Newsoverworld

Love and Olive Oil https://ift.tt/2Hsfmfh

DURING MY DAYS in middle school in the rural Midwest, I accompanied my friend Beth to several of her father’s Civil War reenactments. Along with them, I learned how to sew my own costumes, frontload a musket, and fire a cannon. Thrilled by all this, I went on to join every reenactment enclave I could weasel my way into. Over the years, I have posed as a 19th-century explorer giving tours of Frenchtown with a terrible accent, taken a turn as a Victorian prostitute dragging tourists through a haunted brothel, and led Boston visitors down the Freedom Trail dressed in full colonial attire. Through it all, I came to learn the joys of what Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M. Glazer have dubbed “superfandom” — a mode of fervent, participatory cultural consumption. My flair for the corset and the bustle stood me in good stead as I read Ted Scheinman’s new book, Camp Austen , which chronicles the year and a half the author spent participating in, “accidentally” loving, and then leaving what he call...

FIFTY YEARS AFTER the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., his status as icon is undeniable. Over 800 streets bear King’s name, and he is the only American citizen other than George Washington whose birthday is celebrated as a national holiday. During Barack Obama’s presidency, he was frequently compared to King, and even seen as the culmination of King’s vision of America. This now seems optimistic and overblown, but even in the Trump era we find ourselves looking to King to explain, or redeem, our present. Just last August, after white nationalists attacked counter-protesters in Virginia, CNN ran a piece titled “Can ‘I Have a Dream’ help us heal after Charlottesville?” Yet King, though often invoked, is rarely read. “I Have a Dream” and “Letter from Birmingham Jail” will sometimes appear in school history books, but few have read or even heard of longer works like Strength to Love , Why We Can’t Wait , and The Trumpet of Conscience . Even less common is serious critical work on ...

I STUDIED TO BECOME an evangelical pastor. Then I woke up on November 9, 2016, with the knowledge that my faith was now chained to the legacy of Donald Trump. Many of my friends cheered. Polls showed that 81 percent of Americans who called themselves “evangelical” voted for a man who won office by disparaging, belittling, threatening, and dismissing people of color. Now I’m no longer comfortable with the label of “evangelical” because I have become slack-jawed with disgust at friends who will defend Trump harder that they defend the gospel. They boisterously support a gleeful bully and a habitual liar who is hailed as God’s instrument in these times. A pastor acquaintance told me he voted for Trump because he championed the anti-abortion cause and was the lesser of two evils. They gloss over the bigotry and insist they voted for Trump because of “other reasons,” which amount to superficial buzzwords: crooked Hillary, draining the swamp, shaking things up, et cetera. They retreat int...

THE BOOKSELLER FACES an ethical crisis each time they describe the contents of a book to a potential reader. How to detail the story, if there is one, without giving away the climax? How to separate the book from the market in which it circulates, to let it shine alone? As a literary structure, the novel illustrates this issue when it touches more topics, surfaces, lives, tropes, and contexts than it could ever hope to contain. The narrative arc we draw in order to visualize a given story’s movement traces a series of tangential offshoots; sometimes these offshoots comprise a novel’s principal concern, and it labors to square these intersections lest they overpower the structure that maintains their fragile counterpoint. MacArthur Park (Nightboat, 2017), Andrew Durbin’s debut fiction, exploits the novel’s capacity to connect and bridge without necessarily establishing complete contact. Like the “broken slideshow” he describes in the text, Durbin’s essayistic catalog touches and arrang...

EARLY ON IN The Great Quake , Kris Madsen starts her first day as a schoolteacher in Alaska, a place the inexperienced but enthusiastic explorer chose for its location near the top of the alphabet. It’s 1962, and Madsen, a Californian who has just finished college, wants to make a good impression. She has neatly organized her desk when a first-grader named Rocky walks in carrying a freshly caught salmon nearly as big as he is. “For you, teacher!” he says as he lays the fish across the desk. Lovely moments like this abound in Henry Fountain’s book about one of the most powerful earthquakes ever measured: the Good Friday earthquake that struck Alaska in 1964. A science writer at The New York Times , Fountain explains how this devastating earthquake changed the way we understand the Earth’s crust and led to the general acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics. But it’s a story he tells as a humanist who acknowledges that science is just one thread in the vast tapestry of life. In Foun...

“AND SO I STEP UP, into the darkness within; or else the light.” The famously ambiguous ending of Offred’s narrative in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale sees the putative “Handmaid” stepping into a van that has come for her at the home where she is being held as a concubine for an unnamed “Commander” in a post-collapse, post-democratic future United States that has been renamed Gilead. Believing herself to be pregnant by Nick, the Commander’s driver (who may or may not actually be an agent of the state secret police), Offred climbs into the van hoping that Nick is telling her the truth when he whispers to her that the van is actually with Mayday, the anti-Gilead resistance organization, and not from the government. Offred’s tale thus ends not only without resolution to most of its major plot threads but also as a kind of personal philosophical challenge to its reader: having had all your political optimism crushed time and time again throughout the novel, will you allo...