“This is the topsy-turvy world of luxurious toil,” Max Watman writes in Harvest: Field Notes from a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food (Norton, $25), his new book about his adventures with—oh, how I’ve come to dread this phrase—real food. He’s describing his preparation of a foraged meal during a recent summer vacation, which began with him making salt from seawater, because “what could be more guttural, more intrinsically oceanic than the ocean’s salt?” He then infused the salt with anise liqueur and used it to season codfish, but not before Googling “fun to eat” seaweed species, which led him to

Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A RETROSPECTIVE OF COMICS, GRAPHICS, AND SCRAPS (Drawn & Quarterly, $40) reveals the busy creative mind behind Maus, Spiegelman’s masterstroke, completed in 1991, in which he used the despised, adolescent, “Jewish” entertainment of the comic strip to explore his relationship with his parents and their experience of the Holocaust. Co-Mix echoes that strategy, performing the jujitsu flip of mimicking a high-art exhibition catalogue in the quintessential low-art medium of comics. Compulsively self-reflexive, the book convincingly makes the case for comics as the ultimate

What is perhaps most curious about our belief that it is wrong to lie is that it requires us, both individually and as a culture, to engage in a particularly egregious kind of cognitive dissonance. It’s easy for me to insist that it is wrong to kill human beings because I have never killed another human being (at least not directly, though I am a citizen of a nation that kills innocents). I can teach my children that it is wrong to steal with a mostly clean conscience, because it’s been a long time since my preteen shoplifting days. But when it comes to lying, the situation is different. I

People in the arts talk about talent all the time: who has it, who discovered the person who had it, its peaks and valleys, and when it has been “lost” or “wasted.” It’s all said as if we know what talent is, when we don’t. It is more than aptitude or being a quick study. It is more than skill, and closer to ease or sparkle in the skill’s application. It somehow forms a trinity with effort and inspiration, but without talent, those two can seem like sad and misguided cul-de-sacs.

But there is also a talent to having talent, and to living with it. Talent can seem like an alien invasion of the

Beatles enthusiasts, like Dylan fans, seem especially susceptible to what could be called Mystical Completism—the belief that each newly discovered document, each unpublished photo, each additional outtake, represents another step along the path to ultimate enlightenment. As a pursuit, it acknowledges the forest—the variety of approaches from which the band’s chroniclers have come at their boundless subject—but much prefers the trees, those excavated documents and outtakes, over the critical or purely metaphysical.

Mark Lewisohn is the most rigorous practitioner of that literal-minded pursuit,

True believers want to reclaim Parker from a now deeply degraded image, emphasising instead the dare and complexity of his music. This is a gamble when many fair-weather fans tend to shut down at the first mention of flattened fifths and roving thirteenths. Biographers first have to explain the tradition Parker emerged from—solo improvisation within a many-handed ensemble music—but also show Parker’s own itchy, wasp-sting style as the fruit of one vulnerable life, no other.