Michael is best known as a singer and widely recognized as a songwriter, but his greatest skill may have been production. The acoustic guitar that opens his 1987 solo single “Faith” hovers with perfect clarity just the right distance from the listener’s ear, as if the guitar player was strumming just a few feet away; in a decade practically synonymous with stiff, booming percussion, his drum programming has a deft, humorous touch that verges on virtuosity. “I’m a producer before I’m a singer sometimes,” he says in Wham! “I construct what I do.” Michael had the commercial aspirations of a global superstar like Madonna, but he also had a perfectionist streak more befitting a chart eccentric like Kate Bush. In the thirty years between his first solo single in 1986 and his death in 2016, he released only five studio albums, one of them a covers album. In the same span Madonna released eleven, David Bowie ten, and Prince thirty-one. (Bush also released five albums of studio material in that period, one of them a covers album—of her own songs.)
In 1993 Michael performed with the surviving members of Queen at the Wembley Stadium tribute concert for Freddie Mercury. “I just wanted perfection,” he reminisced, “which is what I always want.” To rehearse, “everyone else went for an afternoon. I went for five days. Because it had to be perfect.”
In Disney’s 1959 film Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting around the table before it finally hits the intended balls. Donald asks, “How do you like that for mathematics?”
Because rectangular billiard tables have four walls meeting at right angles, billiard trajectories like Donald’s are predictable and well understood — even if they’re difficult to carry out in practice. However, research mathematicians still cannot answer basic questions about the possible trajectories of billiard balls on tables in the shape of other polygons (shapes with flat sides). Even triangles, the simplest of polygons, still hold mysteries.
Yet for many in the modern United States, there’s something uniquely unpalatable about eating brains, a squeamishness that goes back only a few generations. Before the mid-20th century, Americans treated the brain like any other cut of meat, especially in areas where livestock animals were raised. At least one company, Rose, still markets canned brains soaked in milk (a typical initial step when preparing brains to remove the blood). Scrambled eggs and brains was once a classic American breakfast pairing, appearing in Fannie Farmer’s influential 1896 cookbook and many others. “When [brain] is lightly cooked and pan-fried, it has a very similar texture to scrambled egg,” says VanHouten, who included a recipe for the dish in her own cookbook, It Takes Guts. “Mixed together, you barely even taste [the brain]. It’s just adding a little bit of richness to your eggs.” Farzin points out that you can use brains the same way as egg yolks; even in custard-based ice cream or an emulsified “brainaise.”
Because of current publishing trends, as well as the accident of Ong’s identity, Fixer is more likely to be recuperated today as an addition to the Asian American canon rather than a continuation on an age-old theme. But like many postwar American novels, it is obsessed with the craft of writing and not a little resentful of its practitioners. William’s victims are mainly the power brokers of American letters—authors, poets, publishers—and his story unfolds as a rageful dispatch about the bruisings and indignities one suffers in a publishing world overrun by poseurs. The novel would have us believe that William is set to destroy their lives, exposing the horrid quality of their writing as he wrenches into his possession their cultural capital. But revenge has no guarantees; Fixer is, after all, the vigorous but doomed effort of an author critiquing literature through literature. The New York book world, decaying from the inside out, cannot be killed or saved—especially if we won’t stop reading about it.
A level of macabre curiosity and an ability to stomach some very frank descriptions of what it takes to care for the dead are absolutely necessary. However, for anyone who has touched death, and been left mystified, “All the Living and the Dead” is essential reading.