January 29, 2019 Arts & Culture Where Virginia Woolf Listened to the Waves By Katharine Smyth Virginia Woolf’s Talland House When she was in her late fifties, Virginia Woolf wrote that her most important memory was of lying in bed at Talland House—the nineteenth-century home in St Ives, Cornwall where she, her parents, and her seven siblings spent every summer until she was thirteen—and listening to waves break on the beach as sunlight pressed against a yellow blind. It was “of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” This radiance and cresting water would be consecrated again and again in her writing, saturating not only essays, diaries, and letters but also Jacob’s Room, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. As Hermione Lee notes in her biography of Woolf, “Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.” When Woolf’s mother died of rheumatic fever in 1895, the Stephen family’s visits to Talland House abruptly ceased. Its lease was sold soon afterward. Some thirty years later, this sudden, devastating break—the actual and figurative end to Woolf’s childhood—would spark the plot of To the Lighthouse, her novel about a family of ten who spends the summer in a remote seaside town. The family’s house, and its surroundings, are as vital to the book as its cast of human characters; I went to St Ives to see what they might teach me, not just about Virginia Woolf but also about those homes by which we measure happiness. Read More
January 28, 2019 Objects of Despair Objects of Despair: Fake Meat By Meghan O’Gieblyn Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column, Objects of Despair, examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them. The Impossible burger Science lifted us out of nature. It tamed the wilderness; it gave us tools to transcend our lousy, fallen bodies; and it shot us to the moon. Now it has produced a hamburger made entirely of vegetables that bleeds like real beef. The packaging of the aptly named Impossible Burger instructs you, as if daring you, to cook the patties medium rare. Three minutes on each side, and the center will remain the fleshly pink color of raw sirloin. This effect is the result of heme, the protein that carries oxygen through our blood and gives it its crimson color, and which food scientists have discovered how to ferment in a lab using genetically engineered yeast. (Pedantic foodies will point out that the red in beef is not blood but myoglobin, but this is beside the point. We call burgers “bloody” to acknowledge a truth that modernity has long tried to obscure: that meat was once, like us, a living thing.) Heme, which is abundant in animal muscle, is also what lends beef its distinctive flavor. The first time I prepared the Impossible Burger at home, the skillet erupted into a fatty sizzle (the patty contains emulsified coconut oil, which melts like tallow), and within seconds the air filled with the iron aroma of singed flesh. But the most uncanny moment arrived when I finished eating and there remained on the plate a stain of pinkish-brown drippings. In that moment, when I should have been marveling at the wonders of food science, I confess I was thinking of the weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia, a wooden statue that was said to shed tears of real blood—the signs of flesh where there is none. Read More
January 28, 2019 Arts & Culture Is There Anything Else I Can Help You with Today? By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie A telephone call between the author and a fictionalized Delta representative, in which their conversation ranges from the bureaucratic inanities of air travel to the ravages of global capitalism. Stock photo ALTED Thank you for calling Delta SkyMiles. My name is Alted. Do I have the pleasure of speaking to Ms. Adichie? ADICHIE Yes. How are you? ALTED I’m very good, thanks. How can I help you today? ADICHIE I’m calling about my parents’ ticket. They’re flying tomorrow from New York to Lagos. I bought their return ticket with my credit card. They were supposed to fly home last month but my father needed to undergo a medical procedure and so I changed their return date, and I paid a change fee. I know Delta requires you to come to a Delta desk with your credit card for all ticket purchases and changes. And I’m calling because I am sick, I have a terrible cold. ALTED Yes ma’am, I can hear it in your voice. ADICHIE [Coughing] Yes. So I’m wondering if, since I have already shown the credit card before they flew on the first leg, and since I used the same card to pay for the date change, could you please let them board their flight tomorrow? Could you please waive my having to appear at the airport to once again show the credit card? ALTED Ma’am, I certainly understand the inconvenience. But our policy is that you will need to physically present the card at a Delta desk. ADICHIE I understand that. I’m just asking whether you are able to consider the particular circumstances here. ALTED I apologize and understand the inconvenience. But you will have to physically present the card at a Delta desk in the airport. Read More
January 25, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Forensic Files, Fireflies, and Frigid Nights By The Paris Review Halle Butler. Photo: Jerzy Rose. Three pages into Halle Butler’s forthcoming novel The New Me, misanthropic Millie jokes about wishing she had a home intruder for company. Reading this, I immediately canceled dinner plans so I could finish the book in one sitting. Millie spends her days temping at a trendy design firm and imagining an improved version of herself waiting under layers of ill-fitting outfits and outward disdain. She oscillates between denigrating those around her and pitying their transparent desires with detached boredom. The New Me examines working womanhood, with all its privilege, ambition, objectification, and hierarchies, while confronting a nearly universal desire to build beautiful lives that society deems worth living. Every day holds a glittering future self, but reality diverges into nights of isolation, Forensic Files binges, and guilt-driven cleaning. To frame The New Me as the result of capitalism would unfairly simplify Butler’s depiction of contemporary workplace dynamics, but the implication stews as Millie considers her life’s purpose to “slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.” Regardless, in just under two hundred pages, Halle Butler made me laugh and cry enough times to feel completely reborn. —Nikki Shaner-Bradford Read More
January 25, 2019 On Sports A Loss Like a Knife: The 2019 Australian Open By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Our resident poet/tennis expert is back with some thoughts on the 2019 Australian Open. Stefanos Tsitsipas (left) and Danielle Collins (right) The two most in-form players at the 2019 Australian open, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Danielle Collins, met their ends in the semifinals. That their final sets both ended with scorelines of 6-0 is remarkable. That these rising young stars were defeated is surprising. But here we are. Stefanos Tsitsipas, the twenty-year-old phenom from Athens, was turned away by Rafael Nadal, 2-6, 4-6, 0-6. And Danielle Collins, the twenty-five-year old former college champion from the University of Virginia, met the end of the road in the form of a 6-7(2), 0-6 defeat at the hands of Petra Kvitová. Read More
January 25, 2019 One Word One Word: Boy By Bryan Washington In our new column One Word, writers expound on a single word. William Lindsay Windus, The Black Boy, 1844 I’ve worked a lot of jobs where I’ve dealt with boys. Lately, I’ve been teaching conjugation and sentence structure to junior high kids, swaths of whom are just flexing the boundaries of their boyhood. They ask a lot of questions. One little dude, from Puerto Rico, wonders how many light bulbs there are in the building. One boy, another brown kid, asks me whether Houston will survive the inevitable floods brought about by global warming. And another boy, a little older, during an SAT excerpt featuring Anna Karenina, asks about the legality of queer marriage in Russia, before also asking whether I think he can hack into the building’s Wi-Fi, did I know that he can floss, do I listen to Gucci Mane, can I loan him some money for Fortnite. They’re just boys. And that word—boy—is pretty interesting in itself: it embodies a phase of life and a physical state and a way of being. Boy is garçon. Boy is chico y niño. The distance between boy and man is elastic, and the word itself is just as flexible. Nearly every culture has some sort of ritual transition out of boyhood: bar mitzvahs for Jewish folks, cow jumping among the Hamar in Ethiopia, Seijin-no-Hi in Japan. A first gig. A first kiss. A first beer. And the word’s weight adopts fluidity as it drifts from mouth to mouth: when my aunt calls me boy, in a sprawling patois, it’s not the same boy I’ve heard on fuck knows how many crowded street corners, at whatever ungodly hour. That boy comes after I’ve said something dumb or needlessly contentious or unspeakably obvious. Boy like, Really nigga? Boy like, Slow your roll. Boy like, Bruh; like, Fuck outta here; like, Your assertion is wildly improbable, but my acquiescence to your instigations are an integral part of our friendship’s contract. Read More