I still live in northern New Jersey, and I still find a strange peace in that late-summer melancholy. The awareness that something good is going to end helps me appreciate that it is happening now.
If you appreciate this feeling, as I do, there is no better work of fiction than “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 story, which teems with the languid sadness of summer’s final act. The shift between the promise of freedom and an awareness of the coming cold happens so smoothly, so quickly in the story that I am somehow astounded each time I read it.
In 1968, the British literary quarterly Ambit, under the editorial auspices of J. G. Ballard, Edwin Brock, and Martin Bax, ran an infamous competition for the best work written under the influence of drugs. Years later, in an interview for The Paris Review, Ballard recalled that, in terms of literary quality, “cannabis was the best stimulant, though some good pieces came out of LSD.” But “the best writing of all,” he went on, “was done by Ann Quin, under the influence of the contraceptive pill.” This winning story, “Tripticks”—the opening of Quin’s final novel, which she had started earlier that year—won publication in the magazine and a prize of £40 for its author. “Don’t laugh,” Quin wrote to her publisher, Marion Boyars, “but I’ve won a Drugs competition.” It’s a funny little anecdote, but it seems to me that this comic subversion of Ambit’s contest is also a preview of the more serious subversive work that Quin was doing in her book. For, just as Quin’s homage to her birth-control pills—Orthonovin 2, to be specific—deflates the romantic narrative of nineteen-sixties drug culture, “Tripticks,” Quin’s most pointedly satirical work, is a feminist anti-romance, anti-road novel of a distinctly disruptive sort.
One morning in September 2003, Jim E. Tynsky was working on the tip of a ridge above a canyon in southwestern Wyoming. That point of land had become known as “Tom’s Folly” because of a previous fossil hunter’s inability to find anything in the quarry there. Tynsky wasn’t doing much better. With the season racing to its snowy end, he had little to show for a summer of hard work but the commonest sort of fish fossils. Heaps of discarded stone slabs lay around like broken pottery.
Other quarries on this ridge were known for producing extraordinarily detailed and complete fossils, all from the bottom of an ancient lake. Tynsky, the third generation of his family to eke out a living from finding fossils there, knelt down beside a slab still embedded in the ground. He chose a spot along an exposed edge and started to work at it with his chisel and his geological hammer. A fragment of stone broke away above the split. He was expecting to find fossilized fish underneath. Maybe some good ones. What caught his eye instead was a foot.
The oldest continuously operated Chinese restaurant in America is not in San Francisco or New York, but in Butte, Montana, where 47-year-old Jerry Tam, the great-great-grandson of the original owner, presides over the Pekin Noodle Parlor. Standing on South Main Street outside the weathered two-story brick building, with its display window of antique Chinese cooking equipment, Tam describes the Pekin as a “walk back in time”—one that illuminates the often-overlooked history of the Chinese population in Montana.
You see where I am living now. This morning, out walking on the cliffs behind the Château de Dieppe, I gazed at the archway that leads to those cliffs by means of a bridge thrown over a moat. Through that same archway, Madame de Longueville escaped from Queen Anne of Austria. Stealing away on a ship that set sail from Le Havre, she landed in Rotterdam and rendezvoused in Stenay with Marshal de Turenne. The great captain’s laurels had by then been sullied, and the exiled tease treated him none too well.
When I’m trapped in a metal tube, trying my best to keep my limbs from inconveniencing anyone else around me, I find myself clinging to any small pleasure I can find, even if it’s just a cup of muddy coffee. Up here, the illusion of luxury might as well be actual luxury. Airplanes are a place of needle-thin margins, where an ounce of comfort for yourself can come at a steep cost to someone else. Only one true retreat remains: watching free movies.
Chai does this again and again, elegantly yet forcefully subverting our preconceived notions as readers with each successive read. “Tomorrow in Shanghai” harnesses our attention, splitting it to show the shades of hope, fear, love and loss we’ve already brought to the page.
For his third novel, out this week, Hannaham combines both modes — wicked satire and selected allusions to “The Odyssey” and its progeny — to create a scathing, heartbreaking takedown of the carceral system, “Didn’t Nobody Give a S— What Happened to Carlotta.”
Punch Me Up to the Gods is a letter to so many people, a letter that so many of us need to read and write in our own way, a letter to future generations, a letter to help mend those of us who are broken, a letter to help us prevent breaking those that come after us, so that no one needs to be punched up to see their gods.
So here I’ve been consuming contemporary verse
along with long essays about contemporary verse,
a nearly paralyzing experience that has taught me
that I know nothing about poetry, despite the fact
that I’ve been scribbling poems for all my long life.