I checked into the Hôtel Crystal just as dawn was breaking. The room was small and stained with time. From the window, I watched a bleary-eyed waiter drag crates of wine bottles into an alleyway and smash them one by one.
I made myself a stranger in Paris in order to find a book. A book that some consider lost. But I believe books are rarely lost. Rather, they wait. They bide their time as shards, fragments, phrases, and titles. A book has many lives, though some are more shattered than others.
The emails from my dad were an oasis. With a cheerful tone and dry wit, he’d check in on my academic happenings, signing off with a paragraph of encouragement. But the heart of his letters was the commentary in between, op-ed style musings that felt pulled from the Times, personalized just for me. His thoughts on political happenings were razor sharp and darkly funny. But his fixation on politics didn’t stop him from waxing long on the brilliance of, say, Battlestar Galactica, or a new dish at the local Chinese takeout spot. What struck me most, what I could feel, even then, was the lyricism in his notes, a rhythm that made you feel as if you were singing the lines.
My Manhattan apartment does not have a dishwasher. We’ve debated installing one; there’s room, just barely. I always pull back at the last minute. I like doing the dishes by hand, the more the merrier, the crustier the better. Sometimes music will be playing. I’ll find myself moved by it, the way the English novelist Barbara Pym was, as she wrote in a 1943 journal entry, when she caught herself weeping to Yehudi Menuhin on the radio one evening while her hands were “immersed in the washing-up water.” More often, there will be silence. I get my best thinking done here, far from a blinking cursor, my raw hands plunged into the soapy warmth.
Despite its imaginative nature, it carries a strange sense of realism that leaves readers wondering about the journeys we have embarked on to wrest control over our own lives. This is a serenade, a love song to memory and a naming of that which we dare not speak out loud.
It’s some measure of the extent of urbanisation that the bookends to our day may not be birdsong but the sound of a kettle as the water in it reaches boiling point. That “tock” is made by a miniature device, a small disc consisting of alternating strips of two different metals. When exposed to heat, the metals expand at different rates, the disc gradually curves, and a switch is tripped, cutting off electricity to the kettle. Few of us know this; we write odes to nightingales, not thermostats, even though it is the latter that provides our morning soundtrack, those sonic notches that mark the passing of each day. Tock, tock, tock.
I thought little about those metallic notes until I read Tim Minshall’s new book, an ambitious exploration of the world of manufacturing. In it, he examines the myriad things that surround us, from transistors to ice-cream: the intricate, ingenious ways in which they are made, then shuttled around the world to reach our doorstep. For Minshall, manufacturing has been overlooked and undervalued, with perilous consequences. He writes that it “has become like a sewage system: essential for our lives, yet out of mind until things go wrong”.
In the earliest days of film, one star was such a box-office success that she was able to sustain a career in Hollywood over 45 years and hundreds of movies. But despite Helen Gibson’s loyal fans, her fearless stunts, and her role as a pioneer, not many people know about her today.
Mallory O’Meara’s biography “Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stuntwoman” dusts off Gibson’s remarkable legacy.
Jones offers at least some hope that while the gaps in health care and other needs remain after the pandemic, that chronicling them the way she has creates a memorial in itself that could spur action.