This is important to keep in mind, because for the past year, I had been living in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China’s South West. It is a city of 16 million people, known for its pandas. It is also one of the most famous culinary cities in China, a place synonymous with spicy food and bubbling hot pot. It is a city enthralled with the nostalgic flavours of the past. It was a city where I was constantly challenged to think about the flavours of my childhood. It wasn’t just that strawberries grew in winter; it was that everyone seemed to be able to draw to mind the flavours of their childhood so readily. My childhood’s flavour happened to be a Norman strawberry. It was a marker of my foreignness, a more subtle reminder than the obvious linguistic, cultural and physical differences that set me apart from my friends in the city.
Wherever I would go in Chengdu people would always talk about the flavour of their childhood – in mandarin wo xiaoshihou de weidao. I’d go out to eat with friends and, disappointed, they’d say that the twice-cooked pork was good, but no, it was not their childhood flavour bu shi wo xiaoshihou de weidao. We’d go to a restaurant because someone had said it was definitely still making food that was their xiaoshihou de weidao, only to go and find out that something had changed, and it was no longer quite that. The famous clear jelly dessert that people eat in Chengdu, well, it was now made with a manufactured power and so of course, it had lost the flavour of people’s childhoods. There were countless examples. Once I became attuned to this phrase, I heard it everywhere.
When everything is named for its discoverer, it can be impossible even to track the outline of a debate without months of rote memorization. The discoverer’s name doesn’t tell you anything about what the landscape is like, any more than the “Ackerman” in Ackerman’s Island helps to convey a sandbar in downtown Wichita. Except in a few one-hit-wonder situations where a famous mathematician had extremely narrow tastes (like an Ackerman who, as everyone knew, could only live on sandy substrates, and never left the state of Kansas), their name gives no mnemonic boost whatsoever. Whatever faint associations it might once have held fade away, especially when the discover was neither famous nor narrow, and the reader is several generations removed.
In a Thursday phone interview with The Washington Post, Christensen said he’s “100 percent serious” about his petition to eliminate the term “boneless chicken wings” from menus, not just in Lincoln but across the country. I asked if there were perhaps a few tongue-in-cheek percentage points in there somewhere.
No, he said. The country is dealing with so many complex and important issues right now, he added, “that we might not ever accomplish them in this generation. It is imperative, especially right now with how everybody is feeling in the global climate, that we have a win. We need to have an issue that we can accomplish. We can accomplish it quickly. This is it.”
It’s commonly held that buildings are inhabited by ghosts, less common, however, is the idea that buildings, and the contaminated ideas contained within their construction and political contexts, can also haunt us. As the title of the collection suggests, the haunter and the haunted is given an atmospheric exploration through a variety of well known Brutalist buildings, with their currently maligned positions juxtaposed against the optimism at the time of their construction.
I said before that “Why I Don’t Write” is a quiet collection, but it is not a halting or timid one. Minot still has a poet’s instinct for the surprising volta, the striking image, the bracing final line. After 30 years away from the short story, it is good to have her back, cleareyed and fearless as ever, whispering difficult truths and ambiguities that a less assured writer would feel compelled to shout.
Wittgenstein’s intent is to show what can be meaningfully expressed, but also, more important, to gesture at what lies beyond our ability to express. And a great deal lies beyond. One is left, in Wittgenstein’s words, to “wonder at the existence of the world,” which is precisely the opposite of explaining it fully. Philosophy is the activity of climbing a ladder, and once you reach the top, the ladder disappears.
In the beginning was the word. In schools
the welfare state built, we in the Bogside,
Some days stretch on forever, losing all meaning of conventional time.
One hour spills into the next, and it is as if even the Earth is relearning how to function, too.
Is this my second or third cup of tea?