Neurobiological models are all dopamine and serotonin and action potentials and sensory neurons — they have no language for what it feels like to be motivated by thirst or to taste a carrot. We need some way of translating between what neurobiology talks about (synapses, action potentials and so on), and conscious experience itself.
It happened the way Hemingway described bankruptcy: gradually and then suddenly. I was a young Brooklyn-based food writer cataloging differences between crusts at Saraghina and Motorino while nibbling a slice from Roberta’s—hopping nimbly onto my red steel Specialized for a second slice at Joe’s or Di Fara or Best Pizza. Then I was married, pregnant, living upstate, ignorant of the changing nature of American pizza. Such ignorance may seem trivial in your line of work. In mine, it’s fatal. Pizza is the defining food of our country, the key to the American gestalt. Unbeknownst to me, it was evolving, severing ties with tradition in some cases while fixing firmly to others, all at the hands of chefs whose names I didn’t recognize. Meanwhile, I was making baby food.
These are stories that work from the inside out. Williams has a clear preference for the point-of-view shot: she begins each of her brief, odd tales – none more than a handful of pages long – inside a new character’s head, and allows us to see only what they themselves see, in precisely the way they see it. There is no sense here, as so often in short-story collections, of universe-building. Instead, each of Williams’s stories is intensely subjective: plunging us into a new environment; offering little in the way of orientation. The experience of reading them one after the other is discombobulating, and you get the feeling that this is just the way Williams likes it.
Imagine how different our built environment might look if money and politics or engineering and cultural constraints didn’t affect what was built — where the only real limit would be the imagination of the architect. Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin’s The Atlas of Never Built Architecture is a fascinating excursion into that fantasy scenario. It is a compendium of unrealized architectural visions — buildings and other structures that were designed but never went beyond the drawing board.