For the past 1,000 days, I’ve been writing at least one poem a day. I started on 17 August 2017 as a terrorist attack was unfolding in Barcelona. I was alone in a pub (standard for poets) and found myself writing a few lines on my phone. I posted it on Instagram, where I explained that I was experimenting with writing fast poems. That experiment is now wildly out of control.
It may not be the healthiest pursuit. It requires daily engagement with the details of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, school shootings, celebrity deaths, sporting events and the slow plotlines of Brexit, Trump and climate change – and now there’s a pandemic to write about. Even so, there are days when it feels as if either the news or my mind has slowed to a standstill. It has helped that “Tuesday” rhymes with “quiet news day”.
To say Philip Roth stopped writing is inaccurate. He stopped making art. But his old way of coping with any embattlement, to sit down to the keyboard, continued in the years of his retirement. The underside of his greatness swarmed with grievances time had not assuaged. He couldn’t stop litigating the past and produced over a thousand pages of—well, what to call it?—self-justification in those years, all of which I read.
He’d been giving me typescripts and manuscripts since we met, a habit that accelerated. Sometimes these would be birthday gifts, sometimes gifts for no occasion. Sometimes he’d make jokes about the market value of such items when he inscribed them: “For your old age!” Sometimes he’d rather solemnly address me as if I were his archivist.
“There shouldn’t be a volcano where Mount St. Helens is,” says Seth Moran, scientist-in-charge at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington.
Solving this puzzle is about more than satisfying geologic curiosity. The firestorm 40 years ago was a reminder of the dangers the Cascade volcanoes pose to millions of people—and a hard shove propelling volcanology into the future. In the decades since, scientists have used the extensive observations of that blast to better understand eruptions around the world, and bolster our readiness for those yet to come.
Serial killer narratives as a genre tend to focus on the perpetrators; capitalizing on the public’s shivery fascination with the mind of a killer, sensationalizing the murderer while his typically female victims become, at best, parenthetical; romanticized cautionary tales of lives cut short rather than unique and complex individuals in their own rights. This novel upends that structure, taking the criminal out of the spotlight and shifting the focus to the women who are directly or indirectly affected by his actions. The psychological makeup of the killer is eschewed here in favor of the vibrancy of these women’s lives; their ambitions and hopes, their grief and regrets, the way they see themselves, not how they are seen through the filter of a predator.
It was more than a year ago, when things were merely bad, that the British critic Olivia Laing wrote the foreword to “Funny Weather,” her new collection of nonfiction pieces. The question she asks there — “Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis?” — has taken on greater urgency.
This book is not meant to lay out a comprehensive answer to that question. It’s a gathering of Laing’s reviews, artist profiles and essays, originally published in various newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogues and other venues. But from these it’s fair to say she believes that art can do quite a bit — among other things, she writes, “it shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us up to the interior lives of others” — and she champions the very attempt on the part of artists to make a dent in the collective consciousness.
She burst into my room dancing, humming,
a force of nature, her dark skin gleaming,