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Wyoming is the Cowboy State. The University of Wyoming mascot is Cowboy Joe. The Bucking Horse & Rider is a registered trademark. Rodeo is the state sport. The state is home to a thriving fossil fuel industry. It has always prided itself on its ruggedness, its self-sufficiency, its don’t-give-a-damn attitude. Dick Cheney lives there.
In that moment, with the strings swelling to crescendo in your mind as you read it, as Dee Moray the beautiful (but not too beautiful) American actress steps off the boat and onto the shore, Walter writes how Pasquale, the dreamer, fell in love “Not so much with the woman… but with the moment”.
HBO’s Westworld is rife with literary references that, like the androids populating the titular park, have started to take on a life of their own.
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.
The march toward human obsolescence is relentless, yet the job of the writer is considered relatively safe from the threat of automation. For empathy and creativity are two qualities that it would be difficult to bundle within artificial intelligence. And empathy and creativity are perhaps the two primary calling cards of the writer of fiction.
From the rise in attendance at the Frankfurt Book Fair to the research that names Christopher Marlowe as a co-author of Henry VI, here are last week’s biggest literary headlines.
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.
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