As she talks, clouds roll in, enveloping all but the highest peaks in a fluffy white blanket. “Since I began climbing mountains, I’ve learned the same applies to life,” she adds. “It’s not about getting to the top, but enjoying yourself on the journey. The most important thing is to be happy.”
Llusco, 39, is one of about 10 Indigenous female mountain guides in Bolivia. Her long black hair is tied in two plaits, linked with a large safety pin and wool decorations in red, yellow and green, the colours of the Bolivian flag. She is wearing a pollera, a voluminous floral skirt over layers of pink petticoats. She has paired it with a pink diamanté top, beneath a pink cardigan and a red fleece gilet. “I have never worn trousers to go up a mountain and I never will. Our polleras don’t impede us,” she says of the traditional Aymara garment.
If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis on word choice, the unjust rule of the mot juste (recall here the old saying about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug) that dominates, to the detriment of other concerns, contemporary literature and creative writing. At times, this passion for the right—or the unusual—word reaps dividends; at others, it merely produces an uncalled-for flood of verbed nouns, portmanteaus, adjectives wrenched out of joint.
For more than a decade, small tweaks to the traditional cup, along with a standardized lexicon of modifications (for warmth, sugar quantity, and ice level), represented the business’s key innovations. But, in the past few years, hundreds of thousands of new stores have opened in China, boasting expansive menus filled with what are known as xinchayin, or “new tea drinks.” With their fancy ingredients and highly involved storytelling, these businesses put Starbucks’ seasonal pumpkin spice to shame. Chagee, which sells a hundred million cups of “Bo Ya” annually, emphasizes that its jasmine-infused green-tea buds are picked exclusively in early spring. The chain Auntea Jenny is known for its unusual pairings—for instance, mulberries or hawthorn with Maofeng green tea. On Xiaohongshu, China’s answer to Instagram, influencers rate menu items in posts tagged “new tea drinks evaluation.” According to a report by the tea-research institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, by 2022, xinchayin chains had reached about forty billion dollars in sales. The industry is growing so quickly that one common scam involves fake Web sites posing as renowned brands offering franchise opportunities.
All My Precious Madness is an astutely observed portrait of intellectual melancholia. We tend to associate nostalgia with reactionary politics, but it can, of course, take other forms too: with his blend of sweary, disaffected rage and leftwing idealism, the narrator’s sensibility recalls the US comic Bill Hicks. Henry is down on England and Englishness, which he identifies with parochial conservatism, and romanticises Paris and Rome. For him, the humble espresso symbolises a world of possibility. “There is,” he declares, “every reason to live in Old Europe at the point of its demise and disappearance, rather than sniffing after the Zeitgeist, which is made of cables and clouds, brands and fragile exoskeletons amalgamated from images.”
When a story opens on a beach, in the wake of a harrowing plane crash, I think of Lost. It’s wired into my brain, a holdover from a very different era. But Madeline Ashby’s Glass Houses, apart from the plane crash, is not that kind of story—the kind that goes on, and meanders, and eventually lands somewhere not entirely satisfying. No, this is something very different: pointed and sharp, a thriller full of absurd tech, carefully laid plans, and extremely understandable anger. It is a rich text of rage and experience.
Putting two major supported studios in the spotlight, Studio A in Sydney and London’s Project Art Works, Watfern positions herself not simply as a researcher or writer, but as someone who constantly reflects on these experiences to unravel unconscious biases and unexpected learnings. Her recount of the time spent at these studios, with their workers and artists, feels incredibly lived in – almost biographical in a way that manages to remain humble and insightful.