Late August feels like the world being reluctantly roused, smacking the snooze button for another week, before September comes. We’ll be in London for the end of it, then Paris, right in the energy of la rentrée. But not yet. For now I’m still huddled, biding my time, thinking about the comfort of repetition and familiarity, movements that sink into the muscles, words that settle behind the eyes.
Yesterday I learned I’ve run 51 races with New York Road Runners since 2015. I’ve run the marathon twice, most of the halfs, and pretty much everything shorter. My drawers are overflowing with t-shirts. It’s a ritual now: picking up the bibs, nodding to the other bleary-eyed runners on the subway, gathering in the corrals, fidgeting through the speeches and the anthem, getting through the slow crowded start into the loosening up and the work and the thrill of the finish, the bagels and apples and Gatorade and endorphin high. Usually it’s Central Park but tomorrow morning we’re running in Harlem, a 5K we’ve done for the past couple of years and which has the best celebratory atmosphere. It’s still a joy to know that I can do this. That I do this.
Domestic rituals are a gentler kind of repetition. A couple nights ago I made ratatouille half in a trance, onion and garlic and herbes de Provence, eggplant and zucchini and red peppers and canned tomatoes, turned in oil and left to sweat and slump down. It’s not a recipe, but a process of rinsing and slicing, stirring and tasting, and then leaving it alone to eat the next day. I don’t know or care if it’s authentic or the best version of the thing. But there is something deeply relaxing about deciding to make it, picking up the fresh ingredients—which at this time of year cost less than five dollars—and doing something I’ve done before, so many times.
I’m also re-reading. I let books I love score deep grooves in my brain, so that coming back to them is both a rediscovery and a reawakening. Right now it’s Persuasion, which was never my favorite Austen, because I generally preferred the flawed, vivacious heroines over the good, quiet, stoic ones. When I revisited Emma a few years ago, I wrote this piece about how goddamn bleak it is. (Run away with the gypsies, Emma!) But I’m finding myself gripped by Anne’s pauses and silences, all the banked-up misery she can’t articulate, that nobody else notices. Gillian Beer’s introduction to the gorgeous Coralie Bickford Smith/Penguin Clothbound Classics edition (thanks, Susan!) delights my close-reading soul by picking apart the title and its complications in Austen’s time, arguing that even though it doesn’t look like a tug of opposites, like Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, it would have had an oppositional flavor to her original readers, accustomed to cultural debates over whether persuasion was virtuous moral influence or pernicious sophistry. Anyway:
A Pleasure to Watch
The Criterion Channel is running a Pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck season, because Some Things Are Good. Start with Baby Face, starring Stanwyck as willowy cynic Lily Powers, who has no romantic illusions about men because—as she spells it out in the first five minutes—she’s been pimped out by her speakeasy-owner father since she was fourteen. After hopping a freight car with her friend Chico (and sleeping with the guard for passage), she literally rises through the floors of a skyscraper until she becomes the bank president’s mistress. And then things really get messy. It’s (insanely) brisk storytelling, and of course tries to pull back and redeem the amoral Lily in the last two minutes, but until then it’s a treat to watch her sashay around like Mae West without the jokes. Theresa Harris as Chico, Lily’s loyal friend and maid, is a stock figure with an obviously underwritten role but (slightly) more to do than black actresses usually got to do in these roles. Anyway, please enjoy this trailer, and its flustered inability to decide whether it wants to worship Lily or condemn her, or both.
Writing This Week
It isn’t online yet, but I’m excited to see my interview with Téa Obreht in the print Guardian Review in the UK tomorrow. I’ve known Téa a while, and she is an exceptionally smart and a delightful person, so it was a pleasure to sit down with her to talk about her spectacular new novel Inland, and also women’s rage, historical research, toxic American myths of identity, and camels.
Good Thing in a Bad World
I tend to get paralyzed by apocalyptic thinking, so have avoided the various species-death takes on the Amazon fires in favor of pieces like this, on what we can do. As always, it feels tiny: boycotts, donations. But it inspired me to reconnect with my values on eating meat, which I didn’t do for years, until I did, telling myself I’d only eat it from local, organic, morally virtuous sources. Of course, I didn’t keep that up. But this is my push to recommit to it, for beef especially. A sprinkler-drop on the inferno.
In closing, thank god(dess) for Megan Rapinoe.