Chinatown shows us something we still need to learn to see about the American century. What has become legible in Chinatown is the figure of the pipeline. This is obvious in the case of the water pipeline or aqueduct at the center of Chinatown’s historical plot, to which so much critical attention has already been paid, but it is also true, if less obviously so, for the case of the oil pipelines at the periphery of Chinatown’s production. If, to Robert Evans in 1973, “something real” meant California’s water wars, in 2024 we might now also understand global oil wars.
Over the course of its long existence, it has shaped literary tastes without any real commitment to appraisal or critique, and it has taken pride in its ability to carry on a tradition of nothingness, no real engagement with books, only an often smarmy, worshipful reverence for (certain) books and (certain) writers.
In the end, truth machines haven’t progressed much from Llull’s Ars Magna. The 13th-century zealot hoped to automate truth to dispel people’s uncertainty—instead we’ve automated the uncertainty. Perhaps the elusive truth about the universe does lie in the baroque, feverish ramblings of Llull’s Ars Magna, if only somebody could decipher it. Just don’t ask ChatGPT.
For almost ten years now, my family and I have taken our annual vacation to a beach. As a Californian in land-locked Colorado, I often feel the call of the ocean—and it means my fifth- and sixth-grade kids can snorkel all day without coming up for air. These vacations aren’t just a quick detour from mountain living; they’re a mental reset that, almost without fail, reinvigorate my writing and motivation. Plus last year’s trip—to Maui, just before the fires—was the first time my kids were old enough to not require hyper-vigilance on the beach, which yielded another vacation bonus—relaxation. This year, our annual trip would assume even more significance: it would be a break from the appointments, the bills, and insurance hassles; a chance to catch my breath before this seemingly impossible thing happened.
Perhaps my favorite thing about writing here is that it’s too far from the house for the internet. After that, it’s the quiet. So quiet that, in the summer, I can identify most of the birdcalls in the surrounding trees. A trapped housefly, flinging itself into the windows from one side of the room to the other, is such an ear-splitting disruption that I stop writing until it makes its way to the opened door. I run outside to chase squirrels off the roof because of their rasping footsteps. A woodpecker searching for bugs in the shingles prompts a coffee break back up at the house. In fact, the boundary between the animal and human space is, well, relaxed around here. I keep the spiders around because I appreciate the work they do on the houseflies. I quite like watching a line of ants on the wall, am wondrously shocked that they all know where they’re going. Every spring I find at least one old tool drawer filled with acorns from a cheeky squirrel, and it always makes me smile.
If you’ve never read a Kate Quinn novel, there’s no time like the present. Or like the 1950s in Washington, D.C. That’s the setting for Quinn’s “The Briar Club,” which is a murder mystery wrapped up in the stories of multiple women who rent rooms at a boarding house during the height of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare.
At times, you feel the author’s considerable ingenuity straining as she comes up with one more way to look at lichen. They allow us to re-see our relationships with one another, to capitalism, to sentience, to language, to racism and crime and just about any other issue that might present itself. And yet as far-fetched as some of the analogies might initially seem, Palmer always finds a way to turn the lichen’s scale and stasis into an opportunity for genuine reflection: “Freedom and independence are associated with movement — the ability to get away, to leave and return, to explore and exploit. If you are attached, if you stay in place, you risk becoming an object and possibly an object to be used.”