We went around the table introducing ourselves. When my turn came: “Hi, I’m Greg Zimmerman and I actually work here at StoryStudio. I’ve been here about a year. I haven’t written fiction in a long time. I’m excited to be in this class, but also really nervous.”
What if this class went poorly? If it did, how could I look my StoryStudio co-workers, many of them accomplished writers, in the eye? What if I scribbled some drivel and the instructor reported back, “Hey, you know that guy you hired last year? He’s not it.”
This brings us back to where we started: the affinities between a certain kind of modern architecture and a certain kind of classicism, both of which are equally committed to the same polluting, carbon-intensive construction technologies and global capital flows. Today, in the context of the climate crisis, concerns with style hide more urgent concerns about construction and materials. It is not just tedious but actively dangerous to carry on building in the old way, whether that’s concrete frames dressed in titanium or coated in neo-Georgian stock brick. So, is there an alternative?
As a result of Wang's mental state, his questions about the hatch, and the general unease that some Shuttle commanders had toward payload specialists not being full members of a crew, it's reasonable to conclude that Overmyer was concerned about Wang opening the hatch. This was relatively easy to do. After learning a hard lesson regarding cabin pressure and complicated locking mechanisms in the Apollo 1 fire, NASA had designed the Shuttle hatch to open outward. It was a relatively simple procedure, requiring little physical force, as the hatch opened into the vacuum of outer space. Overmyer was clearly concerned. So he put duct tape on the hatch as a stop-gap.
James makes a virtue of her story’s artifice because the historical setting is a lens through which to examine contemporary debates about the legacy of colonialism, particularly as it relates to plundered treasures. The title is made explicit in the name of a card game Jehanne plays with the elderly and canny Lady Selwyn, but throughout the novel, objects and people are appropriated by the powerful, in a world where “race is the final ranking”. Loot is a vivid and witty reimagining of an episode of history that continues to shape the present, and the ways we think about art, identity and ownership.
A man once came up to Pablo Picasso in a railway compartment. Why, he asked, did the Spaniard not paint people as they really are? “What do you mean?” asked Picasso. The man produced a photograph from his wallet and said: “That’s my wife.” Picasso responded, “Isn’t she rather small and flat?”
Terry Eagleton’s delightful new book, The Real Thing, explores what artistic fidelity to the “real world” involves, and why, in particular, many of us still like reading “real-life” dramas – such as the latest Tessa Hadley or Karl Ove Knausgaard – and regard the new Richard Osman thriller or the latest instalment in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games franchise only through disdainful lorgnettes.
Martyrdom is ultimately a story somebody tells about us; better to have one to claim for yourself.
Trillin’s new book is called “The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press.” It’s an assortment of profiles, essays, columns and a few examples of light verse, all of them about journalism, written originally for The New Yorker, The Nation, Time and other outlets. A few go back as far as the early 1970s. New money for old rope, in other words. But it makes sense to have this material in one place, and this book is buoyant and crunchy from end to end.
In “How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins” (Bloomsbury), Helena de Bres aims to rescue twins from the gothic, from horror movies, and from singleton scrutiny, the better to return our gaze and testify to the experience of twindom from the inside out. De Bres invokes twins from life and legend—the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker; Tweedledum and Tweedledee; her own identical twin and herself—to examine how multiples complicate our notions of personhood, attachment, and agency.
Even before the arrival of a murderous mouse, the field of copyright has been full of dramatic turns, as a new book, “Who Owns This Sentence?”, recounts. That is because “copyright is an edifice of words resting on a long and complicated string of metaphors and double meanings,” write the authors David Bellos, a professor at Princeton, and Alexandre Montagu, a lawyer. Over centuries artists, authors, lobbyists, publishers and public officials have defined and redefined the meaning of copyright, with debate and legal changes happening beyond the public eye.