"Womp, womp, womp." That's the sound, according to Grammy Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, of a sharp-rimmed glass cutting into just-right biscuit dough. Coming from Giddens' mouth, the timbre translates as a low note plucked from a double bass.
Giddens is an American scholar-musician whose folk, country and blues music illuminates the African lineage of the banjo and celebrates the legacy of the Black string band. But in 2020, at the outset of pandemic lockdowns, Giddens found herself craving something seemingly less academic: biscuits. Not the crisp British variety that Americans call "cookies" and "crackers". Not crumbly, sweetened scones – those she could buy in abundance in her adopted city of Limerick, Ireland. No, what Giddens wanted were flaky, buttery biscuits with a definitive rise, the kind that are ubiquitous across the American South.
On a slate-black night, I stare at a horizon freckled with stars. Only this isn't the sky, illuminated by hundreds of constellations; it's the muddy bank of a river, charged by a colony of glow worms.
"This is my TV," says David Finlay. "It's magical, like something out of Avatar." By day, Finlay works as a transport manager, but by night, he scours Australia's bushland and beaches chasing living light. "If you're tucked up at home, you miss these things. Everybody cocoons themselves at night, whereas I think, what fun can I have?" he says.
This is a new translation by Lauren Elkin of a shortish Simone de Beauvoir book, Les Belles Images, first published in 1966. The book’s aim is to identify the source of its heroine’s discontent. But on the journey inside her mind and life, we get a good account of how de Beauvoir saw the world in the 1960s — and in many ways, that world wasn’t a whole lot different from ours.