I don’t collect endings, however, to have the final say about my life. In fact, I write against certainty. The more options I have at my disposal for ending an essay, the freer I am to change my mind about its meaning. Nor am I simply putting my pain to use, as I thought when I was starting out. I write to savor my pain, to transgress and transform it.
Sheep Meadow is quiet on this Wednesday morning in June. The guitar-strummers and sunbathers who lounged on its lawn yesterday are gone, and now its only occupants are the elms and sycamores that cluster along its edge, where I now stand with the Central Park Conservancy’s historian of the past forty years, Sara Cedar Miller. I have come to the leafy center of Manhattan on a quest to find traces, however faint, of parkmaker Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1854 horseback ride across Texas. I may be 1,800 miles from the heart of Texas, but I’m drawn to the alluring, if unprovable, theory that this famous green sward—borrowing the word Olmsted and his partner Calvin Vaux used when they designed this park in 1858—could be inspired by the upper Guadalupe River and its surroundings in the Hill Country, the land that Olmsted loved most when traveling through Texas just a few years before he became the architect of the world’s most famous park.
I had no idea banana curry pizza even existed in Sweden until I saw a piece of pizza art from Cities by the Slice on Instagram. On the account, illustrator Dan Bransfield highlights the foods of different cities, and when I saw his pizza print featuring slices around the world, with a Swedish slice topped with bananas, I was intrigued.
“Colored Television” is a novel about capitalism, race, gender, parenthood, creativity and yearning; it is, in short, a Great American Novel.
That’s a breathless way to start a review, but Senna’s story, set in Los Angeles, is also about the perpetual divide between commerce and art, and the novelist’s deft handling of all these multiple themes deserves such praise.