As It Ends With Us, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel, hit theaters last week, the details of its plot highlighted a subtle shift in romance narratives. (I know, I know—some readers insist that this story is not a romance, but that’s certainly how the book is marketed.) While a high-earning neurosurgeon initially seems to be the catch of the day, our heroine ultimately finds her happily-ever-after with a chef who spent time unhoused as a teenager. This twist reflects a broader trend simmering in romance: Maybe billionaires aren’t so sexy after all.
When Richard Chizmar was 10 years old, he wrote a story about a snowman who couldn’t melt. The thermometer climbed, and the sun blazed, but the snowman remained standing, watching his once hard-packed buddies dissolve into slush.
“He was so lonely,” Chizmar recalled and grinned. “I always saw the world differently than the other people around me. Even then, I was exploring the dark side.”
As a work of scholarship, Pursuits of Happiness would never pass peer review today. Though I’d like to make a case that its outrageousness, to use Cavell’s word, is exactly why we might learn to treasure it anew. As with any enduring marriage, our ongoing rereading of Cavell’s book might rest not only in the book itself, but in our relationship to it—by which I mean, in our relationship to it, our relationship to our past selves.
So if procrastination is so costly, why do so many people regularly do it? Years of research have provided a reasonably comprehensive list of psychological factors that relate to procrastination. But it’s been unclear what mental processes underlie the decision to start or postpone a task. When faced with an upcoming deadline, how do people decide to initiate a chore or project?
I was particularly drawn to the dreamlike structure. The narrator — who never refers to himself in the first person — slips between scenes, as if passing through the layers of a place, ventriloquising the patter of the residents and loiterers and fishermen and priests and writers who populate these localities.
The flexible structure — which is established in the first chapter, set in Trieste’s historic Caffè San Marco — allows Magris to tuck sections of literary criticism, or reflections on the complex geography and history of his chosen places.
Consider the lie embedded in a century-old photograph. Four Filipino men, dressed in ‘tribal’ costumes with spears in hand, pose for a portrait in front of a straw hut. They were among 1,200 people brought to the United States for the racist spectacle of the Philippine Village at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair – meant to entertain and educate its American audience. The dehumanising display, and its photographic record, helped incorporate the newly acquired territory of the Philippines into an expanding imperial vision.
Manila-born, Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco encountered the photographs of Philippine Village in 2019, while trawling the collections of the Missouri Historical Society and St Louis Public Library. The Unruly Archive brings together Syjuco’s work with archival collections in the United States from the last half decade, which scrutinises the ways in which they have systematically excluded and misinterpreted the history of the Philippines, and asks a simple question: ‘What does it mean to not see yourself clearly?’