The women might have wanted to return home. But they couldn’t. They were not Odysseus, with rowers and soldiers, returning after conquer and plunder. These women had to travel to new worlds — pioneers and explorers, mythic as goddesses of war and love and intellect — because the old world was trying to kill them, starve them, or bury them alive.
Our women were not in history class, or film, or the literature of “the canon.” Our women survived the men who survived the cannons of war, and those were hard men. We hung out with hard men. Weak men. Good men. We married them. We got the babies. The violence. The guns. More babies. The laundry. The pots. Dancing. Pigs. The barter — sex and beds and sheets. The chickens. The bread.
We kept the nation alive.
But what if we reconsider the treadmill? Siskel’s primary criticism is that Clue is an exercise in futility, a whodunit with enough answers to render the question obsolete. Even the film’s very premise is something of a punchline. When Wadsworth shouts the literal rules of the game— “That’s what we’re trying to find out. We’re trying to find out who killed him, and where, and with what”—he is subsequently clocked in the head by a falling candlestick. In that moment it’s not the answer that matters, but the mounting mania and undercutting silliness of it all. What if, Clue seems to ask, futility isn’t an Achilles’ heel? What if it’s the point? The result is a film that honors its source material and transcends its limitations.
Bouillabaisse sometimes seems as old-fashioned as coq au vin or blanquette de veau. Here, and all over France, it is often said you can no longer find a classic rendition of the dish, which is something between a soup and a stew.
Yet there is also a rumor that bouillabaisse survives, especially in this city, which is celebrating its food this year with an initiative called Marseille Provence Gastronomy 2019 that includes cooking lessons, dinner concerts, wine-tastings, art exhibits and markets. To mark the occasion, a group of elementary-school students painted two large outdoor “bouillabaisse” murals featuring the rockfish necessary for the dish.
So when I decided to seek out and taste the real thing, I came to Marseille.
“Think of it this way,” my doctor said as she wrote me a prescription for blood pressure medication, “at least you don’t have children. At least you don’t have to make the choice between the care of your mother over the care of your kid.”
We were the same age, and she had just become a caregiver to her elderly father, who lived in another state. She was exhausted, no longer had the time to go for her ritual morning run, wasn’t eating well: the calls from her father began at 6 am, interrupted by the calls from her college-age children.
I smiled weakly. It had taken me years to come to terms with being childless by choice, and I had, and do, regret my decision. I didn’t see how not being a mother while becoming the sole caregiver for my own had any upside.
There is a conundrum at the heart of understanding how judgements work in relationships. On the one hand, we need to accurately assess whether someone is right for us because it is such an important decision – this is someone who we might potentially spend the rest of our lives with. On the other, a lot of evidence suggests that we are very bad at evaluating the qualities of the people closest to us.
Love blinds us to the realities of the people around us.
In the end, Straight’s book is about far more than a country of women. It’s an ode to the entire multiracial, transnational tribe she claims as her own. “This is my letter to say we love you,” she writes to Sensei, a nephew threatened too many times by both gang violence and the police. In fact, her words are for all those who now call her mother, aunt, cousin and sister, in the neighborhood where she has lived her entire life. And for all those who survived, so these women could live.
"First Cosmic Velocity" is a cleverly conceived and beautifully delivered novel that looks at the struggle for space supremacy from the Soviet side of the Cold War.
My mother turns off the kitchen light
before looking out the window
and half-hidden behind green apple
curtains, takes her nightly inventory