And because history is more or less over, Willis’ characters get to muck about in the past and have adventures. Historians at her future Oxford have access to time travel technology which allows them to visit the past, dressing up like “contemps” (short for “contemporary people”) blending in to see what their lives were really like. Academic historians are, in fact, the only people in Willis’ books who use time travel: historical observation is the only practical application of the technology, since changing the past or bringing objects back through time is considered to be impossible. The scientific consensus in Willis’ novels is that going back in time to kill Hitler, for example, wouldn’t work—the continuum would stop you, spitting you out halfway around the world at a different time. History protects itself.
The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature. The Writer makes coffee and sits down at their special writing desk for their ritualized morning pages. They break for lunch—or perhaps a morning constitution—during which they have an aha! moment about a troublesome plot point. Such a lifestyle aesthetic is “something we’ve long wanted to believe,” said Paul Bogaards, the veteran book publicist who has worked with the likes of Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, and Robert Caro. “For a very small subset of writers, this has been true. And it’s getting harder and harder to do.”
Ithaca is also inundated with nature, drowned in it. This I can’t quantify, but it seemed to us then that the surrounding gorges, forests, swamps, and bogs were especially thronged with plants and animals. The air seemed thick with the smells of pollen, new leaves, rotting leaves, skunk cabbage, pine forests, and stagnant ponds. It was certainly full of pollen, midges and gnats, bees, wasps, hornets, butterflies, moths, deerflies, black flies, and horseflies. The water my sister, my brother, and I swam in was also occupied by rafts of water striders, water boatmen (which bit us), leeches (which bit us and left uncoagulated streams of blood after we’d salted them off), and water beetles (which also bit, very hard, taking chunks of flesh and drawing lots of blood). The mud we waded in was gooey with smooth green algae, sometimes jellied with clusters of frogs’ eggs, and always potentially mined with snapping turtles.
Stories keep traditions alive – they're the reason Maryland fried chicken continues to find new fans. They're the reason why 111 years after the Titanic sank, the ill-fated ocean liner continues to capture our imaginations. They're the reason a water-logged piece of paper sold on Saturday for the price of a luxury car.
Players have defended the game by noting that its letter strings—from AA (a kind of Hawaiian lava) to ZZZ (an interjection for sleep)—could be found in a bunch of standard North American dictionaries, books that have been used through the years to compile and revise Scrabble’s tournament word list. But after an update last month introduced dozens of suspect words, riling up the community of competitive players, that’s becoming harder to do.
As in fairy tales, settings are generic, characters are unnamed, plots unfold according to dream logic, and the situation is a given, the way that the accident of one’s birth to a particular set of parents in a particular time and place is a given. What matters is not so much the unknown specifics of the character’s background or life, but rather what the character does in the strange situation they find themselves in.
What is perhaps most astonishing in reading the three stories together is that they don’t showcase Keegan’s maturation as a writer over more than two decades so much as remind you of how long she has simply been a master of the craft.
In what might be the most entertaining music memoir since Elton John’s Me, Boy George’s Karma weaves a meandering path through several decades’ of fame, success, crash and burn, before delivering him into a kind of autumnal meditative serenity, aged 62. That it is all wildly discursive, spectacularly catty and occasionally quite mad merely confirms its authenticity. This is George O’Dowd in all his exhausting glory.