Yesterday’s hike was rough, but the 15 miles today were raw pain. The mosquitoes were so vicious that by mile two even our local guides had asked to borrow our 100 percent deet. Bugs here suck down lesser repellent like an aperitif. Nothing provides complete protection.
Our destination is La Danta, one of the largest pyramids on earth. It’s located in the ruins of El Mirador, a centerpiece of Maya civilization from 800 B.C.E. to 100 C.E. that was abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago. There are no restrooms, no gift shops. In fact, the site is still being excavated.
This is where Angela and Suley want to get married. So, accompanied by a pair of guides, a half-dozen pack donkeys, and their ten toughest (or least informed) friends, the brides are determined to march us 60 miles over five days through Parque Nacional El Mirador in northern Guatemala to La Danta to say “I do.” It’s our second night on the trail.
A messenger arrives with bad news. (The messenger is wearing a double-breasted suit jacket and wields a thin cigar.) “Painting,” he says, “is dead.” The artist panics, throws his hog-hair brushes into the fire and starts fiddling with devices, heavy metals, ideas. He’s heard rumors before but now painting is really dead, it’s terminal, the situation is so dire that someone is saying they’ve painted the “last paintings” anyone can paint. The artist looks out over the vast and blighted landscape of culture and sees painting everywhere surrounded by the carnage of itself, squirming and dying on screens, more confused and ugly than ever, the word “beauty” a distant memory.
When Linn became blind when he was 11 years old, he soon realized he took more pleasure from restaurants than he did from his other passions. He lost his vision in the early 1980s, between the release of the second and third Star Wars films, and he was struck by how disappointing the cinematic experience was as a blind person: “Ewoks just aren’t that cool when you’re blind,” he says. But a good restaurant was still a revelation. “Eating a fantastic manchego, or pancetta,” he says, “you put it in your mouth and it explodes.” On a recent trip to Crete, he and his wife went on a dining tour. “I’ve never liked honey that much, but this was real honey,” he says, his voice caramelizing with the memory. “It was almost a liquid.”
The biggest problem for a blind diner has very little to do with any mechanical or logistical difficulty of blindness, and instead centers on the condescending, exclusionary, or simply ignorant attitudes and behaviors of sighted people.
Since June, Rauwerda, of New York’s Brooklyn borough, has been making a “perpetual stew” in her apartment and documenting it online. She’s also invited others to join in, hosting free “stew tastings” attended by as many as 200 Brooklyn residents, who sign up in advance on Rauwerda’s website and agree to bring an ingredient of their choice. If their name is Stew or Stu, they’ll be anointed a guest of honor.
A perpetual stew gets topped up with new broth and ingredients when it runs low rather than being dumped down the drain. The dish’s dubious origins are often traced to medieval European cuisine, though the concept better resembles certain Asian broth recipes. Regardless, intrepid cooks have put their own spins on the perpetual stew. Rauwerda’s is vegan and made in a Crock-Pot, she said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Toward the end of my teens, it began to dawn on me that my face was probably fully formed. That no radical change was forthcoming. That even back when I still held out hope, my features were meanwhile settling, treacherous, into a mediocrity which surprised, humiliated, crushed me. In other words, I was not going to be any great beauty. I was only going to be what I was: attractive occasionally, like most people, relative to whoever happened to stand nearby. I was horrified; I couldn’t get over it. Being average-looking is, by definition, completely normal. Why hadn’t anyone prepared me for it?
I could not have discovered I was plain without discovering K was pretty. She is my friend of many years. Back then, it obsesses me: how we make each other exist. We attend elementary school together, then high school. She enrolls at a nearby college. Her tall grants me my short; my plump her skinny; her leonine features my pedestrian ones. I resent her as much as I exult in her company. In between us, and without words for it, the female universe dilates, a continuum whose comparative alchemy seems designed to confront me, make me suffer, lift her up. Her protagonism diminishes me, or does it? I confuse myself for a long time thinking I am the planet, and K is the sun. It takes me a long time to forgive her.
In 1907, an unrelenting rainstorm hit the fictional town of Hosh Hanna, triggering a massive flood that swept through its streets. The flood took everything with it: houses collapsed, livestock died, and all but two people, who desperately clung to a walnut tree, drowned. The story of the flood that swallows this small Syrian town outside Aleppo opens Khaled Khalifa’s latest novel, No One Prayed Over Their Graves, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. But the flood is just one of many currents that wash through the area, and the others—the twilight days of a decaying empire, budding nationalisms, liberalism, and the grip of religious fervor, to name a few—claim just as many lives over the course of the novel.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exuberant circus of a novel, action-packed and expansive, almost too much to process. It plays out in a dystopian US just a shuffle-step from the norm, where predominantly Black prisoners fight not just for the entertainment of a primetime TV audience but, indirectly, for the reader’s benefit too. The narrative explodes in all directions. The tale at the centre is sometimes obscured. The book is unruly and knowingly compromised but it comes fuelled by a sense of thrilling, righteous rage.
What at first feels like another “2001: A Space Odyssey” turns out to be so much more. Kitasei has a few tricks up her sleeve, as well as an amazing talent for description — reading “The Deep Sky” is like watching a 4D movie, all senses engaged.
“The Deep Sky” is a smart, emotionally mature, quick-paced climate fiction space whodunit that I already wanted to read again before I even finished it.
In the hospital coffee shop the glass
doors open and close on the past,
open and close on the future and all
one wonders about in a hospital.