What if ground zero for an essential strain of 20th-century modern art wasn’t Paris 1907 (Pablo Picasso’s disjointed nudes) or New York City 1947 (Jackson Pollock’s drips) but rather San Francisco 1967, where Ruth Asawa made intricate sculptures alongside her six children in her Noe Valley home? What if Asawa, and other artist-mothers who were her friends and fellow activists, founded a new métier for modernism, one that runs entirely counter to the modernist trope of the solitary genius toiling alone in his spacious studio? Well, in fact, they did.
This is how I cook—not by recipe, but by intuition. By feeling. By experimentation. I pretend at being a Chopped contestant on the daily. This isn’t to say that I’m going into it with only a Santoku knife and a prayer. It’s actually the opposite. Because I’ve spent many years—my whole life, in fact—obsessed with cooking.
Maybe they’re healthy. Maybe they’re not. Maybe that’s not even the point.
The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work — still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction. Hard work is supposed to get you somewhere — that's part of the promise of America. But the pay-off feels much less certain to these characters. A winning lottery ticket, an inheritance, maybe even a union would have to come along to propel these characters to a place of greater humane possibility. Vuong's achingly austere artistic vision leaves it to his readers to imagine the better world he won't let himself depict on the pages of this wonderful novel.
The ruins of Rome have served as a Rorschach test for centuries, with spectators projecting onto them their hopes, fears, or even disappointments. As early as 1411 the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras wrote of Medieval Rome that its ruins “seem beautiful even in their dismembered state”. Four hundred years later, the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand detected instead “a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the brevity of our existence”, while the American scholar Henry Adams (1838-1918) gave a political twist to his reading of the runes: “Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be America”. “What did I find in the Forum?” wrote Arthur Hugh Clough, the English poet, to a friend in 1849: “An archway and two or three pillars.”
Now Roland Mayer, the emeritus professor of classics at King’s College London, has produced a survey of this rich field of speculation, tracing Rome’s greatest ornaments from antiquity to the present day.