Orwellian. The word has become a catch-all describing an invisible yet ubiquitous bureaucracy whose tentacles influence every corner of citizens’ lives. Conservatives and liberals use the term with disgust. Would that it meant something else, if only because it identifies the author with his best-known—if not best—work, 1984, while ignoring the rest of his contributions to English letters.
Today, my first book launches. It’s kind of a wonderful word, launch: such propulsive force in its sound. Such muscular, fearless leaping. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d take a look at launchings of various kinds in literature. Not gradual beginnings, not slow evolutions into different forms, but sudden catapults into the new.
In a 2001 Penguin introduction to the novel, Colm Tóibín writes: “In Another Country, Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century.” Baldwin’s novel is rife with symbols of life in the USA: jazz, cocktails, the movies, and the idea of “making it.” It’s a story of searching and striving for a better life, more fulfilling work, and purer relationships.
The internet is a compost heap full of old websites and technology and expired pop culture leftovers. Every once in a while, some enterprising artist grabs his or her pitchfork and turns the heap to reach the richest, oldest, most decomposed material. That fertilizes new growth. Vaporwave, a new musical genre, is a good example.
I was at a lecture recently about The Iliad—that beloved epic gorefest—when the scholar discussing the text referred to its author as “DJ Homer.” It wasn’t so much that Homer composed the text of The Iliad, he said. It was more that he remixed old stories that had been circulating for hundreds of years and…
“Black Philosophy #3,” Dodd’s new poem from the first issue of The Shade Journal, poses a series of “if…then…” questioning statements regarding blackness, black boys, death, dead boys, living boys, pretty boys, prettiness, and a manner of interrelating, interlocking, and uncompromising conditions between those terms.
Three Day Road, a historical fiction story about two Cree Natives, Xavier and Elijah, who volunteer to enter WWI fighting for Canada is tough to put down. Part Métis, Boyden lets us inside the world of the First Nations people enough to see how well their skills as hunters served them (and the Allied forces) well.
A girl who saves the world: isn’t this key to what draws us in droves to post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and otherwise speculative fictions? That they’re often only accounts of ruin on the surface; beyond that, and in the vein of what makes them utterly necessary, they’re stories of survival and heroism that arguably aren’t told otherwise.
For days, while I revised my translation, I looked for the right words to tell the protagonist’s mother that he’s terminally ill. Even though the protagonist’s life is nothing like my own, I couldn’t help but climb inside his skin and walk around in it.
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