No one has ever lived in the past. Every human being in the history of the world has lived in their own present. The past is now, or should be, for the characters we create to populate crime fiction regardless of the time period in which we write.
But there are challenges and pitfalls here because the past itself does not have the same shape or coherence as does the present which we inhabit. The past is filled with countless people, places, and conflicts which we turn into something called history to impose order upon chaos.
In retrospect, the disappearance of the classic anchorman after 9/11 is an issue larger than journalism itself. It speaks to the vital question of whether anybody—elected or not—will ever be able to play such an essential role in sustaining a shared and accepted informational identity for our national community. The next time all hell breaks loose, perhaps we’ll find out.
Do we want to eat food made by robots? Chain salad might be the perfect food to answer that question. Chain salad is neither bad nor good. It simply is. Whether it is made by a robot, or a person I never see because I ordered the salad on my phone and then picked it up from a shelf in the store, is largely irrelevant to the Sweetgreen Experience. At Sweetgreen, you don’t think about where your salad actually came from; instead, you think about how cool it is that Naomi Osaka is an investor.
Bad luck in small doses can cast a glittering light on the rest of life. It shows us just how close we came to smashing our heads on the bookcase, and so makes us look at the bookcase (the room, the house, the street, the town, the life) with a new sense of wonder. Sooner or later, in one form or another, the terrible thing will happen. I didn’t understand that when I was young, no matter how many nuns tried to tell me. Now, I think I do. And I’m grateful that this time I got off easy.
Because I did not attend college and spent all but one year of high school at home with arthritis following rheumatic fever, I had the good fortune to discover Shakespeare on my own. We were rural Missionary Baptists with no car and no phone — my father dead, my mother unemployed. A penciled note in a volume from a cheap set called World Famous Classics tells me that I first read “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1974. I was 16 and in a wheelchair. The first Shakespearean phrase I underlined during this period was “skirmish of wit,” about the raillery between Beatrice and Benedick, which inspired a lifelong expectation that romance must include snark.
I volunteer this personal history because Robert McCrum’s magnificent new book, “Shakespearean,” is about, in part, Shakespeare’s ability to speak to many kinds of people in many different ways. McCrum also found a new personal connection to Shakespeare through illness. In 1995, at 42, he suffered a massive stroke. “During convalescence,” he writes, “the Complete Works became my book of life. Almost the only words that made sense were snatches of Shakespeare, and next — as I began to recover — longer passages from King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and especially Hamlet, the play that rarely fails to supply a kind of running commentary to the inner dialogue of the self.”
But it’s exactly these properties that kindle and sustain Nelson’s interest in the concept of freedom. Indeed, she’s a writer deeply drawn to in-betweens, uncertainties, and the way language bends and morphs in tandem with us, materially shaping our experience of the world and vice versa.
John Burnside is, to use a good Scots word, a byordinar writer. Whether in memoir, novels or poetry his oeuvre combines the gothic, the cryptic, the mystic and the barbaric. There have been themes across his work – strange disappearances, moments of epiphany moments – that he has encircled in his own mythology. This new collection of poems is both a continuation and a radical break. The “memes” as it were are still in place, but in this book the language is riddled with religious overtones. It is a book I had to read three times, and even then I do not think I have plumbed its depths. Nevertheless, I was moved, pleasantly bewildered and more than once, dumbstruck.
These animals did not and do not “think” in the way we do, Panciroli notes, nor strive for anything but to live and help their offspring do so. Yet when an asteroid strike made earth a hellscape 66 million years ago, they easily outsmarted the supposedly supreme dinosaurs, who quickly vanished, and went on an evolutionary tear that created today’s modern ecosystems and (arguably less to their credit) human life. Despite their puny stature, she writes, “their evolutionary path is not one of relegation, but innovation. They seized the moment with endothermic gusto. … Their tale is packed with evolutionary eurekas.”