One hundred years ago, on Nov. 18, 1922, Marcel Proust breathed his last in Paris at age 51. His death, from pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess, was perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the belle epoque, an age of gentility, civility and artistic achievement that had mostly ended with the outbreak of World War I. At the time, several volumes of Proust’s gargantuan, seven-part novel, “À la recherche du temps perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time”), had yet to be published. Jean Cocteau, arriving to pay tribute to the late author, spotted the manuscript resting on the mantelpiece — a pile of papers “still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.”
Proust’s death was an ending but not the end. It would be five more years before “In Search” was published in full and decades before an authoritative text was established from the morass of his marginalia. His work has since been widely acclaimed, and a Proust-industrial complex of criticism and biography has developed around him. “No one is less dead than he is,” a friend remarked, some years after his demise.
Every domesticated plant has a corresponding wild plant from which it arose, but there did not seem to be any wild counterpart of corn. Corn cannot grow in the wild without the intervention of man. Plant a corn cob and you will soon see that so many seedlings arise that they crowd each other out as they compete for nutrients, and none will survive. Corn kernels must be physically separated and planted individually to produce a healthy corn plant that can propagate its next generation. At the time Beadle started his work on corn there were several theories about the forebears of modern corn. One is that wild corn is extinct; the other is that corn was derived from a wild grass called “teosinte.”
Everything in the universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has been remarkably successful in describing the gravity of stars and planets, but it doesn't seem to apply perfectly on all scales.
I remember my first taste of butter chicken. I must have been about 10 years old. My dad’s cousins used to marinate a whole chicken from their farm in yoghurt, spices, ginger, garlic and chilli, before cooking it over an open fire: not everyone owned a tandoor.
Everything they used was from their own land: deliciously sweet and tangy tomatoes, homemade yoghurt, white makhan (a cultured butter). It was such an experience – and such a beautiful dish – that throughout the long train journey home after visiting them, I would hassle my mum to make it for us back home. Those delicate spices, though, and the smoky flavour from cooking over an open fire, are impossible for me to replicate, even now.
I chose not to set any of the present action of this novel in prison because prison is, in fiction as in life, static, repetitive. But I do describe some of the thoughts that allowed Earl to survive in prison, mostly imaginative flights that often involve an afternoon spent at a pool in Austin (an unnamed Barton Springs, where I swim almost daily). If desire is plot—and I think it mostly is—this novel is in part about a man who, in his few remaining years on earth, wants to learn to swim.
This is a very twisty tale, you may figure it out before you finish, or you may not. Either way, it’s a dark and stormy tale that is hard to leave until it is over.
From assault-victim turned outlaw in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise to the president in Commander in Chief, Davis has spent her career seeking out ballsy roles, while battling a chronic tendency towards people-pleasing off screen. “Though my characters were bold before I was, that boldness rubbed off on me,” she writes and the book is a more or less chronological account of her career and what she calls “my journey to badassery”, complete with some of her own sketches and a section of family photographs.
For almost thirty years, Kamin was the architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, and this book collects fifty-five of his columns written over the past decade. Kamin’s chief concern, through the lens of architecture, is that of equity and he sets up a guiding metaphor using the Millennium Park sculpture widely known as ‘the Bean.’ He notes how the sculpture’s metallic surface provides a striking reflection of the city’s growing and lavish downtown skyline, “But [it] does not reflect the reality of a very different Chicago.” For Kamin, ‘the Bean’ is a shiny object meant to distract from “weed-strewn vacant lots, empty storefronts, and unceasing gun violence” in a city like Chicago. Yet, how architecture can address equity isn’t limited to larger cities, playing an important role in more pastoral cities like Fort Worth, Indianapolis, or Columbus, Ohio. The essays in Who Is the City For? present Chicago as an analogue for any city and how architecture and urban design have an ability to bolster and transform the lives of individuals and their communities.
Wildlife in the Balance by Simon Mustoe is for anyone concerned about the future of our planet. Packed with scientific detail, delightful black and white drawings of anything from dugongs and tapirs to gannets, and dozens of stories that explain the science, this is a text that flips the script on how to save the planet.
About my brain, its wires glitching
like a jellyfish sprite