No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
“I mean, we’re not that close now, but he’s the guy who will take me to the hospital at the end of my life when I’m dying. I married him for that. For the end. And, of course, for the children. He’ll be the one to take me when I need chemo.”
“Do you have cancer?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said.
In truth, I couldn’t argue that everything here wasn’t a little different.
I should have been smart enough to realize something most peculiar was up if I had noticed that the title page of Joy Williams short story in the Sept 30th New Yorker was all in small caps, both title and author’s name. That can be taken as a signal of formal innovation, an expectation that is most often disappointed, only not in this case.
When we try to conceptualize complex cultural movements the sometime clumsiness of language can from the start distort what we are saying and lead us down a dark noir alley of error.
Now his sister comes back to the car. She has been in the cheese shop by herself buying cheese while they wait outside in the car. She loves cheese. Sometimes she says she will run away and join a cheese cult, but that’s just a joke. She is ten and knows almost everything.
The American Beat writers circled back into fashion in the UK during the late 1980s / early 1990s. Their resurgence coincided with a spike in the counterculture that was perhaps a reaction to the grind of over a decade of conservative leadership and Thatcher-ism.