The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke on Race, Writing, and FriendshipĬannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.

Kenneth Burke on Reading for Identification.

Lost in Translation: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Ray Bradbury on the Seduction of Space in The Rocket Man.

Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read.

Walter Benjamin on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Simone Weil on the Generosity of Attention in Gravity and Grace.

Simone de Beauvoir on The Ethics of Ambiguity and Existential Courage.The Role of Reciprocity in Nature in Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes.Bridge and Door: Georg Simmel on How Separation Inspires Human Connection.Mary Oliver Finds the Antidote to Confusion in Literature.Transforming 1984: The Pursuit of Wisdom and Wonder With How We Read.

Ethics of the Infinite: The Origins of Radical Responsibility in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

Cannery row audio book