Richard Howorth is easy to talk to, even when he’s hard to hear. Earlier this year, while men hammered away on the other side of a wall in his hundred-and-sixty-year-old house, the fifth-generation Mississippian told me about raising his three children there and how one of them had already had her wedding reception on the property and another will have hers there soon and why handymen are so difficult to find these days and what one of the hammering men was doing a few weeks ago when he put his foot through the roof. Later, from a friend’s nearby home where no one was banging away in the background, Richard’s wife, Lisa, offered her own explanation for the construction work: “It’s so we don’t look like we live in fucking Grey Gardens.”
The Howorths’ home is nowhere near the Hamptons, but still merits its own documentary: the grit-lit author Larry Brown used to sober up on the front-porch swing; the novelist Donna Tartt stayed the night; the writer Darcey Steinke helped hatch a skinny-dipping plot in the parlor; the Jack-of-all-genres Alexander McCall Smith once showed up in a kilt and conducted a Southern outpost of his Really Terrible Orchestra. “We can’t talk about some of the people,” Lisa said, “because those stories end in the hospital or the county jail.”
In the tangled web of my teenage years, farther back than I care to admit, I had the uncanny ability of always knowing what was best for me. Or so I thought. When my parents told me it wasn’t unreasonable for them to expect me home by midnight after a night out with friends, I argued the point. When they told me I ought not to wait until the last minute to start that book report for school, my standard reply was that I had plenty of time, knowing I hadn’t even started reading the book let alone writing the report. More often than not the choices I made turned out to be not in my best interests, which proved two things: that my parents were right and that my adolescent hubris was doing me more harm than good. Three examples illustrate my deficient powers of distinction: Frankie Avalon or David Copperfield. Elvis Presley or Tom Sawyer. Dion and the Belmonts or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. I chose Frankie, Elvis, and Dion.
But just as that information once did, the minimalist menu is disappearing. Thanks to the realities of post-pandemic restaurant operations — smaller staff among them — more restaurants are reverting back to full descriptors, with long, double-barreled lists of details about provenance, sauces, cooking methods, and sides. “Now that print menus are slowly coming back, restaurants are more willing to provide longer descriptions, which also helps them lure diners,” says Guillermo Ramirez, creative director of the Miami-based marketing agency Gluttonomy Inc. To diners right now, knowledge is power.
“The body is a house. Who lives within?” as one poem has it, echoing 2 Corinthians 5: “Our body is the house in which our spirit lives here on earth.” There’s no doubting and no escaping the joyful, hopeful spirit that inhabits “The Poet’s House” — the spirit of poetry that by the end of this charming novel Carla so clearly embodies — and the irrepressible Jean Thompson so smartly imparts.
Picture a lone human walking across the rocky expanse of a planet, talking to himself as he goes—a lone human alert to signs that this is a planetary surface, to “the speed,” as he puts it, “of the planet rolling under your feet.” This is the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson somewhere high in the southern Sierra Nevada—“the heart of the range”—almost any time in the past 49 years. He could be a sunwalker from his novel 2312, but the planet is Earth, not Mercury, and the California sun won’t incinerate him.
Robinson is hiking off-trail, and—as he writes in his new book, his easy gait is a mode of being: “pedestrian and prosy.” He may be paying close attention to anything or nothing: his plantar fasciitis, a scatter of obsidian chips at a Native American knapping site, the way the mountains “seem to glow from within, to pulse with an internal light, under a sky as dark and solid as enamel.” Or he may be comforting himself “with my usual science fiction exercise,” imagining a scene elsewhere in time, working it through in his mind until he can say, yes, “it had been like that.”