The terrific story she told me that evening involved her late father and a phone call he made toward the end of his life. Ullmann’s telling of it was occasioned by a question I asked about long marriages, what she thought helped them flourish and endure. She and her husband, married nearly 20 years, have a gentle way with each other: Dahl’s hand would briefly come to rest on Ullmann’s shoulder; Ullmann’s feet would find Dahl’s lap at the end of a dinner party. The terrific story Ullmann told about her father and the phone call spoke sweetly and, I thought, meaningfully to that question. And yet it was also — Ullmann made clear, when she came to its conclusion — as far as she was concerned, not a terrific story: rather, an anecdote, one of many she has accumulated across her long, unusual life. But it was not the sort of story that she tells in public. More important, it was not the sort of story she exploits in her fiction.
“I can’t stand anecdotes,” Ullmann said, cross-legged on her couch beneath a framed Alexander Calder lithograph, her voice rising at the end of her sentence as if to chase the final word away.
In the years leading up to the release of her third album, Jepsen did a lot—she moved to New York City, and did a short stint on Broadway (playing Cinderella in a Rodgers and Hammerstein production). But above all, she wrote, and wrote, and wrote. In all, Jepsen wrote 200 songs for the album, with only 12 songs making the cut and an additional 8 songs released a year later as an EP of B-Sides. “I think some people have painting in their blood, or dancing in their blood. And even more than singing for me, writing is very much a part of me and I can’t not do it,” she says at the beginning of a mini behind the scenes documentary, released alongside the album on YouTube. The 8-minute clip shows Jepsen humming, writing, singing, and bouncing ideas back and forth with a team of artists and producers that included Tegan and Sara, Dev Hynes, Rami Yacoub and Joe Janiak among others.
In his last published essay, “To Crush a Serpent,” Baldwin wrote, “Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity.” In a country that remains in many ways emotionally infantile, and where simplemindedness can be deemed a sign of strength, Baldwin’s fierce imagination remains an invaluable resource and provides a blueprint for America’s collective welfare.
Rockstar Grill Operator is Waffle House’s term for its best short order cooks, after the entry-level Grill Operators and more-senior Master Grill Operators. Rockstars like Charles must be nominated by several of their peers and managers and pass various food safety examinations. They also take a “volume based” cooking test that Waffle House isn’t particularly happy discussing in detail (I suppose it’s proprietary) but that one employee told me meant you had to cook $1,500 worth of orders on a single six-hour shift. I have no true sense of how difficult that is, but my steak and eggs, the most expensive item on the menu that day, cost $8.50, so the math is available to be done. Waffle House only recently codified these classifications, after years of more haphazard ratings, such as the impressive-sounding Super Master Grill Operator and the subtly undermining Master Blaster. About 10 percent of Waffle House’s cooks currently qualify as Rockstars.
In New York City, as with most big cities, there is the opportunity to be anonymous on the streets. For a long time, I loved no one knowing who I was or what my business was. I took comfort in the speed with which I moved through the streets of the city, head down, in my own little world, but still somehow absorbing a thousand details at once. It was helpful to my development as an artist, I felt. If all you want is to be left alone with your imagination, then there is no better place to do it than New York.
In New Orleans, there is an insistence to the way we all interact with each other out in the world. We share these streets, which are generally sparsely populated in the neighborhoods. There are good mornings, goodnights, how y’all doings, and head nods and smiles and eye contact. There are neighbors who walk out on their front porch to give treats to my dog. There is polite chit-chat even if we don’t know each other. There are waves from car windows. There is communication. My solo-artist instincts still sometimes rise up, but here, I can’t hide even on those rare occasions I wish I could. This is me now: I’d rather be seen and known than ignored and isolated.
There is a photograph, taken in 2017, of my desk as it looked until recently: monitor, laptop, stacks of papers, various derelict technologies, magazines, books. It resembles a forest—or better yet a city, loose towers arrayed around a small square of open space. This was during the time I was spending a semester in Las Vegas, where I had a different, and much cleaner, desk in the small apartment I rented not far from the campus of UNLV.
I took the photo by way of comparison, so I would remember what I’d left behind. I wasn’t using either desk very much: the one at home because it was too cluttered, the one in Nevada because I had a small breakfast table in the front room where I preferred to write. I could set up my computer and spread out notes and papers on the rounded surface, everything (or so I thought) accessible to me. It was then that I first began to imagine what it might be like to clean my office, to remove those ancient piles and discard the detritus, to get rid of the Kindle and the Sony Reader, to deconstruct and excavate the evidence.
If there was any lingering doubt that Brutalism — the architectural style derided for everything the name implies — was back in fashion, the “Atlas of Brutalist Architecture” quashes it with a monumental thump. At 560 pages representing some 878 works of architecture in over 100 countries, the outsize volume is part reference tool, part coffee table book, and certainly part of an ongoing design trend favoring big, big books.
Death is emptying us out with the flat teaspoon
of minutes, bit by bit, without being excessively