I’m great at feeding people, but I’ve never mastered portion control. I joke that it’s inherited, that I always make too much because written in my genome is the fear that there won’t be enough to go around. That’s never happened; I’ve always had the luxury of a full shopping cart.
Or rather, I did until mid-March, when I encountered empty supermarket shelves, just days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic. The sight of those picked-over produce displays flooded me with visions of my grandmother, who always made too much food, and who counted wealth in jars of pickled vegetables and preserved fruit, an ever-renewing stockpile that meant everything might go to hell, but at least we could eat.
I have often bristled at Arthur Rimbaud’s injunction at the end of A Season in Hell: “Il faut être absolument moderne.” I have never wanted to be absolutely modern; I find infinitely more comfort in my futile yearning for the past. Recently, however, I came across a short film by Lucien Smith that unexpectedly assuaged my nostalgia. A Clean Sweep (2013) is a sort of lullaby for New Yorkers: the soft texture of the film footage renders otherwise mundane city scenes (a bustling street at rush hour, a plump deli cat pawing a door) into tender tableaux vivants. Blinking brake lights of cars stuck in traffic blur into soft, red nebulas, as though seen through a rain-splattered window. But this soothing effect is conveyed most acutely by the spoken-word address of its narrator: the maverick writer Glenn O’Brien, who passed away in 2017. He meanders through his thoughts about the concurrence of the past and the present, gently nudging us to see that time is perhaps far less rigid than we suppose. “It feels like history here,” he says at one point. “Where? Where what? It feels like history, here.”
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight's strange and delightful second novel, Hex, opens with its protagonist in crisis. Nell Barber is an ex-doctoral student at Columbia; her lab, which studied toxins, has been disbanded after a student accidentally poisons herself, and now Nell is floating through New York, grief-stricken and in need of work. She's also profoundly lovesick for her dissertation advisor, a magnetic young botanist named Dr. Joan Kallas. Without Joan's "absolutely necessary nearness," Nell is undone. She describes herself as "deleted." She spends her time cooking up ways to continue her research without a lab; writing long letters to Joan in composition notebooks; and seeking beauty wherever she can find it.
Probably not coincidentally, “Nemesis” was Roth’s last book, written with a heightened awareness of mortality, and infused with a certain kind of forgiveness. “Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not,” Roth writes in the voice of his narrator, one of the playground boys who survived polio to live into adulthood. “Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance — the tyranny of contingency — is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.”
What would Dr. King think of the future?
Would he find his dream becoming a reality or just a VR experience?