This is the cookbook David Foster Wallace might have written. In an off-the-wall blend of memoir, travel, history and fiction, Frank proceeds region bThis is the cookbook David Foster Wallace might have written. In an off-the-wall blend of memoir, travel, history and fiction, Frank proceeds region by region, choosing for each state one beloved dish and interrogating its origins as well as its metaphors and associations. It’s a mixed bag of familiar foods and ones that only locals are likely to know about. Each chapter ends with a recipe for the signature plate, whether from a Lutheran church or a posh restaurant. Frank’s digressive, anecdotal approach takes some getting used to. If you enjoyed J. Ryan Stradal’s Kitchens of the Great Midwest and appreciate the style of writers like Geoff Dyer, Maggie Nelson and Will Self, this should be your next food-themed read.
(2.5) DNF @ 62%. An interesting approach to family memoir, but not successful as a novel. I was meant to review this for BookBrowse, but found I could(2.5) DNF @ 62%. An interesting approach to family memoir, but not successful as a novel. I was meant to review this for BookBrowse, but found I couldn’t recommend it with 4 or 5 stars. The digressive family stories and genealogies are tiresome, and the third-person narration so distancing that readers never get a clear sense of who Liliane actually is. She’s all generalities: “Liliane, like many middle-class teenage white girls in North America, is horse crazy.” Only occasionally do we get telling details or strong recreation of a child’s point-of-view.
This reminded me most of Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing, a fictionalized biography that works better. I would recommend it to people keen on World War II-era European history, but would hesitate before suggesting it as a novel....more
(2.5) Humphreys has lived along Ontario’s Napanee River for over a decade. I was expecting a blend of personal reflection and natural observations, bu(2.5) Humphreys has lived along Ontario’s Napanee River for over a decade. I was expecting a blend of personal reflection and natural observations, but instead the book is mostly composed of brief fictional passages illuminating a handful of species: cattails, the cabbage white butterfly, cardinal flowers, the great blue heron, and so on.
I liked the passages about the heron best – Humphreys successfully imagines the life of a plume hunter and contrasts it with the excitement of two women involved in the foundation of a bird conservation charity (see The Year of Necessary Lies for more on this topic). However, much of the book felt like unconnected vignettes, not building to any kind of grander picture of a location.
The book is richly illustrated, but my Kindle download does not do justice to the images and makes the layout look screwy. Reading this in print would likely be a much better experience, more like looking through a historical photo album. I also enjoyed the lists: of species (by kingdom), and of the random objects the river has brought Humphreys over the years. I’ve heard good things about her writing, so wouldn’t rule out trying out more of her books even though this one didn’t quite live up to expectations....more
Think of Alexandra Kleeman as an heir to Dave Eggers and Douglas Coupland, with a hefty dollop of Margaret Atwood thrown in. Her first novel is a fullThink of Alexandra Kleeman as an heir to Dave Eggers and Douglas Coupland, with a hefty dollop of Margaret Atwood thrown in. Her first novel is a full-on postmodern satire bursting with biting commentary on consumerism and conformity. Television and shopping are the twin symbolic pillars of a book about the commodification of the body. In a culture of self-alienation where we buy things we don’t need, have no idea where food comes from and desperately keep up the façade of normalcy, Kleeman’s is a fresh voice advocating the true sanity of individuality. Don’t miss her incredible debut.
(Nearly 4.5) It may seem perverse to twist Emily Dickinson’s words about hope into a reflection on bereavement, but Porter’s exceptional debut does ju(Nearly 4.5) It may seem perverse to twist Emily Dickinson’s words about hope into a reflection on bereavement, but Porter’s exceptional debut does just that: tweak poetic forebears – chiefly Poe’s “The Raven” and Ted Hughes’s Crow – to create a hybrid response to loss. The novel is composed of three first-person voices: Dad, Boys and Crow (the soul of the book: witty, onomatopoeic, often macabre). Dad and his two young sons are adrift in mourning; the boys’ mum died after an unspecified accident in their London flat. The three narratives resemble monologues in a play, with short lines laid out on the page more like stanzas of a poem. The closest comparison I’d make is with David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time.
Whereas alcoholic writers were the points of reference for her previous book, the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), here outsider artists take ceWhereas alcoholic writers were the points of reference for her previous book, the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), here outsider artists take center stage: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, and the many lost to AIDS in the 1980s to 1990s. It’s a testament to Laing’s skill at interweaving biography, art criticism and memoir when I say that I knew next to nothing about any of these artists to start with and have little fondness for modern art but still found her book completely absorbing.
For several years in her mid-thirties, British author Olivia Laing lived in New York City. A relationship had recently fallen through and she was subletting an apartment from a friend. Whole days went by when she hardly left the flat, whiling away her time on social media and watching music videos on YouTube. Whenever she did go out, she felt cut off because of her accent and her unfamiliarity with American vernacular; she wished she could wear a Halloween mask all the time to achieve anonymity. How ironic, she thought, that in a city of millions she could be so utterly lonely.
Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee. … [L]oneliness inhibits empathy because it induces in its wake a kind of self-protective amnesia, so that when a person is no longer lonely they struggle to remember what the condition is like.
Several of the artists shared underlying reasons for loneliness: an abusive childhood, mental illness and/or sexuality perceived as aberrant. Edward Hopper might seem the most ‘normal’ of the artists profiled, but even he was bullied when he shot up to 6 feet at age 12; his wife Jo, doing some amateur psychoanalyzing, named it the root of his notorious taciturnity. His Nighthawks, with its “noxious pallid green” shades, perfectly illustrates the inescapability of “urban alienation,” Laing writes: when she saw it in person at the Whitney, she realized the diner has no door. (It’s a shame the book couldn’t accommodate a centerfold of color plates, but each chapter opens with a black-and-white photograph of its main subject.)
Andy Warhol was born Andrej Warhola to Slovakian immigrants in Pittsburgh in 1928. He was often tongue-tied and anxious, and used fashion and technology as ways of displacing attention. In 1968 he was shot in the torso by Valerie Solanas, the paranoid, sometimes-homeless author of SCUM Manifesto, and ever after had to wear surgical corsets. For Warhol and Wojnarowicz, art and sex were possible routes out of loneliness. As homosexuals, though, they could be restricted to sordid cruising grounds such as cinemas and piers. Like Klaus Nomi, a gay German electro-pop singer whose music Laing listened to obsessively, Wojnarowicz died of AIDS. Nomi was one of the first celebrities to succumb, in 1983. The epidemic only increased the general stigma against gay people. Even Warhol, as a lifelong hypochondriac, was leery about contact with AIDS patients. Through protest marches and artworks, Wojnarowicz exposed the scale of the tragedy and the lack of government concern.
In some ways Henry Darger is the oddest of the outsiders Laing features. He is also the only one not based in New York: he worked as a Chicago hospital janitor for nearly six decades; it was only when he was moved into a nursing home and the landlord cleared out his room that an astonishing cache of art and writing was discovered. Darger’s oeuvre included a 15,000-page work of fiction set in “the Realms of the Unreal” and paintings that veer towards sadism and pedophilia. Laing spent a week reading his unpublished memoir. With his distinctive, not-quite-coherent style and his affection for the asylum where he lived as an orphaned child, he reminded me of Royal Robertson, the schizophrenic artist whose work inspired Sufjan Stevens’s The Age of Adz album, and the artist character in the movie Junebug (2005).
A few of the chapters are less focused because they split the time between several subjects. I also felt that a section on Josh Harris, Internet entrepreneur and early reality show streaming pioneer, pulled the spotlight away from outsider art. Although I can see, in theory, how his work is performance art reflecting on our lack of true connection in an age of social media and voyeurism, I still found this the least relevant part.
The book is best when Laing is able to pull all her threads together: her own seclusion – flitting between housing situations, finding dates through Craigslist and feeling trapped behind her laptop screen; her subjects’ troubled isolation; and the science behind loneliness. Like Korey Floyd does in The Loneliness Cure, Laing summarizes the physical symptoms and psychological effects associated with solitude. She dips into pediatrician D.W. Winnicott’s work on attachment and separation in children, and mentions Harry Harlow’s abhorrent rhesus monkey experiments in which babies were raised without physical contact.
The tone throughout is academic but not inaccessible. Ultimately I didn’t like this quite as much as The Trip to Echo Spring, but it’s still a remarkable piece of work, fusing social history, commentary on modern art, biographical observation and self-knowledge. The first chapter and the last five paragraphs, especially, are simply excellent. Your interest may wax and wane through the rest of the book, but I expect that, like me, you’ll willingly follow Laing as a tour guide into the peculiar, lonely crowdedness you find in a world city.
Hall interweaves disparate time periods and voices to track the development of artificial intelligence. The fact that all six narratives are in differHall interweaves disparate time periods and voices to track the development of artificial intelligence. The fact that all six narratives are in different documentary formats – memoirs, letters, the transcript of a dialogue, a diary, and so on – means they are easy to distinguish. One might argue that two of them (Alan Turing’s letters and Mary’s shipboard diary) are unnecessary, and yet these are by far the most enjoyable. They prove Hall has an aptitude for historical fiction, a genre she might choose to pursue in the future. A remarkable book interrogating how the languages we converse in and the stories we tell make us human.
(Non-subscribers can read an excerpt of my full review at BookBrowse.)
Related reading:The Shore by Sara Taylor also crosses the centuries with its linked narratives....more
This ambitious collection of Americana-themed essays blends travel, personal anecdote, history and science. Throughout, Tevis zealously interrogates eThis ambitious collection of Americana-themed essays blends travel, personal anecdote, history and science. Throughout, Tevis zealously interrogates emblems of apocalypse: deserts, atomic bombs and the book of Revelation. She notices everything down to Alaskan lichen, and highlights less-visited sites most tourists miss. Personal details are deftly interwoven, as in “Somebody to Love,” where an intimate account of infertility meets a minibiography of Freddie Mercury.
The catholicity of Tevis’s interest means she does not always bring multiple strands together convincingly. Still, her reach is impressive. With these atmospheric, offbeat essays, she rivals Barbara Kingsolver, Rebecca Solnit, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Terry Tempest Williams.
I loved the idea behind this: a memoir in the form of short essays built around scent memories. Cinnamon brings the Christmas season to mind, aftershaI loved the idea behind this: a memoir in the form of short essays built around scent memories. Cinnamon brings the Christmas season to mind, aftershave reminds him of his father, and garlic and cannabis dredge up different aspects of his growing-up years. There’s some beautifully poetic language here. A favorite line was “The child that I am is allowed to breathe in these smells of dead pollen, widowed woolens and orphaned linen so that one day he can piece them together into a narrative and resurrect lives lost through wars, illnesses and accidents.” But ultimately I got a bit tired of more of the same. Perhaps if I’d kept it as a bedside book and just read a few pieces at a time instead of attempting to read it straight through, it would have worked better for me. Alas, as this is a library book, it will have to go back half-finished. (Read the first 86 pages out of 173.)...more
Between the ages of about eight and 15, I was adamant that I wanted to be either an archaeologist or a paleontologist when I grew up. I can date the lBetween the ages of about eight and 15, I was adamant that I wanted to be either an archaeologist or a paleontologist when I grew up. I can date the latter ambition to the first Jurassic Park movie, which I saw in the theater when I was in third grade; the former is a bit more challenging to trace, but may have something to do with the hours my first best friend and I spent “excavating” behind the shed in her backyard. With our hand trowels we unearthed ceramic fragments and seemingly endless oyster shells. I doubt any of it was worth anything, or proof of any kind of interesting history on this plot of land. It was most likely just a 1950s suburban trash dump. Still, I felt like Indiana Jones discovering buried treasure.
When I was 15, I finally had the chance to do some real archaeology, through a University of Maryland summer field school. Five of us eager high school students won places through an essay contest to participate in the college kids’ dig behind a Colonial-era home in Annapolis. A classmate and I carpooled every day for those two weeks, our moms taking turns driving us in to the historic town center, where we split our time between field work and lab work.
I wish I could say the field school was inspiring, but if anything it convinced me that I wasn’t cut out for archaeology. It was a dripping hot Maryland August, and our work was painstaking and filthy. Outsiders probably don’t realize that you work literally centimeter by centimeter, and spend proportionally more time taking notes and making sketches than you do digging. Finds are few and far between, and usually not very exciting; the highlights of the whole time were an animal tooth and a few shards of blue pottery. It was hard to gauge our contribution to the overall goal of finding traces of the home’s formal garden. I finished the two weeks feeling glad of the experience, but disillusioned with my erstwhile life goal.
All the same, I’ve never quite shaken off my interest in archaeology — despite an introductory college course that bored me to tears (and lowered my grade point average). It turns out I wasn’t actually that compelled by soil layers and evidence of early farming and animal domestication. I couldn’t see the rare delight of discovery past all the mundane, laborious realities of an archaeologist’s day job; I studied English and Religion instead, and became a freelance writer and book reviewer via multiple bookstore and library jobs.
Approaching journalist Marilyn Johnson’s third book, then, I hoped for an off-beat journey through the world of contemporary archaeology: a nostalgic but not overly rosy view of a difficult profession. I certainly was not disappointed. Johnson captures perfectly both the cinematic allure and the everyday drudgery of archaeologists’ work: “From a distance, this kind of work might seem to fit the Indiana Jones fantasy, full of treasure and danger. Up close, the glamour can be hard to detect. Archaeologists are explorers and adventurers — Hollywood got that part right — but not exactly in the way you’d think.”
From a position of almost total ignorance, Johnson went about educating herself through a whirlwind tour of as many different aspects of archaeology as possible. She attended two field schools, one on the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, where she looked for remnants of Dutch plantations, and one at Yeronisos, off Cyprus, where Joan Connelly runs an ongoing dig searching for proof of a Greek priestess cult. The variety just in these two field experiences points to the difficulty of making generalizations about the career as a whole:
Archaeology itself is not easy to navigate; it is a broad and complicated profession, and the archaeologists of the Old World (who study Iraq and the ancient civilizations of the East and Middle East, including classical Rome and Greece) tend to go to different conferences and read different journals than the archaeologists who work in the New World of the Americas.
Yet Johnson was determined to get the whole picture. She learned about bog bodies, Native American methods of harvesting bone grease, forensic archaeology, and jade “pig dragon” sculptures from the Goddess Temple in northeastern China. At conferences she chatted with experts on ancient alcoholic beverages (Uncorking the Past by Patrick E. McGovern), debated the historical authenticity of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series (starting with The Clan of the Cave Bear), and toured Machu Picchu with UNESCO delegates in Peru. A female archaeologist also gave her a sneak peek into the Explorers Club in Manhattan — where women were only admitted in 1981!
Underwater archaeology is where it’s at nowadays, apparently, and in one of the key chapters of the book Kathy Abbass introduces Johnson to marine archaeology taking place in Newport, Rhode Island, a hotspot for Revolutionary War shipwrecks. Fishkill, New York also proved to be a surprisingly good Revolutionary-era site, with a soldiers’ graveyard that has more than once been under threat from developers.
The book is not all about centuries-old history, though. It’s just as much about what we value today, and what we will commit to saving. One of the most intriguing sections of the book is about modern war zones. A group of archaeologists had the brilliant idea of issuing American soldiers with playing cards featuring Iraqi and Afghan archaeological treasures. By collecting them all, and putting them together to form a bigger photo, they might absorb the message that they are in a land of ancient traditions with riches worth preserving. “These sites have survived thousands of years; will they survive you?” went the provocative slogan.
“Good archaeology fills in the blanks of history. It tells the losers’ story. It teases out the history that falls between cracks,” Connelly told Johnson. Sometimes, sadly, it seems archaeologists are the losers at risk of falling between the cracks. This year Forbes magazine named archaeology the #1 worst college major, “based on high initial unemployment rates and low initial earnings.” The husband-and-wife team with whom Johnson worked in the Caribbean struggled to find jobs when they moved to England. It took two years for Grant Gilmore to get a six-month contract, and two and a half years in total for him to get his dream job — a dispiriting 300 job applications later. Johnson sums it up with this sobering sentence: “Jo and Grant were in thrall to a profession that couldn’t sustain them.” Indeed, none of the archaeology graduates I know personally are working in their field.
But if Johnson paints an overall somewhat depressing picture of archaeology today — it’s a difficult field to break into or make a living from, and governments and ordinary people are not always supportive of digs that stand in the way of development — she makes a case for how relevant and essential the work still is. As she asked herself of one enthusiastic archaeologist she met while exploring Deadwood, South Dakota,
What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there.
Now that’s a noble aim.
I highly recommend this book, for armchair travelers and professionals alike.
“Get off your bum and enjoy your muscles while you have them.” Note: the title is notHow to Exercise; if it was, I couldn’t have been less interested“Get off your bum and enjoy your muscles while you have them.” Note: the title is notHow to Exercise; if it was, I couldn’t have been less interested. Instead, Young brings his philosopher’s credentials to bear on the subject of physical fitness and mind-body dualism, making this one of the more memorable School of Life titles.
So many of us are “mind workers” nowadays, Young points out. It is as if we have become disembodied, only valuing our intellectual achievements. Yet from ancient Greece onwards, virtue has had a physical aspect. Developing pride and pleasure in oneself is a material process as much as a mental one. Fitness means being fit for a purpose. In Hume’s equation, beauty = pleasure = value, such that muscles are not just useful but aesthetic. While avoiding the extreme of narcissism, we can still appreciate bodily excellence and the sacrifices necessary to attain it.
Perhaps the most notable chapters are the author’s case studies on running, ocean sports and yoga. Haruki Murakami, whose sense of discipline applies equally to exercise and writing, is Young’s primary model for the first. As another running writer, David Lebedoff, adds, “The fact that it takes character to get out of your chair is perhaps the greatest benefit to be derived from exercise.” Meanwhile, the ocean is a reminder of the classical theory of “the sublime,” a blend of beauty and danger, but observed from a place of safety. Yoga, with its physical and spiritual elements, is a notable instance of exercise being beneficial to both body and soul.
The idea I found most interesting is that exercise creates a mental void: at the same time it provides a rest from thought and the perfect environment for it. Surprisingly, Charles Darwin is one of Young’s favorite examples. Through taking long walks along his “Thinking Path” near Down House in Kent, Darwin opened up an ideal space for reverie. Many of his most revolutionary ideas came to him during these walks.
Young posits that we modern worrywarts are all too often in a state of mental ambiguity, but exercise is a means of returning us to simplicity. It also serves as a memento mori, telling us we are physical beings – feeble, time-limited and contingent – yet “for all our weakness and isolation, we are strong, secure, and part of something bigger than our feeble selves. Exercise is a chance to savor the precariousness of life – before we fall out of the world for good.”...more
When she first became a mother, professor and essayist Eula Biss took the opportunity to reconsider inoculation. She’d never given it much thought befWhen she first became a mother, professor and essayist Eula Biss took the opportunity to reconsider inoculation. She’d never given it much thought before, but in an American culture of paranoia about everything from bird flu to food additives, it was impossible not to ask what risks she was exposing her son to, and whether they were worth it. In a wide-ranging cultural history reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, she delves into the facts, myths and metaphors surrounding immunization. This book powerfully captures the modern phenomenon of feeling simultaneously responsible and powerless. Biss reminds us that “what heals may harm and the sum of science is not always progress.” A short, well-constructed argument, well worth reading.
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