The next day, a Monday, Ashley started assembling 30 boxes of survival-food kits for the staff. She packed Ziploc bags of nuts, rice, pasta, cans of curry paste and cartons of eggs, while music played from her cellphone tucked into a plastic quart container — an old line-cook trick for amplifying sound. I texted a clip of her mini-operation to José Andrés, who called immediately with encouragement: We will win this together! We feed the world one plate at a time!
Ashley had placed a last large order from our wholesaler: jarred peanut butter, canned tuna, coconut milk and other unlikely items that had never appeared on our order history. And our account rep, Marie Elena Corrao — we met when I was her first account 20 years ago; she came to our wedding in 2016 — put the order through without even clearing her throat, sending the truck to a now-shuttered business. She knew as well as we did that it would be a long while before the bill was paid. Leo, from the family-owned butchery we’ve used for 20 years, Pino’s Prime Meat Market, called not to diplomatically inquire about our plans but to immediately offer tangibles: “What meats do you ladies need for the home?” He offered this even though he knew that there were 30 days’ worth of his invoices in a pile on my desk, totaling thousands of dollars. And all day a string of neighborhood regulars passed by on the sidewalk outside and made heart hands at us through the locked French doors.
It turned out that abruptly closing a restaurant is a weeklong, full-time job. I was bombarded with an astonishing volume of texts. The phone rang throughout the day, overwhelmingly well-wishers and regretful cancellations, but there was a woman who apparently hadn’t followed the coronavirus news. She cut me off in the middle of my greeting with, “Yeah, you guys open for brunch?” Then she hung up before I could even finish saying, “Take care out there.”
It’s Whateverday, the 99th of Monthcember—who knows at this point—and there’s heavy traffic on East Drive in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Joggers in the hundreds. Young, old, fast, slow. When the sun’s out during lockdown it’s busier than a charity race out here. You can tell the quarantine newbies. They jog like I do. A pained shuffle. Their exercise clothes appear to be whatever they could find in the back of the closet. T-shirts stained with dried paint, sneakers dirty with car grease or a kid’s crayon scribble. They are outpaced by gazelles wearing aerodynamic lycra, zero-drop running shoes and monitoring tech strapped to their arms. Now the Olympics have been postponed, presumably they are training to join an elite military unit following the breakdown of society. Doubtless irritated by so many amateurs crowding the East Drive to peak fitness.
East Drive runs north-south, part of a circular roadway that lassoes the entire park perimeter. I’ve been waiting for a couple of minutes to cross it west from the Lincoln Road entrance side, onto the path where I like to begin my daily walk into the heart of the park. But the joggers keep on coming. The fun-runners, the serious athletes, the serious-athlete-parents running at high speed pushing strollers in which their offspring are pulling two or three Gs. Just when I think I spy a gap in the parade, it’s filled by a cyclist out for a leisurely ride. Hot on their tail are the scooterists and rollerbladers and children veering this way and that on their training wheels. Here come the gear-heads pedaling custom-built recumbent trikes and—GETOUTTATHEWAYFUCKOUTTATHEWAY!—the professionals competing in their own personal Tour de France. Slowing for crossing pedestrians can shave as much as 1/125th of a second from their circuit time, which undoubtedly justifies their fury. I give up trying to dart over the road and instead merge into the pedestrian lane to follow the caravan of health enthusiasts north.
The town, in Lancaster County, has been home to a sound company and a staging company for decades. But since opening the Studio in 2014 and establishing Rock Lititz, its owners have adapted to the new reality in the music industry: Record sales are a fraction of what they once were, and while streaming has helped the bottom line, the big money is in touring. For a major band planning a major tour, the companies that constitute Rock Lititz aim to be a one-stop shop: They build the stage, they design the lighting, they do the sound, and after a couple days or a week or a month of rehearsals, they send you off to tour the world.
BTS is sending ahead thirty shipping containers of equipment, which will become Ferenchak’s temporary new neighbors. The production will be one of the biggest that Rock Lititz has hosted—as massive as Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour in 2018, which became the top-grossing concert tour in U. S. history.
The 29-year-old author of this impressive Dutch debut, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, grew up on a dairy farm in North Brabant. Cows, in this telling, are sensitive creatures; sick cows are the sweetest kind. “You could stroke them gently without them suddenly kicking back at you.” The meagre comfort in “The Discomfort of Evening” comes from these beasts; the humans in this searing novel, shortlisted for the International Booker prize, are too numb with pain to be able to console anyone.
Who would have guessed that a satire about an oily Republican congressman, 19th-century taxidermy and a creature so ugly it resembles “a pig screwed by a donkey” would be the perfect tonic for testing times? This is what Jessica Anthony’s insouciant and ingenious novel delivers in fewer than 192 achingly funny pages.
In the last story of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut collection, “How to Pronounce Knife,” a 14-year-old girl helps her hard-working mother pick worms at a hog farm. Having mastered an improvised method, the woman’s worm counts are consistently highest among her fellow workers. Then, a white boy — the girl’s classmate — copies the woman’s process and quickly becomes the manager simply because he speaks good English and agrees to initially work for free. “I knew what James got was something she wished for herself,” the girl thinks, pondering her mother’s situation. “She loved this job and she had been at it for much longer than James, but no one had noticed her work at all. And James? He was happy to have a job that paid so well. He didn’t wonder if he deserved the job or not. He was fourteen and he was boss.” Soon, he brings about changes that reduce the mother’s worm-picking efficiency and endanger her livelihood. Upending the narrative of immigrants sweeping in to take jobs away from Americans, Thammavongsa highlights how it’s often immigrants who get exploited, their contributions ignored.
Over the course of the collection’s 14 stories, Thammavongsa’s tales of Lao immigrants in the Western world continually subvert many such prejudices. Her careful dissection of everyday moments of racism, classism and sexism exposes how power and privilege drive success, how work shapes the immigrant identity, and how erasure and invisibility lead to isolation.
The focus of Augustine Sedgewick’s book is not coffee’s effect on drinkers but its role in the story of global capitalism, as a commodity that links producers in poor countries with consumers in rich ones. Coffee does more than merely reflect this divide, he argues—it has played a central role in shaping it. It is, he notes, “the commodity we use more than any other to think about how the world economy works and what to do about it”.
It is so early almost nothing has happened.
Agriculture is an unplanted seed.
Music and the felt hat are thousands of years away.
The sail and the astrolabe, not even specks on the horizon.
The window and scissors: inconceivable.
Seasons will not be still,
Filled with the migrations of birds
Making their black script on the open sky,
Those hasty notes of centuries-old goodbye.