Latest news with #QueenoftheNight
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Five Books That Will Redirect Your Attention
Boredom can sometimes feel like a bygone luxury in an age of screens and constant distractions—yet even with all the content in the world at our fingertips, tedium manages to creep in. Not only does it sneak up on us in waiting rooms or on airplanes; we also encounter it while scrolling idly at home. In the face of repetitive Instagram posts, cookie-cutter TV episodes, and exhausting group chats, the mind goes blank just as reliably as it might while staring out of a window. There's nothing peaceful about this mental stillness; as the day lengthens, so does the ennui. The experience of sitting around, tired and irritated, with nothing to do, may be character building, or even healthy (studies show that it can be beneficial to developing creativity). But the process is notoriously uncomfortable: Medieval monks referred to the feeling that boredom provoked as acedia and attempted to pray it away. Charles Dickens popularized the phrase bored to death in Bleak House, when the weary Lady Dedlock complains that she's on the verge of expiring for lack of excitement. The avant-garde Situationists in mid-20th-century Paris proclaimed 'Boredom is counterrevolutionary' and turned this phrase into a rallying cry. Contemporary sufferers tend to opt for some form of immersive entertainment. For those who might turn to a book, not just any one will do. Sometimes the listless mind craves action, adventure, and drama, but propulsive page-turners aren't the only way to dispel dullness. Plot twists or surprising facts can do the trick too; at times, a radically strange narrator or a weirdly compelling story is what we need. The following titles provide many ways out of malaise, each as distinctive as the varieties of boredom from which they offer sweet relief. , by Alexander Chee Chee has said that he spent 15 years writing his 2016 novel, although readers are likely to finish it in a flash—it's too much fun not to speed through. Named after the famously difficult 'Queen of the Night' aria from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, the book follows a 19th-century American, Lilliet Berne, as she makes her way from the Midwest to a New York circus and then a Parisian brothel, finally reaching the heights of French society as an opera singer and courtesan. Along the way, she witnesses the rise and fall of the revolutionary Paris Commune, flies in a hot-air balloon, and wears an enormous amount of sumptuously described dresses. This is the kind of writing to pick up when you need to lose yourself for an afternoon inside a world radically different from your own. It is also the perfect story for readers who enjoy a little high drama that, at times, borders on camp—as is so often the case in opera. , by Peter Cornell (translated by Saskia Vogel) Cornell's book-length essay begins with a note claiming that what follows is a manuscript constructed by a researcher at the National Library of Sweden. Regardless of its actual provenance, The Ways of Paradise became something of an underground classic in the four decades before it was published in English last year. The text is structured in a series of numbered fragments, reflecting a larger fixation on spirals and mazes of all kinds—the curl of a seashell, mimicking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage's focus on eternity, or the 'ephemeral labyrinthine traces made by the folds and creases of garments'—and drawing parallels among a swath of disciplines and time periods. Burbling beneath its torrent of information is an occult murmur, even a mild paranoia: To what end are we all connected, and what do these connections mean? Although Cornell doesn't offer his audience much of an explanation, his slow deluge of intertwined facts and stories makes it hard to stop reading. Imagine this as the holy book of a new cult devoted to the spiritual possibilities of the spiral. [Read: The transcendent brain] , by Bae Suah (translated by Deborah Smith) The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. , by Simone de Beauvoir (translated by Carol Cosman) America Day by Day chronicles the four-month-long trip through the United States that the French existentialist de Beauvoir embarked on in January 1947, a journey filled with mishaps, misunderstandings, and moments of joy. De Beauvoir attends parties in New York, gambles in Nevada, listens to a lot of jazz in New Orleans, finds herself confused by San Francisco, smokes marijuana for the first time, and gives a series of lectures at colleges across the nation. Although the author encountered an America still unsure of itself after the violence of World War II, many of her observations feel strikingly relevant in 2025. Between American men and women, she detects 'a mutual mistrust,' for example—their 'lack of generosity, and a rancor that's often sexual in origin' could easily be found in the present. Many of the pages documenting travels through the Jim Crow–era South dwell on the disquieting gap between the U.S. Constitution's focus on freedom and the realities of racial segregation. By the time de Beauvoir gets to Chicago, however, her mood improves, and sharp-eyed readers might notice why: There, she meets the writer Nelson Algren, who gives her a tour of the city—and, though it remains unmentioned in the text, the pair later fall in love. [Read: The philosopher who took happiness seriously] , by Lydia Sandgren (translated by Agnes Broomé) Like fellow Scandinavian Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, to which it's been compared, the Swedish writer Sandgren's Collected Works exerts a hypnotic pull on the reader over its hundreds of pages. Following the publisher of a small press, Martin Berg, as he turns 50, Collected Works initially seems to resemble a reverse bildungsroman, as Martin ponders his youth in Gothenburg, his own thwarted artistic ambitions, and his friendship with Gustav, a painter. But there's a mystery at work here too: Why did Martin's wife, Cecilia, a promising academic, abandon him and their young children years ago? Alternating between past and present—and Martin's and Cecilia's points of view (as well as, eventually, their daughter's)—Sandgren creates a more complicated portrait of a modern marriage than the book's premise might suggest. As the reader absorbs with horror the growing stockpile of Martin's betrayals over the years, Sandgren probes questions of gender, success, and ambition, creating a portrait of a man and a woman fundamentally at odds that keeps its reader spellbound. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
What to Read When You're Bored
Boredom can sometimes feel like a bygone luxury in an age of screens and constant distractions—yet even with all the content in the world at our fingertips, tedium manages to creep in. Not only does it sneak up on us in waiting rooms or on airplanes; we also encounter it while scrolling idly at home. In the face of repetitive Instagram posts, cookie-cutter TV episodes, and exhausting group chats, the mind goes blank just as reliably as it might while staring out of a window. There's nothing peaceful about this mental stillness; as the day lengthens, so does the ennui. The experience of sitting around, tired and irritated, with nothing to do, may be character building, or even healthy (studies show that it can be beneficial to developing creativity). But the process is notoriously uncomfortable: Medieval monks referred to the feeling that boredom provoked as acedia and attempted to pray it away. Charles Dickens popularized the phrase bored to death in Bleak House, when the weary Lady Dedlock complains that she's on the verge of expiring for lack of excitement. The avant-garde Situationists in mid-20th-century Paris proclaimed 'Boredom is counterrevolutionary' and turned this phrase into a rallying cry. Contemporary sufferers tend to opt for some form of immersive entertainment. For those who might turn to a book, not just any one will do. Sometimes the listless mind craves action, adventure, and drama, but propulsive page-turners aren't the only way to dispel dullness. Plot twists or surprising facts can do the trick too; at times, a radically strange narrator or a weirdly compelling story is what we need. The following titles provide many ways out of malaise, each as distinctive as the varieties of boredom from which they offer sweet relief. The Queen of the Night, by Alexander Chee Chee has said that he spent 15 years writing his 2016 novel, although readers are likely to finish it in a flash—it's too much fun not to speed through. Named after the famously difficult 'Queen of the Night' aria from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, the book follows a 19th-century American, Lilliet Berne, as she makes her way from the Midwest to a New York circus and then a Parisian brothel, finally reaching the heights of French society as an opera singer and courtesan. Along the way, she witnesses the rise and fall of the revolutionary Paris Commune, flies in a hot-air balloon, and wears an enormous amount of sumptuously described dresses. This is the kind of writing to pick up when you need to lose yourself for an afternoon inside a world radically different from your own. It is also the perfect story for readers who enjoy a little high drama that, at times, borders on camp—as is so often the case in opera. The Ways of Paradise, by Peter Cornell (translated by Saskia Vogel) Cornell's book-length essay begins with a note claiming that what follows is a manuscript constructed by a researcher at the National Library of Sweden. Regardless of its actual provenance, The Ways of Paradise became something of an underground classic in the four decades before it was published in English last year. The text is structured in a series of numbered fragments, reflecting a larger fixation on spirals and mazes of all kinds—the curl of a seashell, mimicking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage's focus on eternity, or the 'ephemeral labyrinthine traces made by the folds and creases of garments'—and drawing parallels among a swath of disciplines and time periods. Burbling beneath its torrent of information is an occult murmur, even a mild paranoia: To what end are we all connected, and what do these connections mean? Although Cornell doesn't offer his audience much of an explanation, his slow deluge of intertwined facts and stories makes it hard to stop reading. Imagine this as the holy book of a new cult devoted to the spiritual possibilities of the spiral. Untold Night and Day, by Bae Suah (translated by Deborah Smith) The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae's novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae's longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a 'poetic fever dream.' Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer's release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. America Day by Day, by Simone de Beauvoir (translated by Carol Cosman) America Day by Day chronicles the four-month-long trip through the United States that the French existentialist de Beauvoir embarked on in January 1947, a journey filled with mishaps, misunderstandings, and moments of joy. De Beauvoir attends parties in New York, gambles in Nevada, listens to a lot of jazz in New Orleans, finds herself confused by San Francisco, smokes marijuana for the first time, and gives a series of lectures at colleges across the nation. Although the author encountered an America still unsure of itself after the violence of World War II, many of her observations feel strikingly relevant in 2025. Between American men and women, she detects 'a mutual mistrust,' for example—their 'lack of generosity, and a rancor that's often sexual in origin' could easily be found in the present. Many of the pages documenting travels through the Jim Crow–era South dwell on the disquieting gap between the U.S. Constitution's focus on freedom and the realities of racial segregation. By the time de Beauvoir gets to Chicago, however, her mood improves, and sharp-eyed readers might notice why: There, she meets the writer Nelson Algren, who gives her a tour of the city—and, though it remains unmentioned in the text, the pair later fall in love. Collected Works, by Lydia Sandgren (translated by Agnes Broomé) Like fellow Scandinavian Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, to which it's been compared, the Swedish writer Sandgren's Collected Works exerts a hypnotic pull on the reader over its hundreds of pages. Following the publisher of a small press, Martin Berg, as he turns 50, Collected Works initially seems to resemble a reverse bildungsroman, as Martin ponders his youth in Gothenburg, his own thwarted artistic ambitions, and his friendship with Gustav, a painter. But there's a mystery at work here too: Why did Martin's wife, Cecilia, a promising academic, abandon him and their young children years ago? Alternating between past and present—and Martin's and Cecilia's points of view (as well as, eventually, their daughter's)—Sandgren creates a more complicated portrait of a modern marriage than the book's premise might suggest. As the reader absorbs with horror the growing stockpile of Martin's betrayals over the years, Sandgren probes questions of gender, success, and ambition, creating a portrait of a man and a woman fundamentally at odds that keeps its reader spellbound.
Time Out
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Mozart's opera ‘The Magic Flute' is coming to Hong Kong
Hong Kong's first professional opera company, Opera Hong Kong (OHK), will present a contemporary rendition of The Magic Flute, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's last opera before his death and a staple in the global operatic repertoire. Director Shuang Zou has reinterpreted this two-part opera with a modern stage setting, embellished by costumes from renowned designer Dan Potra. The original storyline follows Prince Tamino as he gets sent on a quest by the Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter Pamina, armed with a flute that can transform sorrow into joy. Opera Hong Kong's new iteration of the 1791 classic is set in the modern city, and begins in an MTR station – sounds like it will be a quirky, fantastical journey as the characters travel between reality and dreams to achieve their happily ever afters. Mexican-German tenor Andrés Moreno García stars as Prince Tamino, while Pamina will be played by American soprano Sofia Troncoso, and the iconic Queen of the Night by Russian soprano Aigul Khismatullina. We can't wait to hear her perform the famously challenging 'Der Hölle Rache' aria! The production will be a collaboration between Opera Hong Kong, China National Opera House, and the State Opera South Australia, joined by the children's chorus of OHK, and promises to be a splendid audio-visual feast. After premiering in Hong Kong, the show will then go on to an international tour, so be the first to see it on stage.
The Star
25-04-2025
- Science
- The Star
QuickCheck: Is there a flower that blooms only once a year?
FLOWERS are lovely (unless you're allergic to pollen). Whether for a celebration of gratitude, love, birthdays, or anniversaries, they are often gifted to others and bloom throughout the year or in accordance with the seasons. However, is it true that there is a flower that blooms only once a year? Verdict: TRUE The Queen of the Night (QotN), which is also known by its scientific name, Epiphyllum oxypetalum, is a Night-Blooming Cereus, a cactus species with large, white flowers that bloom at night. It is native to southern Mexico and can be found in most parts of Central America and northern South America. While these other flowers bloom at night several times a year, the QotN blooms only for a single night each year, which falls in late spring or early summer (between May and June). The cactus can grow up to 3 metres in height, and its flower is large, usually measuring up to 30cm long and 20cm in diameter. The fragrant flower blooms after sunset and lasts only one night before it withers by dawn. These cacti in the same location would all bloom simultaneously, increasing their chances of cross-pollination. Scientists believe that the cacti use a form of chemical communication to synchronise the blooms. Perhaps next time you want to compliment someone, you could use this flower as an example (ie: a rare friend like you appears as rare as the bloom of the QotN). REFERENCES: visit/ecology/flora/night- blooming-cereus/ com/queen-of-the-night/ plant/epiphyllum-oxypetalum
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Nigerian Sculptor Reflects on All the Land Contains
When Otobong Nkanga appeared on the Art Newspaper's 'A Brush With…' podcast, the host, Ben Luke, asked which piece of art she would choose to live with, if she could choose only one. It's a question he asks every guest. Most people pick historical masterpieces, a Turner, say, or a Giotto. Nkanga chose a stone. Two years ago, Nkanga was announced as the 2025 winner of the Nasher Prize, honoring her work in sculpture. It follows that Luke's immediate reply was: 'Because you could sculpt it?' 'No,' she said quickly. 'Because it would contain all what I need.' The first time I spoke with Nkanga, in a video interview, it was three weeks before the opening of her Nasher Prize exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (which runs through Aug. 17). The award comes with a $100,000 prize, one of the art world's biggest. When we spoke, though, she was home in Antwerp, Belgium, packing her bags to head across the Atlantic, and she still didn't know exactly what she would be showing. Her plan had been to not ship anything ahead of time and instead make all new pieces, on site. 'I want to try out and see if I can make it happen,' she said. 'It's much more riskier in a way. I have such a short time to put everything together.' The serenity and tangible warmth with which she spoke belied how high-stakes a moment this was. Over the past 20 years, the Nigerian-born Nkanga, 50, has explored the idea of rock, and by extension the land that sheds it, as both a living entity and a container in a shape-shifting body of work. Her exhibitions almost always take the shape of a site-specific installation or performance, often both at once. She has planted galleries with fields of pebbles, printed poetry and images on limestone and worn a crown of malachite through the streets of Berlin. In a 2013 performance titled 'Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok,' she balanced on one leg atop a boulder in a courtyard in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, carrying a potted Queen of the Night plant on her head. It is precisely the way she has exploded the notion of what sculpture can be that caught the Nasher Prize judges' attention. As Briony Fer, an art historian and member of the jury, stated in a news release at the time she won the award, 'Otobong Nkanga maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic and probing ways. The intense and productive way in which she presents formal and material questions is what marks out her huge contribution to sculpture right now.' The second time I spoke with Nkanga, also via video, she was wearing bright red overalls that matched her crimson glasses, sitting on the white oak floor of the Nasher's Renzo Piano-designed building. At her side, two assistants were helping her cake a long loop of thick rope with glue and dried aromatic plants, in sections: things like roasted coffee, sassafras bark and corn silk. 'We have to do the transitions to make sure that the colors are moving from one tone to another, slowly shifting,' Nkanga said. Once fully dried, the rope was to be hung from the ceiling by two particularly dark sections. The effect would be that of room-size incense sticks. The rest of the loop would flow across the floor, like a contour line on a topographic map. Elsewhere in the room, Nkanga had been excavating what looked like miniature open-pit mining holes in boulders of red Palo Pinto County sandstone. And she had painted a temporary wall in seven thick bands of earthen claylike colors. A sense of the ground and groundedness was pervasive. Nkanga sourced her materials from the Americas, many locally; she was thinking about the red earth of Texas and Mexico, of ingredients that spoke to the movement of people and food from beyond the Rio Grande and the trade wars between the United States and other countries. Nkanga had also brought on board a Texan soap maker, Trang Nguyen, for a new iteration of her 'Carved to Flow' series. She first worked on this project for Documenta 14, in 2017, which took place between Athens and Kassel, Germany. She worked with Vis Olivae, a soap maker based in Kalamata, Greece, to produce the soap 'O8 Black Stone,' using ingredients from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North and West Africa. With proceeds from sales of that soap, she created the Carved to Flow Foundation in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. For the Nasher, she and Nguyen are producing two new soaps: a rust-color bar dotted with poppy seeds, called Red Bond, and Salt Rock, a pale chalky bar, made of lye, pumice powder and sea salt. As production continues throughout the show, the soap will progressively fill the space, 2,000 bars, wrapped in custom packaging printed with poems Nkanga has written. Exhibiting at the Nasher comes with peculiar constraints, because Piano's building itself is an artwork to protect. You can't make holes in the oak floorboards or drill in the Travertine marble walls. For Nkanga, though, just doing the show at all came with questions. 'Coming to America this time, it just feels a bit different,' she said. She has been thinking a lot about what it means to work in the United States at this time, given the political shifts. Nonetheless, she said she felt it was important to make work that could 'open up other possibilities and to create also spaces of rest, spaces for reflection and spaces to trigger other ways of existence and to open up other worlds.' 'It's good to be able to do this work,' she added. 'Especially with many exhibitions being canceled, money being taken out, language, different groups of people being targeted.' Nkanga's work has often dissected how colonization affects people and places. When Nigeria, her home country, was colonized by the British, as she told the art historian Akin Oladimeji in 2024, 'We gave access to the core and the being of who we were. And the access to our lands, prodding, digging, taking out extracts, and the access to our bodies to check to see are we normal or not.' Her insistence on acknowledging the connection between the living and the land provides a powerful counterpoint to so much of the art long made about land in America. Robert Smithson, known for so-called earthworks like 'Spiral Jetty' (1970), wrote, in his 1968 essay, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,' of being conscious of geologic time and prehistory in order to 'read the rocks' he worked with — and decried how 'social structures confine art.' Nkanga, by contrast, said that her work was a 'constant grounding back into reality': a reminder that amid all that earth and rock and wind and water, there are, and always have been, people and other living things. Thinking about the ways in which governments and companies extract from the land without regard for whomever or whatever lives on it, Nkanga said, 'It's so important to constantly remind us that we do not exist without air, that we do not exist without water, that we do not exist without trees.' She is the first to admit that, in winning the Nasher Prize, she's following a roster of extraordinary artists, name-checking the past winners Doris Salcedo, Theaster Gates, Senga Nengudi and Nairy Baghramian. 'When I heard, I was like, 'Really?'' she said, recalling the moment she learned she had won. 'I'm not thinking about the power of the work, I'm thinking about making it. But then at moments like this, you realize that it actually has a vibration that is touching different people.' The heightened state of awareness under which Nkanga works often leads her, like piano wire under tension, to sing. When she's stuck in the studio, or waiting for a mechanical Jacquard loom to finish weaving a tapestry, she'll get up and dance. She loves, loves, loves to sleep. Sometimes she cries, and, she said, 'I'm always grateful when it's a tear, because it means it's getting out.' The parallel between these elements of her daily practice and her broader stance in prepping for this show is instructive: She's forging ahead with the exhibition, a means to expel doubt and instead give it wonderful shape. Three-quarters of an hour into our first conversation, I was struck by the power of this resolve. 'What keeps you going?' I asked. She was quiet for 12 long seconds then, with a faint, heavy sigh, she said, 'because there's so much to do.' 'There is a certain trying to understand the world and your place in it and why certain things are the way they are,' she continued. 'But it's not only looking at what's not going right in the world — it's also looking at it in its sheer beauty.'
