When contemplating travel, we cannot help but think big: London, Paris, or—why not?—even flights to Australia and New Zealand lasting more than a whole day’s time. It is those magical interstices just within reach we tend to forget, the local gems just across the way that, once taken in, might blow our minds in ways so subtle we do not at first recognize them.
Seneca said we each dwell in two communities: the place of our birth, and the community that “is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.” I would far rather be a citizen of the world than, by accident of birth, an American. I feel disloyal writing this.
Everything about Mark Twain, Ron Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at once profound and outrageous. But Twain’s is merely an exaggeration of our existence, its pain and its joy, our past, and our culture, inescapably our Americanness.
The Affirmative Action Myth is, in essence, a defense of a golden age of Black bourgeois culture, Black bourgeois morality, Black bourgeois striving, indeed, Black bourgeois reality. And being bourgeois here is not about a class, but an aspiration. Riley’s book is an account of how Black people made themselves American. And why not? America is the land of self-invention.
Everyone past the age of reason carries an internal model of the nation where they live. The model describes, with varying complexity and correspondence to reality, the landscape, climate, cultures, history, vibes, and human possibilities and dangers, including what that person believes they can be in relation to their country, and their expectations for treatment by the government and fellow citizens. If enough people talk about their overlapping models, you might get political parties, widespread patriotism, rebellion, nationalism, or talk of a zeitgeist.
Was Randle Patrick McMurphy a fool to go up against Nurse Ratched? Was Nelson Mandela a fool to spend twenty-seven years in prison? Was Alexei Navalny a fool to taunt the Russian powers girding Vladimir Putin and suffer poisoning, prison, and death?
I would suggest using an iron skillet, the kind they made before inferior castings. Do I need to say the old ways are often best? Heat it up for five minutes at medium-high as you prep your ingredients.
The 50th anniversary of ‘Jaws’ will trigger the return of sub-rational fears of swimming in the ocean. For me, I am left thinking about a private lunch I shared with Roy Scheider, who played the film’s police chief, and wanting to commit these memories of the great actor to the public record.
We had no idea how much we would miss them in the wake of St. Louis’s May 16 tornado. At least, I did not.
Crap transference is when people give you things they own, apparently with good intentions, except you do not need or want them, and in fact may not have known they existed.