In her 2016 essay for the New Yorker on Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, Laura Miller argues that while French presents readers with an extraordinary “portrait of contemporary Ireland wobbling in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger’s collapse,” in which the locations of the murders and investigations are vivid and salient, “the kernel of her work’s appeal” is not its exploration of Irish society but its exploration of self: “In most crime fiction, the central mystery is: Who is the murderer? In French’s novels, it’s: Who is the detective?” Since late summer, I’ve been reading the novels for the first time (Miller is correct when she says that “anybody who’s read one will very shortly have read them all”; the Brooklyn Public Library cannot get the novels to me fast enough), and what fascinates me is the relationship between self and place—specifically self and home—in them.
We already spend all day on our computers or our phones, feeling those repeated blasts of rage and despair and envy. And then we retire to the bathroom and dive right back into the same mess?
Look, I do it too: keying while peeing, scrolling while unrolling. But I wish I didn’t! Because that’s not what the bathroom is for. The bathroom ought to be a respite from the loud, angry world, a place to purge our bodies of waste and clear our minds for the time ahead.
Our forefathers, and foremothers, had a solution for this problem: the bathroom book.
Did The Jetsons inspire generation of innovators to realize both the many artifacts and the essence of its vision? Or did the writers understand the core human needs for comfort and convenience, and by extrapolating from the emerging technologies of the time, brilliantly imagined a future that was effectively predestined in any market-driven society? Both explanations are likely true to some extent, but whatever the reason, we have pursued—and partially achieved—the future The Jetsons depicted. And we continue to pursue it, applying a bursting pipeline of new technologies in the service of greater convenience.
The writers of The Jetsons gently mocked this culture of convenience. The scripts are peppered with ironic comments about working too hard, in relation to housework, for example, which consisted of pushing the requisite buttons. George needs to relax at the end of his “hard day” at work, which consisted of sitting back in a chair with his hands clasped behind his head, peering at a wall of controls and occasionally pressing a button or fiddling with a knob. And Jane needs to take an exercise class, where she works out her fingers, to make them stronger for all the button pushing she needs to do.
Think of karashi mentaiko, or sacs of salted cod roe that have been marinated in powdered chiles and spices, as caviar’s Japanese cousin. Spicy and mildly fishy, it has lurked flirtatiously on restaurant menus and in international snack aisles for the last decade. But now, thanks to a combination of factors, including the recent proliferation of wafu restaurants around the country, mentaiko is now more recognizable than ever in America’s collective consciousness. Its name translates to “children of the cod” in English, which brings a certain Stephen King novel to mind. In this case, be very scared of how much you’re going to love mentaiko, because it’s about to be everywhere.
Perhaps my memory of browsing the mall is shot through with the faintest sepia tint. I’m sure I was bored some of the time. Lunch behind me, I was typically after a specific novel or CD or comic book, which used up my spending money almost immediately and set me adrift for the remainder of the trip until the agreed-upon meet-up time. Anyway, wasn’t the mall a site of vapid capitalist consumption? Shouldn’t I have been wandering an art gallery or nudging a soccer ball outdoors? By the parenting standards of today, my family’s Saturdays would not be judged especially nourishing.
But, at least, the mall back then was modest—low ceilinged, less brilliantly lit, and compact. The scale was human and the stores affordable. They served the needs of the browser, not of the brand.
In the acknowledgements to #! (pronounced “shebang”), Nick Montfort writes: “The poems in this book consist of computer programs followed by output from running these programs. Some of them use randomness…In these cases, running the program yourself will very likely produce different results.” Montfort goes on to specify that the computer programming languages used to create the outputs for this 2014 book of poetry include Python, Ruby, and Perl. #! is an example of what we might call “code poetics” or “database aesthetics,” which explores the politics of the appropriation of open-source code by putting code to use in new and unimagined contexts. Montfort recognizes as much: “You may type the programs in and run them if you like, or do whatever you want with them; all of them should be considered free software (offered entirely without any warranty of any sort).” Montfort’s poems thus have an indeterminate quality; they are intended to be appropriated and recontextualized, yielding new outputs—new poems—each time.
“Shrines” doesn’t surprise in the thrilling sui generis way of “Behind the Scenes” or “Life After Life”; no thunderclap revelations à la “Case Histories” arrive in the flurry of postscripts and ever-afters that make up its final pages. It lands instead as light refreshment; a cocktail of fizz and melancholy, generously poured.