Here’s a story I used to tell myself: I moved to Los Angeles to get away. From winter, for one thing, and the weight of history. To find a bit of freedom, or maybe distance. For me, now as then, the two amount to pretty much the same. Or better still, space — the space to stretch, the space to fail, the space to carve a passage for myself. In other words, the space to write.
I was wrong about this, as it turns out, but I was also correct. That’s the thing about Los Angeles: Everything we say about it is both true and false. City of sprawl and city of neighborhoods. City of the future and city of the past. This is particularly so when it comes to writing, which has long existed here along the edges — except, of course, when it has not. Film and poetry and fiction. Literature of exile, literature of place.
I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a definition this ambiguous. It’s both helpful (there’s a limit to coherence, and the limit is aesthetic) and unhelpful (enough for what, or whom?). It reminds me of a dictionary entry for “detritus” that I copied down in a notebook: “the pieces that are left when something breaks, falls apart, is destroyed, etc.” That seemed so artfully vague to me, so uncharacteristically casual for a dictionary. It has a quality of distraction, of trailing off, of suggesting you already know what detritus means. Part of me resists the question of what poetry is, or resists the answer — you already know what it means.
But let’s answer it anyway, starting with the obvious: If the words have rhyme and meter, it’s poetry. Nonwords with rhyme and meter, as in “Jabberwocky,” also are poetry. And since words in aggregate have at least some rhyme and rhythm, which lines on the page accentuate, any words composed in lines are poetry. There’s something to be said for the obvious. Virginia Woolf wrote of E.M. Forster: “He says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing one has overlooked.”
When an underwater volcano in the Pacific island nation of Tonga erupted violently in mid-January, it spawned a tsunami that devastated many of its islands and struck far-off shores across the ocean.
But the huge volcanic explosion also generated something that scientists hadn’t seen in more than half a century: a planetary-scale pressure wave, or shockwave, in the atmosphere.
A minute before midnight on 21 July 2021, as passengers staggered sleepily through Manchester airport, I stood wringing my hands in the glow of a vending machine that was seven feet tall, conspicuously branded with the name of its owner – BRODERICK – and positioned like a clever trap between arrivals and the taxi rank. Standard agonies. Sweet or savoury? Liquid or something to munch? I opted for Doritos, keying in a three-digit code and touching my card to the reader so that the packet moved jerkily forwards, propelled by a churning plastic spiral and tipped into the well of the machine. My Doritos landed with a thwap, a sound that always brings relief to the vending enthusiast, because there hasn’t been a mechanical miscue. Judged by the clock, which now read 12am, it was the UK’s first vending-machine sale of the day.
Nine hours later, I was sitting in a spruce office in the Manchester suburb of Wythenshawe, drinking coffee with John “Johnny Brod” Broderick, the man who owned and operated that handsome airport machine. I’d had an idea to try to capture 24 hours in the life of vending machines. These weird, conspicuous objects! With their backs against the wall of everyday existence, they tempt out such a peculiar range of emotions, from relief to frustration, condescension to childish glee. For decades I’d been a steady and unquestioning patron. I figured that by spending some time in the closer company of the machines and their keepers, by immersing myself in their history, by looking to their future, I might get to the bottom of their enduring appeal. What made entrepreneurs from the Victorian age onwards want to hawk their goods in this way? What made generations of us buy? Johnny Brod seemed a good first person to ask.
Reading and books have always enabled Hunt to commune with the dead, connect across boundaries of space and time with other voices, transcend human limitation and loss. “I carry each book I’ve ever read with me, just as I carry my dead — those things that aren’t really there, those things that shape everything I am,” she insists. “In books we can find our ways back to the worlds we thought were lost, the world of childhood, the world of the dead.” “The Unwritten Book” ponders and enacts this art of losing with an intoxicating blend of humor and pathos.
It’s a strange, murky book, this one, which drops you right into its menacing rot from the first line and doesn’t let up for another 211 pages, or rather, when it does let up, it’s only to push you into stranger, murkier, even more menacingly rotten territories. Missouri Williams’ first novel, The Doloriad is a book of worms, incest, decay and extreme violence with interludes of queasy comedy and thwarted transcendence.
Zorin’s book achieves the ultimate expectation set by the biography genre — he creates a consistent representation of Tolstoy’s integral personality.