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Strange Sights Much Sought, Strange Things Much Bought

December through the eyes of an Elizabethan poet.

Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, ca. 1608.

It is now definitely December. Another November survived, and a grim November it was, too, the month Thoreau used to call November Eat-heart—days “as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart,” in which “you must hold on to life by your teeth.” “You can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk … If you do feel any fire at this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own.” Even the life-affirming Nicholas Breton goes dark: “Now begins the Goshawk to weed the wood of the Pheasant, and the Mallard loves not to hear the bells of the Falcon. The winds now are cold, and the Air chill, and the poor die through want of Charity.”

Breton, ca. 1554–1626, was a prolific Elizabethan poet, friend to Edmund Spenser, with a penchant for powerfully balanced rhythms (“Sing a dirge on Spenser’s death, / Till your souls be out of breath”), but he’s justly forgotten today. Justly except for his fantastic Fantasticks: Serving for A Perpetuall Prognostication (1626). Along with lesser vignettes on the elements, seasons, hours, and major holidays, Fantasticks contains twelve little descriptions of the months that deserve to be immortal.

Starting in January, when “Time begins to turn the wheel of his Revolution,” Breton’s vivid natural and social descriptions march steadily through the year: “the Squirrel now surveyeth the Nut and the Maple, and the Hedgehog rolls up himself like a football”; in June, “the little Lads make Pipes of the straw, and they that cannot dance, will yet be hopping”; in September, “the winds begin to knock the Apples’ heads together on the trees, and the fallings are gathered to fill the Pies for the Household.” Each month ends with a kicker as balanced as a brace of oxen: May “is from the Heavens a Grace, & to the Earth a Gladness. Farewell.”

Here is December:

IT is now December, & he that walks the streets, shall find dirt on his shoes, Except he go all in boots. Now doth the Lawyer make an end of his harvest, and the Client of his purse. Now Capons and Hens, beside Turkeys, Geese and Ducks, besides Beef and Mutton, must all die for the great feast, for in twelve days a multitude of people will not be fed with a little …. Now are the Tailors and the Tiremakers full of work against the Holidays, and Music now must be in tune, or else never: the youth must dance and sing, and the aged sit by the fire … The Footman now shall have many a foul step, and the Ostler shall have work enough about the heels of the Horses, while the Tapster, if he take not heed, will lie drunk in the Cellar. The prices of meat will rise apace, and the apparel of the proud will make the Tailor rich. Dice and Cards, will benefit the Butler. And if the Cook do not lack wit, he will sweetly lick his fingers. Starchers and Launderers will have their hands full of work, and Periwigs and painting will not be a little set by, strange stuffs will be well sold, strange tales well told, strange sights much sought, strange things much bought, and what else as falls out. To conclude, I hold it the costly Purveyor of Excess, and the after-breeder of necessity, the practice of Folly, and the Purgatory of Reason.
     Farewell.

I haven’t run across many capons or ostlers this season, but costly Excess rings a bell—this is all recognizably my December. At the same time, as with any Elizabethan English, paying attention to moments of static, the words that seem not quite right, turns up interesting things. Why will Dice and Cards benefit the Butler? Because a butler was originally a bottler: the main servant in charge of the wine cellar and serving the drinks. “Now plums and spice, Sugar and Honey, square it among pies and broth”: To “square it” is to strut or swagger, perhaps from squaring your shoulders or squaring up to box. “And Gossip I drink to you, and you are welcome, and I thank you, and how do you, and I pray you be merry”: A “gossip” was a “god-sib,” a sibling or relative in a foster relationship—your child’s godmother or godfather, for instance, was your gossip. From there the meaning spread to close friends (Breton’s chatty December pub-goers toast to friendship), especially the female friends present at a childbirth, and from there to idle or malicious chatterers and their chatter, by the sexism that eventually turns almost any English word with feminine associations nasty.

Still, more interesting than the glimpse of language past is that of life past and the life that lives on—the dirty shoes, the starchers and launderers and tiremakers, the Folly of shopping for strange stuff. Of course the language and the life go together, and you lose one when you lose the other. A few years back, there was a short-lived outcry when somebody noticed that the 2008 Oxford Junior Dictionary had quietly cut a number of words. A young person apparently no longer needs to know catkin, brook, minnow, acorn, buttercup, heron, almond, ash, beetroot, bray, bridle, porpoise, gooseberry, raven, blackberry, tulip, and canter, and the culling—sorry, “deletions”—made room for celebrity, citizenship, bungee-jumping, committee, compulsory, block graph, attachment, and database, among others.* I doubt capon and ostler are in there either. You can’t blame the dictionary folks; they’re probably right.

Beyond the vocabulary, there’s the death of Breton’s rhythm. Singsongy in much of his poetry, the echoes and symmetries in his calendar express a sturdy rootedness in the rhythms of the world. This grounding makes “perpetual prognostication” possible: it says this is how the months will always be. I don’t think I hear rhythms like it anywhere today, even in children’s books, pop songs, or rap, the three places in our culture where poetry has gone to live. We have less faith now in our future Decembers. To conclude, I hold it a Messenger of ill news, and a memory of Comfort. Farewell.

*Lists taken from the fine essay “A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook” by Robert Macfarlane, in Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings (2010).

Damion Searls, the Daily’s language columnist, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.

In the Details

Milton’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.

Some books are made to be read aloud—or, at least, they take on different dimensions when they’re heard or performed. The texts that make for great audiobooks are sometimes the ones you’d expect: Ulysses or Moby-Dick or just about anything by Wodehouse. Books whose poetry and humor are thrown into relief by a gifted voice actor.

Other times, a title will take you by surprise. My brother has always been a great book-listener, and over the years I’ve given him any number of audiobooks. I won’t say which were disappointing, but it was fun to hear how well Herzog took to the treatment, or The Savage Detectives. Leo McKern reads Rumpole far better than your head ever will. (And listening is, in my opinion, the only way to approach The Fountainhead.)

Perhaps the biggest surprise was Paradise Lost. Maybe that doesn’t sound fun—but it’s riveting, and I’m not just saying that because today is Milton’s birthday. (He doesn’t care. Depending upon your system of belief he’s either dead or has better things to think about.) Like a lot of people, I’d read Paradise Lost in college—or maybe studied is the better word—and I’d recognized its importance as a literary and philosophical work and a cultural artifact. But it wasn’t until listening to the nine-hour Nadia May version that I really appreciated the poem.

It’s a great luxury to put yourself in the hands of a talented reader, to give yourself over totally to the pleasures of language. As anyone who’s ever both seen and read a play knows, the experience is completely different, and differently rich. It’s a special treat to do this with a piece that one has only approached intellectually, especially if one tends to overthink things. This is one of the few kinds of true relaxation that technology has brought us.

This may be a facile point, but it’s important to remember that Milton was blind, meaning that his work was always read aloud: dictated to his various scribes, and then presumably read back to him. Perhaps this goes some ways toward explaining its particular spoken music. You can read infinitum about Milton’s disillusionment and despair, his personal travails and political disappointments. But to hear that passion expressed is something else entirely. Some recorded versions cast two readers, so that the character of Satan is distinct. I imagine this is great, but not absolutely necessary: the conflict is vivid as written.

If you can manage it, read the lines aloud to yourself. People might look at you like you’re crazy, but then, no one said the struggle between good and evil was easy. 

But first whom shall we send
In search of this new world, whom shall we find
Sufficient? Who shall tempt, with wand’ring feet
The dark unbottomed infinite abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy isle?

Now in Fabulous 4-D, and Other News

An audience watching a 3-D “stereoscopic film” in 1951. Photo: UK National Archive

On the letters of T. S. Eliot: “Despite having spent years wanting to know more about Eliot, I find the prospect of his complete correspondence—of which there are three-and-a-half decades still to go—boring beyond tears … the diplomatic mass of rejection slips and luncheon appointments … [the] deadening epic of polite notes.”
There’s no stopping the future, and the future is 4-D movies, which integrate wind, rain, scents, motion, and bubbles into the film-going experience, making it all the more immersive—arguably immersive to a fault. “If you take issue with your seat’s lilts, jolts, and prods (or having air blasted into your ear), you’re sadly out of luck. Aggressive warning labels caution you against placing lidless beverages in your cup holder lest your Sprite end up in your lap. Hot drinks are forbidden for obvious reasons.”
Are you tired of referring to December 16 as “Jane Austen’s birthday”? Doesn’t have a very nice ring to it, right? It would be so much easier simply to call it Jane Austen Day, which is what the Jane Austen Centre proposes you do. Go ahead.
Syntactically dubious headline of the day: BLINDFOLD SEX KNIFE ATTACK EX-WIFE JAILED FOR MURDER ATTEMPT.
“If the snow on the roof melts off, the next storm will be rain. If it blows off, you can calculate on snow. The day of the month on which the first snowstorm comes gives the number of storms you can expect in the following winter.” New Englanders have plenty of gloriously unfounded lore about snow.

Boudoirs of the Future

Schwartz, date unknown.

Delmore Schwartz was born on this day in 1913. The below is from a letter he sent to his publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, on May 8, 1951; it’s extracted from a series of their correspondence published in our Summer 1992 issue. A few years after this letter, in 1953, Laughlin dissolved his business relationship with Schwartz, who had succumbed to neurosis and paranoia, early signs of which are visible here. By the early sixties, Schwartz had cut off nearly all his friendships and started to drink heavily. He died in 1966.

I have decided not to be a bank clerk, after all, since I would probably be paralyzed by the conflict between my desire to steal money and my fear of doing so.

It was pleasant to learn that you expected our correspondence to be read in the international salons and boudoirs of the future. Do you think they will be able to distinguish between the obfuscations, mystification, efforts at humor, and plain statement of fact? Will they recognize my primary feelings as a correspondent—the catacomb from which I write to you, seeking to secure some word from the real world, or at least news of the Far West—and sigh with compassion? Or will they just think I am nasty, an over-eager clown, gauche, awkward and bookish? Will they understand that I am always direct, open, friendly, simple and candid to the point of naïveté until the ways of the fiendish world infuriate me and I am poked to be devious, suspicious, calculating, not that it does me any good anyway? And for that matter, what will they make of your complex character?

It develops that the jukeboxes in bars now have an item entitled Silence, which costs a nickel, just like Music. This can only lead to drunken disputations between those who want Silence and those who will be goddamned if they can’t have a little Music with their beer.

The Giants, after losing eleven straight and thus preventing me from buying the newspaper for eleven days, defeated Pittsburgh twice in three days, which made me reflect on the fact that I have been a Giants rooter for thirty years: the expense of spirit in a waste of games.

Yours,

Delmore

Hand in Glove

From The Saturday Evening Post, 1839.

A few weeks ago, my mom called. This is not in itself unusual, and she had important news: she’d sighted the Barefoot Contessa and her husband on the self-checkout line at the supermarket. I was naturally interested, but I happened to be in the middle of something. I was about to excuse myself when she said, in tones of great distress, “Oh God. Oh no.”

“What?” I said, alarmed. “Is everything okay? What is it?” 

Her reply was muffled.

“What is it?” I repeated. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said, once again audible. “But … there’s a really nice glove on the ground.”

I was silent.

“I picked it up,” she continued. “Should I take it to the police?”

It was hard not to think about the time my maternal grandfather had rescued a half-eaten sourdough bread bowl from off the beach. Or the time the same grandfather had braked so hard he nearly caused an accident because he needed to retrieve a tennis ball he’d spotted by the side of the road. Or, for that matter, the many sheds that scarred his property, built to house all these spoils. “We’ll never do that to you,” my mother promised, when she and my dad mounted a large tag sale last summer. (Boxes retrieved from the attic included those labeled GERMAN POW BOOKENDS and MISC. SMALL TREASURES.)

I chose to forget this depressing incident, and largely succeeded. We spoke numerous times in the following weeks, and the glove did not come up again. Then, a few nights ago, I met her for dinner at a German restaurant in Manhattan. It was filled with evergreens, and the festive atmosphere and hearty food were a perfect fit for the weather. In the course of the evening, we talked frankly about challenges in my life and hers, her family’s history of migraines and depression. We laughed a lot and shared a single entrée, as is our wont. 

Late in the meal, I went to the ladies’ room. When I returned, there was a brown suede glove sitting on the table. My heart sank. 

“What’s that?” I said suspiciously, although I knew full well. 

“It’s the glove,” she said. “The one I found on the street.”

“Why are you carrying it in your purse?” I said.

“In case I find the owner,” she said, not meeting my eyes, “or something.” As she spoke she slipped the glove onto her left hand. “You see how fine it is,” she said dreamily. “It has shearling lining. Would you like it?”

“No, I would not,” I said severely. 

The next morning, I took a walk through the park. I had paused to snip a clandestine sprig of holly from a bush just beyond the fence when my eye was caught by something at the edge of the path: a black leather glove. 

Rarely in life are we offered such a clear choice. And I will admit, my first impulse was to snatch it up. But instead, here is what I did: I tucked it into a crack in the fence near where it had fallen, so it was visible from the path. And on second thought, I decided not to snatch that sprig of holly. 

Visit Our Holiday Pop-up Shop This Sunday

You may have heard that The Paris Review offers gift subscriptions—just forty dollars for a year’s supply of fiction, poetry, interviews, and art, including a postcard announcing your gift with a personal message. They make a great present for aspiring writers, who should, in the words of William Kennedy, “read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.”

If you’re shopping downtown this weekend, you can pick up a gift from us in person. For one day only—this Sunday, December 14—we’re opening a pop-up shop at Contrada, a cozy Italian restaurant in the East Village at 84 East Fourth Street. From three-thirty to six-thirty, we’ll be there with discounted subscriptions, back issues, T-shirts, and boundless reserves of holiday cheer (i.e., snacks and drinks). We’ll gift wrap anything you’d like to give as a present. Stop by and say hello!

Purity of Essence: One Question for Nell Zink

Photo: Fred Filkorn

Nell Zink’s first novel, The Wallcreeper, came out in October and was listed last week among the 100 Notable Books of 2014 by the New York Times. Jonathan Franzen—who discovered Zink, and who tried for a time to act as her literary agent—wrote, “Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.”

The Wallcreeper is the coming-of-age story of Tiffany, a young woman who marries a man she hardly knows and follows him to Switzerland. Zink’s compressed scenes and chapter-less form showcase her mastery of tonal register—think Diane Williams with a little less bathos—as the newlyweds’ shared interests in each other and birding quickly shift to other lovers and separate environmental causes. Meanwhile, the zingers and bon mots fly so fast and furiously that one often forgets that Tiffany is on the brink of poverty.

Zink, now fifty, has also published several pieces in n+1. She lives in Bad Belzig, Germany, where she worked most recently as a translator. As a writer living abroad, she does not seem fond of things like e-mail interviews, and understandably so. This exchange took place in August—part of a longer interview filled with some of the most riotous, pummeling insults I’ve ever absorbed—and Zink explained that the course of her experience as a writer has involved a great deal of travel, marked by an intense effort to insulate her creative life from the work required to make rent. Her second novel, Mislaid, is due out next year. She sold it, as she has said elsewhere, for “megabucks.” This may be half jest, but it hints nevertheless that her fortunes have shifted for the better since this summer, when she shared the following account of her personal history.

What kind of jobs have you had? Do you write full-time now, “living the dream”?

I was always a bit concerned about purity of essence. I never wanted a job that might affect the way I wrote or thought. I remember how in college I was very proud of having finagled a job in the English department, where I spent most of my time collating and stapling. I didn’t major in English, obviously, because I preferred being challenged in courses where I might get bad grades. Once, Gordon Lish came to speak there and warned us explicitly against going to work in publishing, because it forces you to read bad prose all day every day and spoils your style. After his talk, all the other student writers jumped up to beg him for jobs in publishing while I wandered off strengthened in my resolve to do manual labor.

I lived in a very confusing world of mixed messages. I knew a cub reporter for the local paper who was an ambitious writer, and he would talk about finding his voice in the context of writing a book review! Later, in D.C., I made friends with a serious writer, and she always spoke seriously of how exactly she was going to imitate her favorite novelist in her new short story or express her unique voice in an article about recent hires for the company newsletter.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think. So after I got out of college I worked construction, mostly. I waitressed some in winter. I was a very excitable waitress, but management valued me for my strange talent of taking drink specials seriously. They would order us to sell fuzzy navels at lunchtime, and I would obediently sell twenty fuzzy navels while the other waitstaff ignored them. My life changed forever in 1989, when a friend of my mother’s shanghaied me into taking the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s test of clerical aptitude. Apparently 98.9 percent was an unusual score. As I recall, it was a test of visual acuity and short-term memory involving long sequences of numbers. I started getting these blind, cold-call job offers in the mail from places like the Defense Logistics Agency. Working full-time in construction was really wearing me out.

Weekends were more convalescence than fun. Plus, I was just coming down from two years of reading almost nothing but Kafka and books he had recommended to his friends and little sisters—this is why I knew Robert Walser so well—and I felt like some time at a dead-end job in an urban bureaucracy would help me understand him more deeply. I soon remembered that he, unlike some of his characters, had enjoyed a responsible part-time position with travel, but coming off a career in construction I couldn’t aim that high. So I embarked on a secretarial career that took me all the way to the office of Joe Uzzolina, at that time VP of European Marketing for Colgate-Palmolive, a boss whom I cannot recommend highly enough. I hope he found a secretary he liked after I abandoned him.

Anyway, the first job I had with what you might call human dignity, meaning with an office of my own and a bit of self-determination, was in technical writing, and only after I moved to Tel Aviv, where being a native English speaker is a meal ticket. When I moved from there to Germany I had about thirty-thousand dollars saved from my life of endless drudgery, and I went on strike or, you could say, sabbatical. Basically I retired at thirty-six.

I didn’t think it would last. After a while I was sort of broke, but as I got to know more and more people, some of them started offering me translating work. So I ended up doing enough translating to cover my expenses. My German is good and so is my English, so I can get good prices, and covering my expenses involves maybe ten hours of work a month.

Poverty in Germany is not criminalized. There are beautiful public spaces and bike paths and frequent buses and trains, and you never have to live in a crime-ridden slum because they don’t have them. So I’ve been living the dream since I got here in May 2000, being an artist in a garret and writing anything I wanted, with complete freedom because I was always writing for friends who love me—mostly one single friend, Avner Shats, until I got into the weird pen-pal relationship with Jonathan Franzen that led to my writing in public. Avner reads many British books and watches BBC and listens to their podcasts and has written to me nearly every day since 1998, but he grew up speaking Hebrew, and when Franzen came along with his high tolerance for obscure American idiom it was just too much fun to write for him instead, and I probably got carried away.

Probably everybody assumes I only started living the dream after I got what Publishers Marketplace calls “a good deal” for my book for The Wallcreeper back in March, but my lifetime income from writing books still totals three hundred dollars (my advance for The Wallcreeper), and in any case the “dream” for me, given my typically German lack of financial desperation, would be if somebody invited me to one of those literary festivals where you sleep in a comfy hotel somewhere interesting and speak English with people who are predisposed to be friendly.

Matthew Jakubowski is an editor for Asymptote. His writing has appeared in Music and Literature, gorse, and 3:AM Magazine. He lives in West Philadelphia and can be found online @matt_jakubowski and truce. 

Crop Circles (Not That Kind), and Other News

Kendall McMinimy, Pivotal 2, 2013, acrylic, toner, and panel, 36" x 36" x 1". Image via Wired

“At moments like these prose is a brick through the poet’s window. The fate of the poet is to ignore the broken window and make good use of the brick, and of the draft.” Rowan Ricardo Phillips on being a poet.
Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is enjoying a “cinematic convergence” in New York: “Altman’s comic, poetic, wacked-out adaptation of the Raymond Chandler detective novel will play at three of the city’s leading rep houses—the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Modern Art, and Film Forum—in a stretch of eighteen days.”
Lydia Davis interviews Dan Gunn, one of the editors of Samuel Beckett’s collected letters: “One of the questions in transforming rapidly produced handwriting into print is what to do with anomalies. Is it useful or interesting to show where Beckett makes typos, or where he crosses something out and amends it? Is it worthwhile to show where he misspells a name (as he regularly does, for instance, when he adds a circumflex to the second ‘e’ in the surname of Jean Genet), or confuses a French transliteration of a Russian name with an English one?”
The New Republic as we know it is dead—and everyone, suddenly, has an unshakably strong opinion about it. “[This] sort of response to the end of the old TNR—the reductive shouting, the polarized tribes, the narcissism of small differences in the progressive media world—provides perhaps the best reason to mourn what TNR once represented.”
Center-pivot irrigation systems: bad for the planet, good for abstract art.

This Week on the Daily

E. Ravel, from Die Gartenlaube, 1891

Our new Winter issue is here. Learn more about its cover, which features a photograph from Marc Yankus.

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“Art isn’t always what—or where—you expect to find it.” Nicole Rudick looks at art ephemera.

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Walter Benjamin used to write a radio show for children—here he tells a story with thirty brainteasers. (We’ll post the answers on Thursday.)

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“I think poetry is always one or two poets away from extinction.” Michael Hofmann and Jack Livings talk about poetry, translation, and Vespas.

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An interview with Julia Wertz about her online comic, Fart Party, now collected in a new book, The Museum of Mistakes. “I’m a real bitch in my work. No one likes a happy-go-lucky character—that’s the character everyone wants to see destroyed.”

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Twenty-five years after Wild at Heart, Barry Gifford’s novels are still weird on top.

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Two centuries after the Marquis de Sade, a French exhibition traces his influence. 

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Plus, Sadie Stein sees how far a full-page ad in The New York Times goes; and Joseph Conrad thinks the world is plenty mysterious enough as it is, thanks.

Staff Picks: Reading Aloud, Rayon Dresses, Red Phones

Straight to Moscow.

Our Summer issue this year included Garth Greenwell’s story “Gospodar.” Though I didn’t then know that Greenwell is also a poet, it now seems obvious: his language in the story is economical and precise and yet so fluid. Two and a half years ago, Greenwell’s friend Max Freeman, a filmmaker and photographer, filmed him reading three of his poems. Greenwell is a superb reader, and I was transfixed by the movement of his face on camera—“enthralled like a bird before a snake,” as he says in the first poem. (Actually, I had to watch the video a couple times because I forgot to pay attention to the words the first time.) The oddly touching “Faculty Meeting with Fly” is the second poem, in which a fly provides interest and pleasure during an otherwise dull moment: “No one before has traced precisely that path / along the thinner vein of my wrist, yet you take / such delight there / … while / beneath you subterraneously my blood must roar / and thrum you like a lyre.” But it’s the last poem, “An Evening Out”—wistful, gorgeous, and sad—that makes the video, and Greenwell’s face, so compelling. —Nicole Rudick

I haven’t read many novels as spooky and sublime and psychologically acute as Forrest Gander’s The Trace. It’s the portrait of a couple in crisis and their misguided road trip through the Chihuahua desert, on the tracks of the writer Ambrose Bierce. Gander’s landscapes are lyrical and precise (“raw gashed mountains, gnarly buttes of andesite”), and his study of a marriage on the rocks is as empathetic as it is unsparing. —Robyn Creswell

Sarah Lazarovic sat down with her brushes and did not stop painting until she’d revealed her entire messy, colorful, and witty journey from a teenaged “fashion-maybe” to a bona fide adult shopping ambassador. In her charmingly illustrated new book, A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy, Lazarovic explains how a mall-lovin’ middle-schooler’s early obsession with scrunchy socks later ballooned into a full-blown consumer obsession with clothes of every possible description. Lazarovic’s story will especially resonate for the late Gen Xer who may have similarly cycled through the Gap Girl to Thrift Girl to Goth Girl to I-just-can’t-have-enough-little-rayon-dresses-for-under-twenty-bucks-Girl, who along the way also made good use of the venerable scrunchie and the ubiquitous safety pin when the outfit or occasion called for it. Lazarovic meditates on the “ill-defined distinction between fashion and shopping,” stating that “in childhood we create fashion with very little shopping (except you, Suri Cruise).” Her adult self craves a minimal wardrobe and a spare closet. She writes, “What I love best is how time often reveals a solution to what I need that doesn’t involve buying.” She closes her diary with expert tips on how to fill your own closet with quality over mass quantity. —Charlotte Strick

I’ve just read this bit from Paul Ford’s latest piece on Medium, which seems too good not to quote. His friend once told him a story: “He was working for a huge old engineering firm and one of the firm’s weird jobs is to keep the line open between the United States and Russia — to maintain the ‘red phone.’ He’d visit the facility sometimes. There is—still, even now—an underground, bomb-resistant facility with rows of blinking machines. It is staffed around the clock by graduate students in Russian literature. They’ll read quietly, occasionally checking the line. I guess someone is on the other side, in Russia. There aren’t many calls, of course. I guess they could, and probably should, shut it all down. Then again, the line is open and it works fine.” —Dan Piepenbring

Paul Harding’s Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2010, and at the risk of being late to the party, I must say it’s brilliant. Harding’s is a fusion of two worlds: this one and the one of memory. His protagonist, George Washington Crosby, is eight days shy of dying when we meet him—a sojourner, as he is for the entirety of the book, of his living room, in a rented hospital bed. Lying there, George slips in and out of a realistic, albeit fantastical, reprise of his New England youth and relives his childhood from his deathbed. Through quiet and unsettling prose, we follow the impoverished Crosby family and their banal life: a wife aching to be loved, a husband drowning beneath his wife’s expectations, and the children watching it all from the dinner table. In Tinkers, death and daydream coalesce, sentences pulsate with regret, and we are moved not by some outrageous grievance but by the poignancy with which Harding writes about loss, particularly the loss of a father: “And that other world that you first dreamed is always better if not real, because in it you have not jilted your lover, forsaken your child, turned your back on your brother. The world fell away from my father the way he fell away from us. We became his dream.” —Caitlin Youngquist