It’s true that the app has shifted the way that fashion is reported, shared and consumed. But there is no agreement about what has been lost and what gained for creativity and craft in Insta-world. In 2019, clothes must resonate through the two-dimensional photogenic prism of a smartphone screen. That can often translate to designers making bold, loud gestures that grab attention and stop you in your scrolling tracks. Sportswear with hyper-branded, instantly identifiable logos? Tick. Huge feathered gowns and outlandishly hyperbolic hair? Tick. Sparkly, glow-in-the-dark glittery stuff? Tick. Celebrity-endorsed fast fashion? Double tick.
We suitors, on the other side of things, have our own prejudices regarding the dance of culinary seduction. Many look for flowery menus and rustic buildings filled with happy, eating people; the brazen may even step just inside to examine the atmosphere more fully, scanning coldly past the humanity of the host to spy, ideally, our double sitting at a table. I find myself spouting off overconfident reasons why a restaurant looks good to my very patient friends. “That place serves teriyaki and burgers,” I announce. “The burgers will be terrible.” Or, “Ooh, it has a flora of restaurant guide stickers on the window. That must be tasty.”
It’s one heck of a pitch, and in the hands of any other writer could wind up gimmicky, but Newman’s genius lies in balancing these timelines and worlds so finely that the whole thing is seamless – not to mention lots of fun. The narrative darts around deftly and the bursts of archaic language are playful and tender.
Nina Allan has been known until now for her speculative fiction, but The Dollmaker is not concerned with the supernatural, at least not in the usual sense. This literary experiment has a conventional setting, in a contemporary England that feels only slightly askew. Its living dolls are kept within safely figurative bounds, avatars of the exotic in a moving fable of otherness, but they are every bit as unsettling as tradition requires.
Some artists just refuse to leave well enough alone when depicting the world. For example, Alfred Hitchcock brought to the screen a world more frightening and ominous than it actually was, while Norman Rockwell in his paintings summoned a world more beautiful and just than it ever could be.
In contrast to such alternately bleak and sunny visions was the commonsensical realism of John Updike, who, over the course of a career consisting of a huge output of novels, short stories, poems, and essays, could usually be counted on to take the measure of the world as it really was. “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me — to give the mundane its beautiful due,” Updike wrote in the 2003 foreword to a selection of his short fiction, The Early Stories: 1953–1975.
Steve Silberman, in the introduction to his NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (Avery, 2015), poses a simple yet provocative question about the state of contemporary autism discourse: “After seventy years of research on autism, why do we still seem to know so little about it?” While clinical psychiatrists, behavioral therapists, neuroscientists, and educational researchers have long attempted to theorize cognitive difference, autism often remains “the unknowable, unnarratable” limit case. Despite promising shifts toward a spectrum model of autism more open to cognitive fluidity, clinical approaches to autism still tend to uphold the medical model of disability wherein autism is reduced to a state of lack or deficiency requiring correction or even elimination. Autistic activists and writers, responding to the shameful legacy of forced institutionalization and sterilization, have worked to resist stigmatizing discourses by reframing autism in terms of neurodiversity. A neurodiverse framework understands autism as part of human variation rather than as pathology. This concept has galvanized international autistic rights movements, challenging ableist ideals by suggesting that cognitive disability might enable new, viable ways of being. Rights-based activism not only led to landmark legislation like the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) but also ethically restores personhood to cognitively disabled people still maligned and infantilized by caretakers, advocates, and specialists.
I like my tights electric blue,
my shoes of patent leather.
This dance I dance is meant for you —
I move quick as new weather.