When John Steinbeck tried to describe his grubby Californian coastal town in the opening to Cannery Row he bumps into the limitation of his own words. ‘How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise – the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream – be set down alive?’ Steinbeck wrote.
His blog categories alone show off this curiosity as they ramble from ‘Austrapolitics’ to ‘New Orleans’ to ‘intellectual property’ to (by far the biggest category) ‘strangely compelling’.
