In a 1975 lecture titled “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” Ursula K. Le Guin summarized the plot of one of her worst stories: “This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly.” Le Guin called this “a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice.” And yet she reworked it into one of the great American political novels, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, first published in 1974 and now out in a 50th anniversary edition. The book has aged well. In her lecture, Le Guin lamented that the “moral proposition” of The Dispossessed had not been completely dissolved in the “mass of living experience”: “The sound of axes being ground is occasionally audible.” I heard them only faintly, and they grow fainter with each rereading, as the harmonies and disharmonies of Le Guin’s creation become ever more discernible.
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness” not long after James Baldwin told an audience of writers that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. And it may be that the only real antidote to the insanity of our times, to this planet-wide storm system of helplessness and disorientation, is to resist with everything we’ve got the belief that our story is finished, that we and our organizing principles are the final word of this universe, dragging behind us the fourteen-billion-year comet tail that blazed from the first atoms to the atomic bomb.
When the sun sets, the tower takes on a menacing quality, with its concrete terraces jutting out like spikes on a club. Later at night, when the construction lights are on, it’s possible to imagine that the building is inhabited—that people are up there drinking wine, slipping into the infinity pool, looking down on the city at their feet. Before it started leaning, 1 Seaport was designed to withstand hundreds of years of wind off the harbor. Until someone figures out what to do with it, it’ll hang there, the tallest eyesore on the skyline.
Everyone has their favourite example of a trick that reliably gets a certain job done, even if they don’t really understand why. Back in the day, it might have been slapping the top of your television set when the picture went fuzzy. Today, it might be turning your computer off and on again.
Quantum mechanics — the most successful and important theory in modern physics — is like that. It works wonderfully, explaining things from lasers and chemistry to the Higgs boson and the stability of matter. But physicists don’t know why. Or at least, if some of us think we know why, most others don’t agree.
As the taxi approached the remote Lake District house where I’d be spending a week doing a silent Buddhist retreat, a thought struck me with Zen-like clarity.
You must be out of your tiny mind.
Billed as “A Verse Novel,” this collection of poems written—so the opening notes tells us—while the author was hiking the San Andreas Fault, fits perfectly into the framework of “a composing as the body tires.” Writing en plein air (as the painters say), Gander’s long lyric sequence moves forward and also halts “to watch” and “wait”: patiently testing certainties within the environment’s truth. While Gander’s trajectory is through a desert, and the “swags” here are endangered Joshua Trees, his pilgrimage (surely the correct term for a walk toward truth) is in the tradition Stevens inherited.
Haber, while seemingly random and confused in choosing which of his narrator’s thoughts lead to which others, is actually impressively in control of the novel’s sequences that reveal a fragmented mind wrestling with an interior chaos as he confronts the deepest loss imaginable.
Surprising, complex, and strangely beautiful, Remedy is one of those smart horror novels that deliver the gory, brutal stuff while also digging deep into the humanity of its characters.
Chihaya rejects this kind of faith-based relationship to books: “Books, like people, should not be asked to save us.” She has arrived at this hard-won knowledge after a lifetime of asking books to do exactly that, and repeatedly feeling them give way beneath her. Indeed, she views all her past attempts to read “for something”—“for comfort, for pleasure, for validation, for comprehension”—as proof that she used to be a “terrible reader.” Bristling at accounts of reading that are premised on progress (“I am disturbed and irritated whenever I encounter the moralizing claim that the main point of reading fiction is relentlessly positive self-improvement”), she instead characterizes reading as a thoroughly mixed bag: “Sometimes it is nutritious. Sometimes it is poisonous. Sometimes—surprisingly often—it is both.”
Evans’s nonfiction marries that faith in the value of subjective experience to a fierce interrogatory intellect; the result is a fascinating overview not only of a writer’s evolution but of the shifts in our understanding of art as (to quote Bernardine Evaristo from Evans’s profile included here) “activism and community”.