Writers from abroad were astounded by the sheer amount of ice that could be found in the country. When Charles Dickens visited the young republic in 1842, he gawked at the American “icehouses [filled] to the very throat” and “the mounds of ices” that Americans ate in hot weather. (Interestingly, ice doesn’t appear much in the English novelist’s work, either as an element or as metaphor.
Perhaps that’s because, after this first visit, he wrote American Notes for General Circulation and the spent twenty years wanting nothing to do with Americans—not because of their obsession with ice, but because of what he saw as their obsession with money.)
The seventh point on the waiver I had to sign was “Please do not throw or toss food into anyone’s mouth, plate, etc.” I felt cheated: This was the implicit promise of Benihana — Japanese Steakhouse and Place Where I Would Learn How to Flip a Shrimp Into My Friend’s Mouth. But I signed, and my apprenticeship began.
I can’t remember the first time I went to a teppanyaki steakhouse, but like many Americans, I have an obsession with this specific form of dinner theater: A chef expertly flips his spatulas (it’s always a man), tosses steak, and makes a flaming volcano out of stacked onion rounds before a willingly captive audience of diners seated around an impossibly hot slab of metal. When I was a child, it felt like the circus to me. In adulthood, with the addition of tiki drinks and sake bombs, it’s become a campy indulgence, its invitation always prefaced by an OMG wouldn’t it be fun? In that way, it’s also become a bellwether of camaraderie: If you think it wouldn’t be fun, or if you think you’re too good for the restaurant Tyrese has in his backyard, you’re not good enough for me.
One of environmentalism’s great challenges is not scientific but literary. The forces rendering our world uninhabitable can seem catastrophically intangible. How, then, are we to overcome our imaginative incapacity and conjure up their terrors and imminent dangers? “It has been suggested that one reason so many of us are attracted to disaster movies … is because they offer ways to visualize, and perhaps prepare for, such events ourselves,” writes journalist John Vaillant in “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World.” His book appeals for much the same reason — but the cataclysms for which it prepares us are not fictions.
This book walks a very delicate path very well. It shows a working class which was multifarious. The references to Covid somehow fit, in terms of indoors, outdoors, freedom and entitlement. There are – a modern phenomenon – snapshots and old photographs, but these do give a sense of transience. The recent past sometimes seems long ago. I do not know if unpolemic is a word, but I admire that Smith has written something which does not reduce the world to easy answers but revels in its difficulty.