Pickford made an uncertain start to the World Cup, at fault when he was beaten at his near post when DR Congo took the lead against England in Atlanta before captain Harry Kane’s two late goals saw them through.
In the pressure cooker of the Azteca, however, Pickford had his finest game for England, with two brilliant first-half saves from Mexico striker Raul Jimenez, followed by an outstanding display of penalty-area command in a frantic second period.
“It was a very brave display of goalkeeping,” said Robinson. “I really admired what he did out there in that second half and his two saves in the first half kept England in the game. They could have been out of it by half-time if it wasn’t for him.”
Pickford won widespread praise for the way he took charge of his penalty area, taking the initiative by coming for crosses and corners on a regular basis as England, down to 10 men after Jarell Quansah was sent off early in the second half, came under siege.
“He decided that he was going to stand up. He came for crosses, made decisions to go for balls, making life easier for his defenders because of how good he was.
“The easiest thing as a goalkeeper is to stay on your line because you don’t get criticised. If you stay on your line you can’t make a mistake, but he showed maturity and bravery.
“He showed the way his game has developed by coming off his line, making those decisions, making big bold calls. That’s where you see how much he has evolved.
“Jordan took it upon himself, punched the ball, caught the ball, made life easier for his defenders.
“He doesn’t mind what players are in front of him. It doesn’t faze him. He’s played with a different back four for most games, with the full-backs alternating and a change in central defence.
“The players know him and trust him. I think there is a good relationship there.”
And Pickford’s Mexico masterclass can bolster England’s confidence as they try to overcome the dangerous Norwegians and master striker Erling Haaland, who demonstrated their threat by beating Brazil 2-0 in the last 16.
“I think Jordan Pickford’s confidence will be at an all-time high and the team’s will be as well after their win against Mexico,” added Robinson.
“I questioned them on air when Thomas Tuchel went to a back five after 71 minutes. I was thinking I wasn’t sure they would hang on, and that would have been a stick he would have been beaten with.
“It did go right and Jordan Pickford was a big part of it going right.”
In Deborah Levy’s new novel “My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein,” the celebrated British author turns her keen observational and critical eye toward Stein, a writer that Levy feels has been criminally redacted from the canon of modernist masters that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. “My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein,” however, is anything but a dry-as-dust revisionist treatise.
Levy couches her thoughts on Stein’s life and work within the story of three women in contemporary Paris, including Levy’s fictive avatar as the narrator, grappling with her own notions of identity as she writes about Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. I spoke with Levy about Stein, Toklas and Picasso.
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✍️ Author Chat
Have you always had an abiding interest in Gertrude Stein?
She has always been lurking there for a number of reasons. When I was studying modernist literature, I was pointed to all the usual suspects — T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Beckett, Joyce. But no one ever pointed to Gertrude Stein. She was absent in Britain, anyway. I’m not sure it’s the same in America.
I feel like in America she certainly is not frequently cited among that pantheon of modernist writers that you just mentioned.
I thought her most commercial work, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” was quite enchanting. But when you start to dig into her other writing, you find this mixture of very obtuse, very violent work, and some brilliant work.
You write in the book that you sometimes don’t understand Stein, but this doesn’t diminish your enjoyment of her work.
The thing about avant-garde writers is that they either crash or they triumph. For readers, it’s either someone popping a vein at the new and strange, or someone over-praising the work. And I thought, well I’m allowed to have mixed emotions about Stein’s writing. Sometimes she is totally brilliant, and sometimes less so.
Author Deborah Levy
(Sheila Burnett)
You also celebrate Stein and Toklas’ fierce individuality, which runs counter to the usual narratives about female authors during this time.
Well, female writers are supposed to suffer or commit suicide. And the glorious thing about Stein and Alice is that the art of living was very important to them. Travel, conversation, or driving around. This really appeals to me. You know, Stein would have a roast chicken leg in one hand and one hand on the steering wheel, with the dogs in the back.
I feel like Stein’s legacy as a writer has been occluded by her renown as a collector of the greatest modern art of the century, most notably Picasso before he became Picasso. She is remembered more for collecting others’ art than for her own art.
If you’re going to collect this bold, daring art of your own time, and you’re buying it cheap, because it’s being mocked, you have to know how to defend it. Stein wasn’t an art historian. She studied psychology with William James and then studied medicine at Johns Hopkins. Through her conversations with Picasso and others, she really began to acquire the apparatus to defend the work, and that fascinated me.
You write that Stein wanted to kill the 19th century with her work by dismantling and then reassembling language.
She was going to write through continuous present tense. She got rid of commas so she could hurtle through time and make her thoughts move forward. No question marks, because it was self-evident to her when someone was asking a question in her writing. She really was a pioneer.
Her prose reads like Beckett’s, decades before his novels were published.
The critic Roland Barthes wrote that all writing has some kind of behavior. A lot of avant-garde writing behaves like Stein, but she wasn’t imitating any other thing. She made something new for her century.
(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Book jacket for “Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe” by Gail Crowther
(Los Angeles Times illustration; book jacket from Galley Books)
Marilyn Monroe was an avid reader who traveled with her treasured library of books wherever she lived. Yet, the stubborn image of Monroe as a literary dilettante remains. Now Gail Crowther has written “Marilyn and Her Books” which sets out to debunk that misconception of the screen legend. Crowther’s sharp account is both the story of Monroe’s library and “what we’ve projected upon Monroe when we’re asked to consider that she had one,” writes Mark Athitakis.
As Cuba struggles with a faltering economy and President Trump’s saber-rattling overtures, Ada Ferrer’s timely new memoir “Keeper of My Kin” “argues that the grand narratives of exile and revolution are, at their core, made up of private reckonings with irretrievable consequences,” writes Mariella Rudi.
When Eagle Rock’s Read Books was threatened with a massive rent hike from its landlord, co-owners Jeremy and Debbie Kaplan rallied the community around the fight for tenant’s rights and started an activist organization called Save North East Los Angeles Shops. “Commercial landlords [have] unbelievably unrealistic expectations of rent, and a small business can only sell a T-shirt or a hamburger or a service for what the market will bear,” neighborhood preservationist Aaron Peskin told Emily St. Martin.
Finally, Swan Huntley found a novel way to put off writing her next book: She hiked to every Erewhon store in Los Angeles.
📖 Bookstore Faves
A Good Used Book’s beautiful interior
(A Good Used Book)
Jenny Yang and Chris Capizzi started A Good Used Book in 2017 by selling secondhand titles at local flea markets and the Grand Central Market downtown. Seven years later, after a brief COVID blowback, the pair opened their own storefront in Historic Filipinotown. Now, A Good Used Book has blossomed into a vital community space featuring a vast selection of previously loved books across all genres. The store also hosts pop-up markets on the weekends, with more events scheduled in the coming year. I spoke with Capizzi about his store.
Who are your customers?
Our customer base is pretty broad. We’re selective about the books we carry, but we want anyone to be able to find themselves somewhere in the shop, whether you’re just getting back into reading or you’re the kind of person who already has strong opinions about translations. And we try not to take ourselves too seriously, so even though we may have critical theory, we also have “Choose Your Own Adventure.”
How do you pick inventory? Is there any emphasis on any particular genres that might be popular?
We definitely do the work to find books, but honestly a lot of the time the books seem to find us. In terms of what we carry, we focus mostly on classic, modern and contemporary fiction, but we love genre fiction too, like sci-fi, crime and horror. And a big part of what makes the store feel like us are our nonfiction and culture sections — humanities, sciences, film, music, fashion and design. Anything for that curious person who just wants to go a little deeper.
I know the store is about much more than books. Can you tell me about some of the other community events you guys organize?
During the week we’re all about the books. Every Sunday we host the Every Sunday Funday Market that features two food pop-ups out front, one savory and one sweet, and four or five local vendors and artists inside. We rotate vendors selling and making ceramics, jewelry, Japanese retro radios, soaps and candles, zines and prints, and even Persian perfumes. And we always have drinks going out of our vintage Coleman cooler, too. It’s a lot of things happening at once, but it adds up to a pretty easy, fun Sunday afternoon.
