In the 1990s I was a lonely, nerdy girl writer. Nobody else I knew was simultaneously obsessed with learning HTML and parsing the sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This meant I spent a lot of time alone, curled in my chair reading—but I spent nearly as many hours clicking and tapping on my mother’s beige, boxy computer, playing computer games. I liked puzzle games, and the bigger the world to explore, the better. In particular, I was a fan of Cyan’s original island-linking puzzler, Myst. For those growing up in the ‘90s, just discovering the engrossing world of first-person computer games, Myst and its sequel, Riven, are a touchstone. The pop culture we absorb and obsess over has a funny way of shaping us when we’re not noticing. I can only see a couple of decades out how Myst and Riven drove my own fixation on negative space in narrative, and showed me how it’s possible to tell a story in an empty room.
And “Memorial” goes beyond the beautiful and painfully melancholy love between Mike and Benson. It is a love story about parents and children, colleagues and friends; it is one of circumstance, grief and forgiveness.
For decades DeLillo has given voice to America's deepest fears about the future, articulating nightmare scenarios of terrorism, financial armageddon and biochemical attack through a series of novels, some remarkable, that both intuit and reflect the fracturing of America's sense of itself. In The Silence he imagines the aftermath: the tumbleweed of civilisation that must surely follow in the wake of the mass communications system collapse that, he argues, we are essentially sleepwalking straight towards.
One might expect a person to feel contented after such triumphs. Not so for Berryman. “You were right abt the Pulitzer, and I was wrong,” he wrote publisher Robert Giroux in June 1965. “It doesn’t matter a straw.” In fact, the award changed the way the literary world regarded Berryman, and brought him heaps of attention. But it did not, and could not, change the man himself. Perhaps some part of him had hoped the acclaim would release him from the cycle of addiction, despair, hospitalization, recovery and subsequent collapse he had fallen into. Berryman expected a great deal of himself, of fame and awards, and of life. Inevitably, he was frequently disappointed.
Students and teachers often regard the syllabus as a dull formality. At the most basic level, it’s like an itinerary, offering a sense of where a class might go from week to week. It’s a checklist, stating what you’ll need, when you’ll need it, and how you’ll be demonstrating that you’ve done the work. Increasingly, syllabi have a contractual feel, with language carefully vetted by a school’s lawyers insuring that classrooms are accessible and free of discrimination. But, as William Germano, a professor of English at Cooper Union, and Kit Nicholls, the director of the Center for Writing at the same institution, argue in “Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything,” serving all these purposes means that few people take the syllabus seriously for what it can be: a story.
Mullan begins with a startling question: “What is so good about Dickens’s novels?” It is worth asking, he continues, because critics tend to discuss Dickens as an entertainer rather than a writer, as though by examining his sentences the magic might wear off. But the closer we look, the better the novels get. The Artful Dickens is both an exposure of the trickster’s methods and a celebration of close reading.
Before I was anything
I was an abstraction, sound waves
moving through glycerin.