As with most things when decided upon at first—a beloved, a political cause, or, in my own case, the writing of poems—it’s easy to think all we have to do is start doing: show love, be politically alert, write poems. Maybe one of the chief values of enthusiasm is its ability to simultaneously energize us toward commitment and render us usefully—for the time—oblivious to the sheer stamina that sustained commitment, what we call a career, requires. Shortly after my first book was published, a teacher of mine told me that having a career in poetry was like riding a runaway open streetcar, that the secret was to hold on tightly and stay aboard, rather than becoming one of the many who get thrown off, into the street. “Keep watching, you’ll see what I mean,” he said. I remember being amused and more than a little horrified by this image, but I’ve come to understand the general idea, and I don’t disagree, not entirely. Thinking back to all of the writers who started publishing around the same time as I did, there are so many whose voices I had thought would be the dominant ones for decades to come—yet they fell silent or, if not silent, never matched or in any way came close to the achievement for which they were earlier acclaimed. There are just as many others whose voices seemed negligible to me, whose work I’d still call unsurprising, yet it continues, like the writers themselves, to thrive and be published widely. And there is a third group, of modest accomplishment at the start, who have managed to differently surprise me by becoming better. I now see how much more powerful stamina can be than talent; or to say it another way, how powerless talent is, on its own, without stamina—rather like what is said about the body once the soul has left it, though I don’t believe in the soul. I do believe in stamina.
Jennings, 48, often thinks about life’s funny timing. If he had not gone on a road trip with a friend to try out for “Jeopardy!” right around when the show lifted its limit of five games, he never would have stunned the world by reeling off 74 wins in a row, never would have won about $2.5 million, never would have become a celebrity instead of living the alternate version of his life, in which he envisions himself as “a mildly unhappy Salt Lake City computer programmer.”
And he really never would have predicted that he would one day replace the legendary Alex Trebek. As proof, we direct you to Jennings’s Reddit username, which is WatsonsBitch. “See, that is the kind of thing you do when you are absolutely convinced you are not going to be host of ‘Jeopardy!,’ ” Jennings said, laughing, during an interview after the taping. (The name is a reference to IBM supercomputer Watson, the machine that crushed Jennings in a competition-slash-ratings stunt in 2011.)
You know him. Everybody knows him. The opera cape and the tuxedo and the hypnotic gaze and the Mitteleuropean accent and the winking lines about not drinking … wine and staying out of the sun. Many of these are from Hollywood adaptations, from Dracula’s Daughter to Love at First Bite, but the original Bram Stoker novel, a century and a quarter old this year, gave the character his long-standing appeal—for reasons well worth thinking about today.
Now that I’ve led you onto the unstable foundations of translation and pointed out how unreliable its construction material is, I hope to reclaim a firmer footing by exploring the essential questions: Can we trust translations? and why should we?
Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson — later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) — was captivated by the rings’ beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated.
Although this Victorian-era idea may now sound ridiculous, it was not a frivolous investigation. This vortex theory had a lot to recommend it: The sheer diversity of knots, each slightly different, seemed to mirror the different properties of the many chemical elements. The stability of vortex rings might also provide the permanence that atoms required.
What is the value of beauty in recluse? Curiously, during the pandemic, many people seized on this period of compulsory isolation to beautify themselves. Interest in plastic surgery and cosmetic services surged. Online forums dedicated to “glow up” transformations proliferated. Even alone, most people felt beholden to some imagined scrutiny. The narrator of Toad, Katherine Dunn’s fourth novel, offers a perceptive remark on this tendency. “There was no cigarette lit, no itch scratched without a full awareness of the audience,” Sally Gunnar observes to herself. “If there was no audience, we rehearsed.” Young people especially. They “do not exist without someone looking at them.” If beauty is social currency, quantified by the gaze of others, its value would collapse without an audience. Forsaking beauty requires a total rejection of people, of all society.
Published after Dunn’s 2016 death, Toad considers the freedoms and limitations of a woman’s indefinite isolation. Recluse offers Sally dignity and distance from an ugly, troubled past. Her ambling narration is caustic and occasionally sentimental, oscillating between scenes from her scrappy college years and her tumultuous adult life. In youth, Sally was undesirable, unseemly, and suicidal. She admits to being “a great follower of persons,” seeking approval and affection in those who rarely returned it. Now, alone in middle age, she is finally content. Her physical traits, once the source of her ire, are unimportant: “Am I getting fat? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, the goldfish won’t complain.”
N.K. Jemisin’s new novel, “The World We Make,” is the kind of book you lose an entire day to, hour after hour going by unnoticed, and emerge shaken and dazzled on the other end. The writing is clear and visceral and intense. It’s some of the most brilliant, unapologetic speculative fantasy I’ve read in years.
Recently, The New York Times published a photograph of children in Ukraine playing on a playground, surrounded by bombed-out buildings. I happened to see it the same week I was reading “Trespasses,” the brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking debut novel by Louise Kennedy. I think the two will be forever linked in my mind.
In a risky move on Bublitz’s part, Alice is our narrator, watching events unfold after her murder. For a novel with a dead narrator, however, “Before You Knew My Name” crackles with life and energy. It is a tour de force of imagination, empathy and righteous fury. Dead girls rarely get to be fully realized in crime fiction, and Alice seizes the speaking role.
Despite its high-flown and somewhat misleading title, The Philosophy of Modern Song is a kind of strange companion to those sleeve notes rather than a philosophical treatise on the art and craft of songwriting. Illustrated with a wealth of sometimes tangentially linked photographs (publicity stills, snapshots, landscapes and classic documentary images by the likes of Dorothea Lange and William Klein), it comprises 66 deeply subjective essays on songs Dylan holds dear, from standards and groundbreakers to obscurities and oddities.
In 1994, three weeks before he was cast as Chandler Bing in Friends, Matthew Perry prayed.
“God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.” The actor’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, is the story of how God held up both sides of that bargain. It is an account of three decades of addiction, crippling pain, comas, an exploding colon, loneliness, self-hatred, self-sabotage, failed relationships, and expensive rehabs (it is also an account of the staggering expense of sobriety). Reading it is exactly as grim and as exhausting as all that sounds. For a book about a life getting high, this is a collection only of lows.
Rodriguez, an artist who has built sculptures from recordings of Dead shows, gives readers a kaleidoscope view of the band’s storied tapers. He thoroughly explores their obsessive quest for the lost chord and how they contributed to several cottage industries that grew up alongside the Dead, ranging from fanzines that published setlists to tape-trading exchanges to entrepreneurs who churned out cassette covers decorated with dancing bears, Ice Cream Kid and lots of skulls and roses.