My complaints with QR code menus are minor but many. I love the communal aspect of dining out with friends or family, and I hate the way that QR code menus take me out of the shared moment and force me to look at my phone (which, of course, leads me down the rabbit hole of checking my various notifications). I hate the way QR code menus mean scrolling, pinching to adjust size, and sometimes juggling between multiple tabs instead of just having to glance over a page or two.
The first generation of immigrants wants to survive, the second wants to assimilate, and the third wants to remember, the sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen wrote in 1938. The fourth, fifth, and sixth? Apparently they now want to go on a luxury vacation to visit the Welsh coal mines their ancestors crossed an ocean to escape.
“Exploded essays”, the poet, novelist and memoirist Lavinia Greenlaw calls the 17 pieces of almost-art-critical prose in this bright, mournful book. The phrase suggests a bristling diagram or enlarged view, an annotated arc of thought or feeling. But also something violently botched or ruined – don’t all essays worth the name aspire, more or less secretly, to blowing up their own form? In revisiting a lifetime of looking – at art, landscapes, weather, heavenly bodies, human faces and sometimes nothing at all – Greenlaw puts certain stark questions to herself and the things she looks at: “How do we make sense of what we see? How do we describe what we have never seen before?”