Making a living as a poet-for-hire with a typewriter has been a tradition in New Orleans for decades, though usually I ply my trade plein-air—setting up a folding table on Royal Street in the French Quarter. My street-office coexists alongside painters hanging their canvases on the St. Louis Cathedral gates, brass bands wailing “St. James Infirmary,” children tap-dancing with bottlecaps on the soles of their shoes, human statues and sex workers and fortune tellers. I’m part of the surreal ecosystem of artists and hustlers who populate the Vieux Carré, a neighborhood brimming with wealthy tourists, and almost entirely devoid of residents. In the past year, typewriter-poets have proliferated exponentially. Today, you might find 15 poets of widely varying quality, sobriety, and intention working simultaneously, on Royal Street in the daytime, and Frenchmen Street after nightfall.
I’ve made my living this way for eight years—here in New Orleans, and on tour in Paris, Havana, New York, London, San Francisco, Madrid. I use a quasi-Marxist system: strangers give me a topic, and ten minutes later they come back and pay what they feel the poem is worth (a wealthy banker of a sensitive persuasion, startled by a love poem composed for their spouse, might hand me a hundred-dollar bill, and I happily write poems for barefoot customers reeking of malt liquor, for free).
Cooking, it is sometimes said, is one of the highest forms of human self-expression. But tell that to the person who is trying to get dinner ready, children in tow, after work and before bedtime, with an imperfectly stocked pantry and nagging pings from unanswered emails.
The first time I used my Instant Pot, to make a vegetable biryani on a timer delay setting, it made me cry. This probably says as much about me as it does about this multifunctional electric pressure cooker. But still. "When we get home, there will be a piping hot dinner waiting for us," I said to my youngest son, as if announcing to a Victorian orphan that I had managed to buy him a goose for Christmas. He raised his eyebrows quizzically at the phrase "piping hot." As usual, he and I were at his after-school sports training, which annoyingly falls most days of the week during just those hours when — if only I were Michael Pollan — I would be at home, chopping an onion in a contemplative fashion. Often as not, our weeknight dinner will be food from the weekend, reheated, or a speedy omelet, or a random stir-fry foraged from the fridge. There is nothing so terrible in any of this (especially when the reheated leftovers are one of those spicy sticky stews that improve over time), but it’s the sense of time-panic and compromise that I don’t like. The first night with the Instant Pot was different. We walked in the house and smelled cloves and bay leaf and the warm scent of basmati, aromas that became still more intense when I flicked the steam valve, opened the lid and heard that happy little jingle that the machine makes when it opens or closes. Some thoughtful person had been cooking, and so many hours had elapsed since I sautéed the onion and spices and put the rice and vegetables in the pot that it did not feel as if that someone had been me.
Yet the Louvre is being held hostage by the Kim Kardashian of 16th-century Italian portraiture: the handsome but only moderately interesting Lisa Gherardini, better known (after her husband) as La Gioconda, whose renown so eclipses her importance that no one can even remember how she got famous in the first place.
Some 80 percent of visitors, according to the Louvre’s research, are here for the Mona Lisa — and most of them leave unhappy. Content in the 20th century to be merely famous, she has become, in this age of mass tourism and digital narcissism, a black hole of anti-art who has turned the museum inside out.
Enough!
Like virtually all disabilities, stuttering has long been viewed through a medical lens—as a pathology in search of neutralization, an obstacle to a successful life. That lens is embedded in the language of speech impediments and speech pathologists. At best, stuttering has been framed as a “despite” condition: we can be happy and productive despite how we talk.
Some of us, though, have been trying to flip the paradigm, to reframe stuttering as a trait that confers transformative powers. We wear our vulnerability on the outside, and that invites emotional intimacy with others. We slow down conversations, fostering patience. We give texture to language. We gauge character by our listeners’ reactions. We are good listeners ourselves.
Schine is an instinctively funny writer—not one of those who populate “Humor” sections in bookstores, with their demented determination to make you laugh, but a novelist of sustained light wit and great formal economy. Her scenes in this new novel are especially lean and staccato, everything counting, the dialogue concise and convincingly absurd. She knows the importance, for any good comedy, of characters who are consciously funny as well as those who are unknowingly so. To the twins’ father, Arthur, it is incomprehensible that someone as humorless as his psychiatrist brother Don “could claim to uncover the secrets of another person’s soul”; humor, Schine makes clear, is an essential means of understanding.
To some American critics, her work has seemed British in flavor, and Austen and Barbara Pym are evidently part of her lineage; from a British point of view she seems nonetheless distinctively American—the predominant subject matter of middle-class New York Jewish family life giving her novels their atmosphere, and the drily observant wit of Dorothy Parker or Dawn Powell informing their tone. In manner as well as subject, a hint of old-fashioned New York glamour from the parents’ generation persists into a world shaped by new technologies and new moralities. At its snappiest, the talk in her novels is like a very well written sitcom, shaped in short scenes, with little narrative padding. The risk entailed in so brisk and hilarious a performance is that the characters may seem more the properties of an enormous predetermined joke than plausible human beings.
I do not mean to fall into the usual trap of reducing Andrews’ career to her two best-loved roles, even if it is a mistake to which she herself must be more than accustomed by now. In her charming new memoir, “Home Work” — the book that prompted the offending tweet — she briefly mentions her own initial apprehension at following “Mary Poppins” so quickly with “The Sound of Music,” of playing two genially mischief-making, musically gifted nannies in a row. And that was before she had won her Oscar for “Mary Poppins,” or had any inkling of just how successful and enduring both pictures would become.
But if Andrews experienced any later resentment at not being able to escape the shadow of her first two major movie triumphs, she doesn’t let on here. Her focus, as the title of the book emphasizes, is on the work, and particularly on the difficulties of the work. Her tone throughout is brisk, matter-of-fact and endlessly self-deprecating (“I kept feeling that I hadn’t done it justice,” “I saw places where my lack of experience showed through,” etc.), punctuated by the occasional flight into effusive gratitude.
So how did we get here? How did superhero comics, the supposed realm of nerdy teenagers, end up conquering the world?
The answer, in many ways, comes down to a single name — Stan Lee. Across a lifetime of creativity, collaboration and endless hustle, Stan Lee saw possibilities no else could imagine and made them real. And if you want to understand how Lee and Marvel did it, Danny Fingeroth's new book A Marvelous Life is the place to start. As a lifelong fan of Spider-Man, The X-Men, Star-Lord and the rest, it was delightful introduction to a guy I'd never met but felt I'd known my whole life.
Barnes tells us that he immersed himself in these past French lives partly as a respite from “Britain’s deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union”, and as a gesture against insularity. And indeed it is salutary to be so thoroughly submerged – even sometimes to the point of drowning – in abundant detail from the “distant, decadent, hectic, violent, narcissistic and neurotic Belle Epoque”, with all its fascination and its difference from us. The past liberates us from the shallowness of our absorption in the present, and reminds us that we always know less than we think about what we’re doing.