In the opening scene of the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, first performed in 1897, “orange girls” at a Parisian theater in the 1640s make their way through an audience of soldiers, society ladies, noblemen, and riffraff, selling orangeade, raspberry cordial, syllabub, macarons, lemonade, iced buns, and cream puffs. The handsome soldier Christian de Neuvillette and his friends sample their wares, drink wine, and eat from a buffet. A poet and pastry cook named Ragueneau banter-barters an apple tartlet for a verse. Then the poet and militia captain Cyrano arrives, and in a glorious, idealistic act, spends his year’s salary to get a bad actor kicked off the stage. The orange girls offer the hungry man nourishment, but he eats only a grape and half a macaron, staying to true to a kind of restraint that defines his character. Food, in other words, plays a major role in the play—one that culminates in act 4, when Roxane, the woman both Christian and Cyrano love, arrives at the Arras front in a carriage stuffed with a feast for the starving soldiers: truffled peacock, a haunch of venison, ortolans, copious desserts, ruby-red and topaz-yellow wine.

I’ve seen three versions of Cyrano this year—a 2021 movie starring Peter Dinklage, with an original score by the band the National; a staging of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring James McAvoy; and the 1987 Steve Martin movie—and in none of them did I pick up on a food theme. Its absence, I thought, must mean something.

The original Cyrano de Bergerac was a period piece, set in 1640 but written in 1897 by a successful Paris playwright who has fallen into obscurity in our time. (I found only a single academic biography on Rostand, though his mustache alone deserves a tome.) The plot is a love triangle. Cyrano loves Roxane, but he believes she cannot return his love because of his huge nose. Roxane has a crush on Christian, because of his pretty face. Christian, tongue-tied and insecure, can’t provide Roxane with the intellectual stimulation she seeks, so he allows Cyrano to write letters to her, signing them as Christian. Roxane falls madly in love—but with which man? It’s a perfect romantic comedy that taps into universal themes. Anyone can identify with the lover’s fear that they cannot be loved due to a fatal flaw, physical or otherwise. But its influence on Parisian society in the late nineteenth century was highly specific.

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It’s villainous behaviour all the way on today’s show: an Armenian player lobbing a water bottle at a ref, Craig Bellamy’s swinging his way back to the north west, and Andy reveals he got arrested at a Green Day concert. 

Oh, and a team in South Africa conceded 41 own goals. Nothing to see here.

Join Marcus, Luke and Andy as they navigate all that, last night's internationals, and much more!

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The failure by governments and businesses to accelerate energy efficiency efforts is “inexplicable,” according to the head of the International Energy Agency.

Fatih Birol said saving more energy was “utterly essential” in cutting household’s rocketing bills, ending reliance on fossil fuel regimes such as Russia, and rapidly lowering the CO2 emissions driving the climate crisis.

New analysis by the IEA showed that doubling the rate of energy efficiency improvements seen in the last decade would, by 2030, slash global energy use by the same amount used in China every year, saving households $650 billion. It would also cut oil and gas use by far more than Russia exports to the European Union. Ending these exports is a key EU goal after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The IEA said greater efficiency could be readily achieved with existing technologies and would pay back fully the investment through lower running costs, especially at today’s high energy prices. Important measures include the rollout of electric cars and heat pumps, more efficient household appliances such as fridges and TVs, and people nudging down home thermostats and choosing greener travel.

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Jordan Castro’s forthcoming novel The Novelist takes place over the course of one morning in which the protagonist tries to write his first novel. During this time, he sometimes G-chats and emails his friend, Li. Tao Lin’s Leave Society is about someone named Li who is writing a novel documenting his recovery from dominator culture. Castro and Lin have been friends since 2010. This conversation was composed from October 31, 2021 to June 8, 2022 on Google Docs and sometimes on Gmail and G-Chat. That material has been shortened and then reorganized freely to suggest thematic continuities, but also discontinuities, in the time, mood, and medium of the interview.

LIN

It’s December 19, 2021. Yesterday, I opened the galley of The Novelist and looked for something to quote in my tweet of a photo of it. I flipped around a little and saw and chose this: “I opened Gmail. Li had emailed me again. ‘Fuck off,’ the email said, simply.” I wonder what readers of that tweet—who know my novel’s main character is named Li—thought about that quote. In the context of your novel, the “Fuck off” is playful, causing the first-person narrator of your novel to grin. What’s your narrator’s name?

CASTRO

I did confide in a diary from the time I was nine or ten. I remember one diary well from this era—red plaid vinyl, with a strap and a fancy lock. The key was lost and the strap had to be cut. I gushed into spiral, lined notebooks in my twenties. Rereading any of these created massive disappointment, so I destroyed them—I am not sad to say. I feel anger toward them, about them. That little girl or the woman understood little or was unable say what she meant to say, and this is one reason I labor on with my fiction. Most of these daily jottings for stories in progress will remain forever lost or hidden, but this sketch work represents, for me, a purer form of diary. Here is one page from this morning.

Diane Williams is the author of ten books of fiction. She has a new collection of stories forthcoming from Soho Press next year. She is the founder and editor of NOON.

England extended their unbeaten run against Germany to three games last night and took the mick out of that crying child from the Euros last summer. A victorious day all round.

Marcus, Jim and Andy run the rule over a huge clash in Munich as Gareth Southgate tinkered with a new system that didn’t quite suit anyone. Elsewhere, Australia clinch a huge win over UAE, Cardiff City are sniffing around bar-owner Gareth Bale and Barcelona are going to pay Robert Lewandowski with… weddings?

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