Is it still cool to memorize a lot of stuff? Is there even a reason to memorize anything? Having a lot of information in your head was maybe never cool in the sexy-cool sense, more in the geeky-cool or class-brainiac sense. But people respected the ability to rattle off the names of all the state capitals, or to recite the periodic table. It was like the ability to dunk, or to play the piano by ear—something the average person can’t do. It was a harmless show of superiority, and it gave people a kind of species pride.
There is still no artificial substitute for the ability to dunk. It remains a valued and nontransferrable aptitude. But today who needs to know the capital of South Dakota or the atomic number of hafnium (Pierre and 72)? Siri, or whatever chatbot you use, can get you that information in nanoseconds. Remember when, back in the B.D.E. (Before the Digital Era), you’d be sitting around with friends over a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, and the conversation would turn on the question of when Hegel published “The Phenomenology of Spirit”? Unless you had an encyclopedia for grownups around the house, you’d either have to trek to your local library, whose only copy of the “Phenomenology” was likely to be checked out, or use a primitive version of the “lifeline”—i.e., telephone a Hegel expert. Now you ask your smartphone, which is probably already in your hand. (I just did: 1807. Took less than a second.)
Danielle Evans’s second story collection, The Office Of Historical Corrections, draws on the current zeitgeist with provocative narratives examining race, female friendship, and privilege. The collection concludes with a novella by the same name dealing with both our present obsession with truth and the historical legacy of racism. Women carry this collection, and the characters of these stories are burdened by the death of loved ones, emotional personal decisions, and the weight of their families in crisis, but the persistent interrogation throughout the collection is America’s unending racism.
And there is the learning to wield that power, the straining upward and the letting go, the bracing herself for the flames. Of her writing process, Valentine said in a recent interview: “I got to experience my brother again, imagine him laughing, see him as child full of potential, remember his life and not just his death.” When, days after Junior’s funeral, she and her siblings went to the freeway exit where he was shot and covered the cement wall in messages and drawings of flowers, Valentine wrote, “Come back, come back, come back.” The wall was quickly painted over. But she never stopped writing, and every sentence of this book is infused with that same urgency and longing. It is hers now, and all of ours, to hold.
One Covid-era hero, in my house, is Jacques Pépin, the French-born cookbook writer. Shortly after lockdown started, Pépin, who is 84, began issuing short videos on Facebook that explained how to cook really well using the simplest and homeliest things you have in your house.
There he is, preparing vegetable soup from odds and sods in his refrigerator, nonchalantly cutting the dark bits from old vegetables. Making a choucroute garnie, he throws in sliced hot dogs as well as other sausages. His quick chicken breasts resemble an entree that might have been served to Hemingway and Fitzgerald at the Café du Dôme. He’s a king of the tortilla pizza.
I can’t remember the last time I read a food book so interesting and so lively, let alone one that makes so many quietly political good points without ever becoming earnest or preachy. Let me add that it also comes with a recipe for parkin. What more could you possibly want?
It may seem an almost hilariously overdone homage to a highly specific period of Yankovic’s career. But the truth is his self-effacing persona conceals one of the late 20th and early 21st century’s greatest bodies of cultural critique — even if it’s in comedic-song form.
and have satisfied the finger-check of pulse
at throat and wrist
In Jersey’s Pine Barrens crickets rub their saw-toothed wings and I’m a child.