“A DISAPPOINTED WOMAN should try to construct happiness out of a set of materials within her reach,” William Godwin counseled Mary Wollstonecraft after she tried to kill herself by jumping off a bridge. Virginia Woolf liked to read “with pen & notebook,” a generative relationship to the page. Roland Barthes had a hierarchical system with Latinate designations: “notula was the single word or two quickly recorded in a slim notebook; nota, the later and fuller transcription of this thought onto an index card.” Walter Benjamin urged the keeping of a notebook “as strictly as the authorities keep their register of
The apartment is a steal, but it has idiosyncrasies: it’s on the top floor of a four-story office building located on a traffic island; the rooms shake and the windows rattle as buses, trains, and trucks trundle past. It is 1970s Tokyo, and the unnamed narrator of Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, a woman, newly separated from her husband, a single mother—the three in conjunction, she is now routinely reminded, define her particular status—no longer possesses an “ordinary” life. This home may be unusual, but it’s hers, and, on the plus side, there are windows on all sides and a
“Only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals,” writes Susan Howe in the foreword to her new collection, Debths, inspired in part by the Whitney’s 2011 retrospective of American artist Paul Thek.
Dribbledrams! Doodledums! Nitwitteries! Fools! Thugs! Jackass! Moron! Buffoons! Cowards! Delinquent! Old biddies, the mulligrubs, to motturize. These are among the words and phrases—a litany of family sayings coined, inherited, and appropriated—that are repeated throughout Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. They accrue as the book goes on, evoking a vivid and particular linguistic world: A Barbison, most eminent Signor Lipmann, white lady cutlet, don’t say it’s the teeth, that girl’s going to marry the gasman, I cannot go on painting, sulfuric acid stinks of fart, you too have your little things, the Brot shot in the pot, I don’t recognize my Germany
