second Sino-Japanese War.
On a recent Sunday morning, Sonoko Sakai, the Los Angeles-based cooking teacher, gathered up her 12 students in the front room of her home and dropped a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of dough onto the floor. She slipped off her shoes — she had gotten a pedicure for the occasion — and started to stomp on the bag. Sakai is an expert on Japanese noodle-making; “everyone” in Japan steps on their dough to knead it, she explained. Her specialty is soba-making, which she called “a restorative art,” but today the class focused on ramen, which would form the base of a cold noodle dish called hiyashi chuka. “Ramen is fun,” Sakai said.
After the demonstration, the students kicked off their own shoes, revealing at least one pair of dinosaur socks, and began their own more tentative stomping. Working noodle dough with your feet is a unique textural experience the bag is a little slippery, and the dough is soft but also unyielding. Giddiness welled in the room, along with a feeling of catharsis. “This would have been really great a few weeks into the pandemic,” one student observed. “If I could have gotten flour,” another replied. But clearly a large part of the fun was the one thing no one would have done during the early pandemic — gathering in a room to stomp on the dough together.
That's because bacalhau – or salt cod – which sits at the heart of all these dishes, runs deep through Portugal's culinary identity, with the country consuming 20% of the world's supply. In fact, so central to Portuguese hearts (and stomachs) is this ingredient, that the saying goes "there are 365 ways to prepare salted cod, one for each day of the year".
But for a fish that is found only in the icy depths of the North Atlantic Ocean – far from Portugal's shores – the country's love affair with salt cod is a puzzling one. How exactly did it end up on Portuguese plates? The answer is wrapped up in more than 500 years of intriguing history.
Your monstera is boring. The pothos hanging from your bookshelf? Yawn. That windowsill cactus collection is, at best, a solid meh. Anyone can grow houseplants that absorb nutrients from the soil, energy from the sun, etc. But if your plants don’t consume insect flesh in a gut-sucking display of evolutionary brutality, let’s face it: Your collection is basic. To turn your mild-leafed menagerie into the ultimate selfie background, what you need is a Nepenthes.
Haunted houses are liminal spaces by design, the boundary between life and afterlife blurred and the line between truth and imagination called into question within. But the most effective haunted houses in literature blur even more lines—between past and present, and memory and reality. Throughout Lucy Wood’s debut novel, Weathering, even the boundaries between physical spaces are challenged as the distinction between the house Ada inherits from her dead mother, Pearl, and the river outside it becomes less concrete. This blurring frames the lives of the book’s three main characters: as Ada and her six-year-old daughter, Pepper, spend more time in the house and around the river, their experiences not only overlap with and repeat Pearl’s life, but also intersect with Pearl’s ghost.
The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. “Fast” is a convenient example: People run fast, but they can also stand fast, i.e., stay in place. Probably the most famous Janus word is “cleave,” which means both to chop in two and to bind. “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers,” the King James has it, but then, in another place, “the clods cleave fast together.” Beware, though: The two meanings descend from separate Old English verbs, clíofan and clífan. You are using a different word when you say “cleave” to mean “split” than when you use it to mean “fuse.” Janusness is slippery this way.
The experience of reading Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, “The Passenger” — alongside its twisted sister, “Stella Maris,” which comes out later this year — kept making me think about the word “portentous.” Not finding this word identified as a Janus anywhere, I hereby nominate it for candidacy. “Portentous,” according to Webster’s, can mean foreboding, “eliciting amazement” and “being a grave or serious matter.” But it can also mean “self-consciously solemn” and “ponderously excessive.” It contains its own yin-yang of success and failure. Applied to prose, it can mean that a writer has attained a genuinely prophetic, doom-laden gravitas, or that the writing goes after those very qualities and doesn’t get there, winding up pretentious. McCarthy has always been willing to balance on this fence. There is bravery involved, especially at heights of style where the difference can be between greatness and straight badness. He teeters more in these new books than in the several novels for which he is judged a great American writer.
A slow burn needs a compelling character to hold the reader’s interest, and White has created an especially unnerving and memorable one in Aoileann.
The most revolutionary and influential poem of the last 100 years was written by an American banker in the City of London. When TS Eliot published “The Waste Land”, his forbiddingly difficult work in five parts — full of parody, pastiche and allusion — in 1922, Time magazine wondered whether it was a hoax. One London reviewer said of its bewildering modernist techniques: “A grunt would serve equally well.” By contrast, New York’s Dial magazine declared: “The poem is — in spite of its lack of structural unity — simply one triumph after another.” It would be reviled by some but also become one of the most admired and imitated works of literature ever written.
Two books celebrating the centenary of “The Waste Land” bring new biographical research to interpretation of Eliot’s achievements and reveal how troubled relationships with women are woven into his enigmatic poetry. Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem revives the enduring fascination of Eliot’s masterpiece. The second volume of Robert Crawford’s biography, Eliot After The Waste Land, completes the story he began in Young Eliot (2016) and is the first book to draw extensively upon a dramatic cache of letters to Emily Hale that was unsealed in 2020.
the more you listen to it—emerges. Blue