It’s difficult to talk with Martin Riker and not feel hopeful. Not so much about the world; both of us are likely too old to presume to know what might come of society, the planet, human beings. But talking with him, and reading his new book, “The Guest Lecture,” lit me up in thrilling ways about all the possibilities still alive — at least for books.
Then again, books and life, ideas and the concrete, the imaginative and the practical, are not opposites for Riker or for his protagonist, Abby. “There’s a William Carlos Williams quote,” says Riker, speaking from his home in St. Louis, where he teaches writing at Washington University. “Something to the effect of, ‘Only the imagination can save us’. … As a young man, I wanted to tattoo it on my arm. But I decided that it needs to mean something practical. It can’t mean something just idealistic.”
The Literary Supplement of The Times came into being on January 17, 1902, a few days before the first anniversary of the death of Queen Victoria. It was conceived as a convenience, a bearer of excess baggage from the overloaded Times—“a makeshift.” The idea was to find a place for the increasing numbers of book reviews, with their accompanying column-length advertisements, now clogging up the pages of the newspaper. With a busy parliamentary session in prospect, the management wished to keep space free for debates about the conduct of the war in South Africa and related matters, such as the construction of the original concentration camps—an innovation of which The Times disapproved. Casting back in 1930, the TLS’s editor Bruce Richmond found it “almost a shock to look at the first number with its hesitating announcement that ‘During the ensuing session of Parliament’ a supplement dealing with books will be published”—during that session but not beyond. It is easy to assume now that continuation was certain from the start but, in fact, the Lit Supp, child of 1902, hadn’t a licence to survive into 1903.
When the parliamentary session closed, it was expected that the makeshift would close with it. Thanks to the manager of The Times, Charles Moberly Bell, however, the Supplement was discreetly steered into a second year. In his letter of 1930 to Mrs. Moberly Bell, Richmond remembered how it staggered past the final week of Parliament, “when your husband . . . immersed in graver troubles, seemed to have forgotten to stop it.
There are other luthiers with expertise in instruments from the Italian craftsman’s golden period, from 1700 to 1725, but master violin restorers are rare — around 20 worldwide now — and Becker is widely regarded as the best. At 64, he has worked on more than 120 Stradivarius violins — likely more, he says, than any other living person. David Fulton, a Seattle-based former software engineer and entrepreneur who once possessed the world’s largest collection of historic Cremonese instruments (named for the city where Stradivari and other renowned Italian luthiers worked) with 28, including eight Strads, entrusted Becker to care for them. (Fulton has since started selling off the bulk of them.) “He’s probably as fine a woodworker as lives on the planet today,” says Fulton. “Without men like him, these things would have decayed into splinters long ago.”
People travel from all over the globe to hand-deliver their instruments to Becker’s office, across the street from Grant Park. (When it comes to multimillion-dollar instruments, FedEx doesn’t cut it.) Once, says Becker, Nigel Kennedy, one of the most famous solo violinists of the 1980s, flew in from England for a day just so Becker could make him a new sound post, the small dowel that sits inside the violin and transfers vibrations from front to back. “He’s like a great surgeon,” says Bell. “His work is so meticulous. It’s like constructing a sailboat inside a bottle. There’s a reason I fly here to bring him my fiddle. He’s the master.”
Yet the joys of eating alone have been documented since ancient times, and I’m happy that it’s never occurred to me to think of solo dining as anything other than an ordinary act. The history of solo dining, particularly for women, hasn’t always been welcoming, and even now there are some best practices I’ve developed to help me do it well. But for me, eating alone in a restaurant is almost meditative, even if I’m just wolfing down a plate of pasta between meetings.
A history of Italian pasta can only start here, with the legendary fettuccine Alfredo. A very simple dish, with just three ingredients, that has been wildly successful: it turns up in over 800 American cookbooks published from 1933 to the present. So why will your Italian friends tell you they’ve never heard of the stuff?
What begins as a statement of absence transforms into a positive construction of an alternate world: one that questions our inherited sense of reality and shows how much we take for granted in our everyday lives.
It is worth spending time with this book for the introduction alone. The editor, Kaveh Akbar, is an Iranian in his early 30s. He is also a recovering alcoholic whose addiction came close to claiming his life. “When I was getting sober, I found no easy prayers, no poems to sing me well,” he says. Nonetheless, he read a great deal of poetry in that time because poetry was a safe place in which he was not going to do himself injury. It was a kind of gift. Poetry freed him from the burden of selfhood. He explains this beautifully.
Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel is immense. Not because it is inordinately long – it isn’t – but because it contains almost as much as its title promises: journeys that take years, and lives that span continents; falling empires and storied cities; so many wars they blur and merge in the characters’ memories; indelible loves, unbearable losses; dreams and songs and megalomaniac delusions; witty allusions, rude jokes. By turns lyrical and sardonic, it is as emotionally compelling as it is clever. I’ll be surprised if I enjoy a novel more this year.
In Ascension, Scottish writer Martin MacInnes’s ambitious third novel – his first, Infinite Ground, won the Somerset Maugham Award – is religious in just this sense. Sci-fi in the grand, world-scaling tradition, it’s concerned with first things, last things and everything in between; the messy pith of existence.
“City Under One Roof” dramatizes both the comforts and the risks of living in an insular community. By story’s end, most readers will probably agree that Point Mettier was a good place to visit, but few of us would ever want to live there.
Euclid had what we now call horror
of the infinite, that something—
anything—could simply go on &
on. The years I lived in bars were