A paradox defines writing: The public sees writers mainly in their victories but their lives are spent mostly in defeat. I suppose that’s why, in the rare moments of triumph, writers always look a little out of place — posing in magazine profiles in their half-considered outfits with their last-minute hair; desperately re-upping their most positive reviews on Instagram; or, at the ceremonies for writing prizes — the Oscars for lumpy people — grinning like recently released prisoners readjusting to society.
Some archaeologists believe that when future civilizations sort through the debris of our modern era, we won’t be defined by the skyscraper, the iPhone, or the automobile, but rather something humbler: the chicken bone.
The reason? We eat so many chickens. So, so many. In 2020 alone, people around the world consumed over 70 billion of them, up from 8 billion in 1965. On Sunday alone, Americans will likely eat a record-breaking 1.45 billion chicken wings as they watch the Eagles take on the Chiefs at Super Bowl LVII. And that makes it all the more astonishing that, according to chicken industry lore, the system that makes it possible for us to eat so much chicken in the first place originated with a minor clerical error.
With the Super Bowl at hand, behold the cheerful untruth that has been perpetrated upon (and generally with the blessing of) the chicken-consuming citizens of the United States on menus across the land: a “boneless wing” that isn’t a wing at all.
Odds are you already knew that — though spot checks over the past year at a smattering of wing joints (see what we did there?) suggest that a healthy amount of Americans don’t. But those little white-meat nuggets, tasty as they may be, offer a glimpse into how things are marketed, how people believe them — and whether it matters to anyone but the chicken.
The 11 autobiographical essays (six old, five new) collected in Haruki Murakami’s splendid second memoir of sorts, Novelist as a Vocation, are not meant to comprise a general guidebook on how to write novels but, rather, a key that illuminates his individual process. It is neither a self-help book nor a manual on fiction writing. As he states in the foreword, it is a “comprehensive look (at the present time) of [his] views on writing novels.” The book, published in Japan in 2015 and now available in an English translation by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, began as a series of “undelivered speeches” and became a record of his “thoughts and feelings.” Yet, despite significant changes in personal and societal circumstances (including the pandemic), his “fundamental stance and way of thinking have hardly changed at all.”