Since we last picked our kids up at school, four months ago, we have taken two walks a day around our neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. I think between us my husband and I have walked the six blocks to Gwendolyn Brooks Park in Bronzeville fifty times. Our route is along Greenwood, past the flowering gardens of old brick houses, then across 47th street, past the art café, currently shuttered, near the health clinic and the historic mosque. A block later comes the park, which has a wonderful sculpture of the poet, the only sculpture of a Black woman in a public place in Chicago. On stepping stones behind the statue are lines of Brooks’s poetry that the children love to read and trace with their fingers. Certain lines have gradually become a part of how I move around in the neighborhood, where we live some blocks from the different houses where Gwendolyn Brooks was born, and grew up, studied, taught, wrote, had her own children, and watched the girls and boys as they skipped and ran. A line that feels strikingly resonant now is incised on the first little oblong stone, from Annie Allen, in the voice of a young girl. It reads, “How pinchy is my room!”
Walking to that statue, to read that line on stone underfoot, I feel how these days I am paying different kinds of attention. To the leaves, to losses, to constraints, on bodies and on daily ways.
I am in the Catskills in a charming, tucked-away treehouse of an inn. My room, walking distance to hiking trails, overlooks a waterfall. Morning coffee and evening vodka-tonic are taken on the deck where the temperature clocks in at a marvelous 75 degrees. Owls hoot. Birds chirrup. Wind tickles my legs.
During the coronavirus lockdown in Chicago, I dreamed about getting away to this leafy utopia. What I did not envision was the hell of crossing the country by car.
I’ve spent too much of my adult life trying to find not just good food, but the very best. Which is exhausting, and expensive, and has warped my own thinking. There have been days I’ve caught myself scheming ways to make more money, just so I can afford to keep eating the meals of my dreams. There have been years where I believed, happily, that it was possible for me—a white man completely untrained in cooking—to be an expert on what food someone else should eat. That I could package the quirky South and sell it to magazines, and that in doing so I was building a more tolerant and well-informed world.
In the collections of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, there’s a round ceramic disk, about the size and shape of a cobblestone, with the barest image of a face on it. Two eyes in a mushroom-shaped head, a mouth opened in a howl or scream of some kind. Radiocarbon dating puts its age at about seven hundred years old, which would make it one of the earliest known images of the Jersey Devil.
It had been some time since I fantasized about having a different face, but the outline of my profile was my first serious dissatisfaction with my appearance. When I was thirteen I accidentally glimpsed myself perfectly from the side by swinging the medicine cabinet open and noticing the secondary refraction in the bathroom mirror. I was horrified at my convexness, which I’d never quite seen fully before. My mouth protruded and my chin fell slightly away underneath it. My nose was an entirely different nose than the one I thought I had. It was sculptural. It had a bump in it. It didn’t look like any other nose in my family; not like my mother or father, not like my grandparents or my many cousins. Where did this statement nose come from? I looked like the wrong half of a moon.
Lauren Beukes’s fifth novel is a smartly written thriller that opens with a satisfying bang: a parent and child on the run after escaping a government compound where the young teenager has been quarantined and forced to undergo a seemingly endless series of tests. The parent is Cole. The kid goes through most of the novel under the alias of Mila. From that you could fairly assume that it’s a father and daughter on the lam, but Beukes — whose novel “The Shining Girls” dealt with a time-traveling serial killer — is all about turning assumptions and expectations upside down. Cole is actually Nicole, and Mila, her 13-year-old hostage to fortune, is actually Miles, one of the few males left after Manfall has taken 99 percent of those carrying the Y chromosome. This is because of a pandemic — yes, that again — known as the human culgoa virus, or H.C.V.
“Imperfect Women” is not a conventional detective story, but an investigation into character and motivation. The real mysteries concern love, friendship, obligation, the disappointments that come with the passage of time and the mysteries of other people’s hearts — as well as your own.
Judging by the many memoirs and documentaries that have appeared since 1987, the jury is still out on whether Warhol was an asshole, a saint, or both. Does it matter? His artistic legacy is secure, in part because he recognized the durability of cynicism. Gopnik, quoting Warhol, notes that truly modern art is without feeling. This may be Warhol’s great insight. Nihilism never goes out of fashion. Sometimes it even looks fun.