Janet Malcolm once remarked that most well-read people have not read Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans.” Famously inscrutable, Stein’s opus exceeds nine hundred pages and sets out to tell the story of “everyone who ever was or is or will be living.” When Malcolm was tackling the novel, she chopped it into six parts with a kitchen knife.
Perhaps what’s so exciting is that it has tapped into the huge energy and enthusiasm for poetry felt by young writers and readers, who recognise it can be a comfort and release. “Aftershock has given me everything,” Wallis says. “It’s proof that you can take an awful few years and make them into potentially the most astonishing year. Having not wanted to live at all … what it is to choose life over and over again. It’s incredible.”
Gilpin ends her foreword with simple humility: “My life is closing. I am grateful to those who are interested in reading these poems.” Her poised acceptance first seems impossible, then exemplary. Indeed, it is the most fully realized understanding of our pact with life: an appreciation for all that the days have offered despite their unexpected curtailment. Not raging against the dying of the light, but peacefully welcoming it with the same curiosity and openness one held toward life. Gilpin offers all of us a path toward this wisdom which is, after all, the work of our lifetimes.
“Time theft, wage theft, the planet’s temperature—background noise.” But as we know, these are the great stories of our time. How can we bring this background noise forward, so we can actually examine the situation and make decisions? Information Age tackles the problems of work, mediation, self-determination, and reproduction amid the dizzying cultural landscape that makes up millennial life.
Keith Houston’s history of emoji, Face With Tears of Joy, argues that emoji have “become so ubiquitous in our writing, so quotidian, that we should be talking about them in the same breath as grammar or punctuation.” I don’t know about grammar, which seems as fundamental to language, spoken and written, as words themselves. But punctuation? Absolutely. As Houston’s breezy, witty blend of pop culture and tech history ponders exactly what emoji are—symbols? Words? Pictographs? A script? A language?—his assertion that these little images have become an inextricable part of our culture, and even perhaps of our unconscious minds, feels credible, that giant poop emoji by the highway being a case in point.