Lily Tuck Explores Roots of Rootlessness
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Like others who wanted John Kerry to defeat President Bush, author Lily Tuck was in such despair after Election Day that she wondered if she should remain in the United States. She thought of returning to her native Paris, the bane of Bush supporters, or at least hanging a French flag from the balcony of her apartment overlooking Madison Avenue. Then again, there is no flag to which Tuck would truly pledge allegiance, for she has never felt at home anywhere.
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Weeds sometimes hide fertile fields of growth.
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She has wandered the earth, trying her hand at a variety of occupations, feeling the soil of many countries beneath her feet.
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I met an old friend for coffee in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and had a few hours to kill before stopping in at the Wired reunion party. I didn't want to drive back to Berkeley because the weather was so crummy, and I was just across teh street from a movie theater and was just in time for the start of a movie that lots of people had been telling me to see. So I went. The movie -- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I had no idea what it was about until the movie started, then I remembered hearing a Fresh Air show about it and finding it too painful to listen to. Now here I was in the theater, not just being asked to listen to it, but being asked to live it. Through some very wonderful film-making, you feel as if what is happening to the main character is happening to you. Or more accurately, probably, you get the slightest hint of what it's like to be this person. My immediate impulse, one which I gave serious consideration to, was to pack up my things and leave. Anything would be better than spending three hours living this guy's life.  Two things happen over time: 1. You get over it. 2. They change perspective, and instead of being inside his body, you move outside it.  I think those two things are the story we all live as we mature and learn to live inside our own bodies, with their limits. You learn to step outside and see the humor in your predicament. The main character says he lives in a diving bell because it's as hard for him to communicate with other people as it would be at the bottom of the ocean inside a diving bell. The movie teaches that it's not much easier for the rest of us, even though we can manipulate symbols better. On the other hand, of course it is. The film develops a relationship between the hero and his father, between the hero and his own children, his ex-wife, his lover.  We strive for deeper understanding of ourselves and each other. But it may be ridiculously easy to find the only meaning that exists, without language, without intellect, by just being. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly should probably be the picture of the year for 2007, it's that good. But like all great art it shows you something truthful about yourself, and you may or may not want to see it.
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"Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves" (HarperCollins; 288 pages; $24.95) &#151; China Galland: In her search for hidden details of her own family's history, China Galland stumbles onto an overgrown burial ground for slaves and gets to know the descendants who have been locked out of "Love Cemetery."
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By John M. Tierney  For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They have been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school - and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it.
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The faithless lovers of Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee are, in a word, words.
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âComanche Moon,â like âLonesome Doveâ before it, upends the classical code of the film western, one that prizes the heroâs commitment to chastely maintaining the social order as the ennobling alternative to intimacy.
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Comment is free: Madeleine Bunting: Never have so many of us appeared so well-off yet felt so poor - and we used to believe obscene wealth was victimless.
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By IRIS FANGER  Modern dance choreographer, scientist, and explorer of the space we inhabit, Elizabeth Streb is a descendant from Icarus in the long line of humans who have wanted to fly.
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By Ian Herbert; Victoria Summerley  In the days when February kept Britain languishing in an icy grip, it was a basic rule of gardening that this was the month to clean up the tools and tidy out the potting shed.
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Racial identity, feminism, literature, sexuality and Elizabethan history combine in a provocative rumination in Petronia Paleyâs solo show.
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The works of Anthony Trollope form an unlikely backdrop to three women's lives.
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AT A TIME when children and young people in inner cities are increasingly finding the natural world an alien environment, a small south London charity is using horticulture to help troubled teenagers re-engage with society.
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Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "We can never have enough of nature." His philosophy of Transcendentalism allowed him to live life without resignation as he declared he would accept "the whole and genuine meanness" of living. The wildfires that currently afflict Southern California residents who may have embraced the same philosophy are perhaps an unforeseen "meanness" that is now a fact of life in the woods. Wired's How To Wiki gives a few pointers about preparing for and surviving the now-notorious wildfire season.
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Pain, alienation and the thousand varieties of loneliness that flesh is heir to: these are the topics that Abi Morganâs âTender,â a British play being given its New York premiere by Thirteenth Night Theater, means to address.
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To dye or not to dye. That is the question in the latest feminist debate over aging and authenticy