I turned 39 not long after my first daughter was born. When she was about five months old, I saw the big four-oh on the horizon, and started to think about what I was going to leave behind when I was gone, at least from a literary perspective. So I looked at the bookshelf of works I’d published: four cartoon collections, two critical studies, a series of scholarly articles, some translations, and a handful of stories and essays. There was enough there, I figured, to get her through a few weeks of reading. But then what? What would she read next?
The more I thought about this question, the more I felt compelled to write new material, which led me to reflect on the links between storytelling and death. I remembered reading Joan Didion as a graduate student, especially her classic opener, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It sounded right when I was younger, but from where I sat today, I wasn’t so sure it was the only reason. Perhaps we told ourselves stories in order to live. But it seemed to me that we told others stories in order to die.
The playful language excited the 5-year-old at Dr. Varner’s family gathering – the kittens, the mittens, the bowl full of mush! The person over 90 recalled, too, how the black-and-white prints interspersed in a book about a “great green room” were actually meant to keep costs down. Color prints could make a picture book prohibitively expensive back then.
“But that, actually, that’s one of the most memorable features of the book,” says Dr. Varner. It creates an aesthetic rhythm, melding perspectives of time, blinking back and forth between modern color and familiar black and white – even as time is grounded in subtle visual details, like the clocks, which move forward 10 minutes through the frames, and the moon, which rises bit by bit behind the window.
When she feels as if she is running on shards of glass, when her legs feel like they are about to split open, when she thinks she can’t possibly run one more mile, Courtney Dauwalter starts visualizing the pain cave. It’s a place she constructs in her mind with elaborate detail. She conjures every crevice of the cave’s architecture: a large space with different tunnels inside. The cavernous paths in her mind can be wide or narrow, depending on the length and duration of the race. But with Courtney, they’re usually impossibly long.
Dauwalter, 37, is considered the world’s best female ultramarathon runner. She might just be the greatest ultrarunner of all time, period. She races astonishing distances of 100- and 200-plus miles, even once attempting a 486-mile course. She is often on her feet for a mind-bending 24 or 48 straight hours, in the harshest environments imaginable, from steep terrain and high elevation to extreme weather.
Whether you sprinkle it on mango slices, the rim of your favorite beverage, or chicken wings, Tajín Clásico is becoming a go-to seasoning for imparting spicy, salty tang to people’s favorite foods. Long appreciated in Latin communities, in recent years Tajín has gained a following — one that could go toe-to-toe with those for regional spices like Maryland’s fixation on Old Bay and the far-reaching love of Louisiana’s Tony Chachere’s Creole seasonings.
In Houston, though — the U.S. headquarters for Empresas Tajín’s manufacturing plant — there’s a particular penchant for this secret formula of chile peppers, sea salt, and lime. Houston Mexican restaurant Picos incorporates it in marinades. Heights bar Eight Row Flint uses it in several of its cocktails. Popsicle and paleta shops like Popston use it in their frozen treats. La Lucha and Dish Society pair it with fruity salads, and even grocery chain H-E-B incorporates Tajín in its sushi offerings.
For one, I love reading romance books while snuggled up, and my phone happens to be the perfect size for such reading. It’s also a bonus that I have my own apartment now, so my mother can’t stop me from reading late into the night. Do I drop my phone on my face from time to time? Yes.
How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9, often quoted as ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’), and there’s nothing new about quoting. Lines from Virgil figure among the graffiti at Pompeii and phrases from Euripides have been found at Herculaneum. These were inscribed less in the spirit of surreal anarchism that makes people write ‘Kilroy was here’ on lavatory walls than out of respect for either the authors or the authority of what they had written. The earliest writings on the art of rhetoric were also in a way books of quotations, since they gathered together passages ascribed to master rhetoricians such as Cicero, which they used to illustrate particular figures of speech. ‘Quotations’ have therefore served both a stylistic and ethically normative function throughout literate history.