Love this. Bumblers into heroes arc, beautiful prose, beautifully paced. Set in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War, but laced with Irish jargon and a stripped-down setting of quarries & markets for a sense of timelessness near the “wine-dark” sea. Brutality & art. Preservation of culture. Entertaining the enemy. Funny & sentimental. Crazy premise (stage Medea with actors now prisoners of war) becomes a beautiful mediation on art & freedom. 2024

Light & lovely coming-of-age story, Tomoko lives a year w/ wealthy extended family. Girlhood, crushes, friendship, fantasy. Strong trans. Stephen Snyder 2024
81 “If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved books & rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you‘d say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone.”

^^Miller tells his daughter to work with what you‘ve got, whether that‘s generational wealth or a pretty face. Go spin that reality TV gold!

P188 “You‘re supposed to bear witness, not enjoy it,” says Bernice “It‘s not supposed to be entertainment.”

200 “Tragedy isn‘t capital,” says Gretel. “It doesn‘t buy you anything. It doesn‘t automatically make you a better person. And it certainly doesn‘t make people fall in love with you.”

Exploitation of women‘s trauma stories, cultural obsession with true crime. When does witnessing become gawking? Reality TV, tabloids, social media. Meta in that novel also sensationalizes stories. Fairy tale heroines (Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard‘s wife, Gretel, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin‘s spinner) join a trauma group. Language and characters clip along, addictive reading if sometimes gruesome. Fairytale aspect cartoonish on tough subject? 2022

Anxiety, menace, secrets. Stories with their own unpredictable logic, weird & wonderful. Uneven collection, but wow are the good ones good. Beautiful defamiliarization of ordinary actions. Attempts at connection, mindless work, masculinity, anxious parents, colluding colleagues, surreal conversations, abandoned theme parks. 2024

18 “The three of us were converging into a singularity. And that was impossible – the building couldn‘t sustain it.”

^^ 361 “Let‘s stop here. All truth has vanished.”

365 “Chunhui was about to ask Jumbo something else, but before they could happen, they vanished. Only their voices were left behind in the vast outer space, faint.
Goodbye, little lady.
Goodbye to you too, elephant.”

Playful, sensual, sometimes childlike, sometimes cunning, sometimes cruel.

Talking elephants. Whale-shaped cinema. Coffee. Twins. Daisy fleabane. The Red Brick Queen. Determination, loyalty, cruelty, devotion. A magical-realist saga. One-eyed bee woman. Shamans. Geumbok & Chunhui. Beautiful translation. Love the old-fashioned direct address to reader. 2023

137 “But first, another interesting event awaits us.”

353 “Dear reader, the story continues.”

353 “the lonelier she got, the more perfect her bricks became.”

Emerging from stuckness, Gia calls on dancer & outsider artist Marta Becket in Death Valley. Long-dead Marta appears. Faith, mystery, quest, solitude. Searching & surface, never quite hits a nerve. 2024

9 “This was the kind of woman I thought I would be. Alone and powerful with creation.”

100 “I was surrounded by emptiness, and didn‘t wish to fill it.”

111 “My pursuits had always revolved around representations of life instead of life itself.”

County Donegal, 1994, just before Irish referendum allowing divorce. Women‘s friendships, women pushing against marriages, loving their children extravagantly. Scandal & dread, bits of humor. Irish “Big Little Lies”? 2024

186 “The boy was depressed […] Half the country was depressed, including herself.”

306 “The only thing that seemed to offer her comfort was the lesson she had taken from Colette–that acceptance was not the same as resignation”

^^ 167, the word for the moment before

61 “Well, for a start, being a great reader, he would probably have complained about the fashion beloved by the worst kind of contemporary novelists for inflicting catastrophic and prolonged memory loss on their characters—very likely he would have called it a cheap plot device to complicate an already complicated series of events.” 😂

Language, culture clash, colonization. Companionship. 1840s Scotland. Minister reluctantly takes on evicting the last inhabitant of a Shetland Island. Taut, haunting, quiet. Rushed but satisfying end. 2024

42 “Into her mind a picture came of this vast emptying-out—a long, gray, and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way like a river through the country.”

181 “How was it, she thought, we never see the big things coming?”

Mystery, anxiety, celebrity, adoration, myth, nature, “death of the author.” Translators have arrived & writer is missing. Followers freak w/out a source text. Clever, petty, silly, meta. 2024

5 “We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.”

43 “all we really wanted was the novel. We wanted to possess it, to stake our claim to it, to make it our own before anyone else even knew of its existence.”

Hallucinatory fishing trip in rural Argentina. Male friendship, trauma, guilt, myth, grief, belonging and other, violence. Cinematic imagery: fire, huge stingray, dance dissolved to fighting. Dreams of the Drowner. Sparse, intense translation by Annie McDermott. 2024

47 “It wasn‘t a ray. It was that ray.”

79 “Every morning, since the girls died, he wakes up convinced he‘s going to hear that Siomara‘s set herself on fire. He‘s sure she‘ll do it.”

Grief, life lostness, Gen Z what-the-hell-do-I-do-now? Drinking. Vomiting. Dead skin, self harm. Male Fleabag? Nested stories, sometimes too “look what I found in my writing journal.” Ghost gardener. Quirky, memorable voice. 2024

49 “I put on a T-shirt with an anthropomorphized broccoli on it. The broccoli was wearing sunglasses and doing finger guns and below him it said BRO in big black letters.”

“I had the feeling that I was being watched.”

Cold War nonfiction companion to podcast about 1962 tunnel dug beneath the Berlin Wall, which allowed 29 people to cross from East to West Berlin. US broadcaster NBC filmed a documentary & financed the dig. Spies, students, families split in two, digging under Stasi soldiers‘ feet. Checkpoint Charlie. The leak. 2021

277 “When you talk to people who lived behind the Wall, it‘s these personal betrayals that seem to have caused the deepest hurt.”

Essay collection. “My ideal is the cocktail-party chat: getting across a profound idea in a brisk and amusing way to an interested friend by stripping it down to its essence.” But it just feels awfully breezy and self-satisfied, floating through quantum mechanics, group theory, fractals, statistical regression, eugenics (!) as cocktail chatter. Popular science but too neatly packaged? Fave: Riemann Zeta conjecture and laughter. 2018

No big revelations here, feels patchworky. Capitalism & wage labor. Productivity, time management, task-oriented vs. schedule-oriented work, efficiency, nature, planetary time. Leisure, rest. Fungible time. Divisible time. Time & attention. The self-timers & the timed. Biggest question: is reading this a good use of time? 2023

66 “If you don‘t know what‘s coming down the line, preparing for the future becomes an infinite task.”

Stunted roadtrip. Room 321. July did the mannish manic pixie trick for so long, what happens when pixie chick ages & makes bank? Quirk dims & sours, resentment sets in. Annoying & awesome in equal parts, now hunger has a wistful, bitter tinge. Motherhood & selfhood. 2024

P47 “She was doing that thing that women do; begging for what you want by not asking for it.”

P173 “So much of what I had thought of as femininity was really just youth.”

Anthology. Not so much nature in these nature poems, but maybe that‘s the point. Faves: Patricia Smith‘s “To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower,” Hanif Abdurraqib‘s “There Are More Ways to Show Devotion” spider rebuilding, Jericho Brown‘s “Aerial View” giraffe. 2024

P 20 Diane Seuss
There is something in suburban rabbits /
that has evolved toward wickedness

P29 José Olivarez
i say to myself when the what wheres all up in the how now – trees!

Pulpy, funny, bawdy, thick w/ machismo, but a feminist core. After witnessing a brutal rape at gunpoint, Indonesian teen Ajo becomes impotent, hardening him against ubiquitous violence against women, feeding his desire to fight men. Rabelais in Jakarta. Scene flash-forwards and back. Cartoon violence w/ 💜. Semi-truck lane battle thrill. Punchy trans. Annie Tucker 2017

29 “one thing was clear: chili peppers would not make your d*ck stand up.”

Yikes. Dread-filled slide into autocratic regime in Ireland. Language often overripe, nature metaphors heavy. What to tell the children when norms are upended? Even Winston & Julia got a picnic break, but not the Stacks. Worse to worser. Booker prize winner. 2023

40 “the man has been trained for the rules of the game but the game has been changed so what now is the man?”

103 “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave”

“Women‘s work,” domesticity, FOOD, gourmands, self-care and self-deprivation. Winding set-up, translation feels clunky. Japanese culture. Friendship, community, seeking help. Satiation and soothing. 2024

171 “Refusing to look after yourself because there‘s nobody around to care about you is a form of violence towards somebody.”

179 “A gourmand was ultimately a seeker of the truth.”

187 “Humans just need rice, don‘t they? Basically.”

Pain & trembling, killers & sieves. Ragged sketches of stories that survive on energy alone. Underdeveloped. Trans. 2023 by Sarah Moses.

91 “People are capable of anything to dissipate the monotony of their lives.”

103 “She had the eyes of a filthy, infertile, solitary cat.”

113 “A circle. This is what Adah wants to be. She‘s not interested in holding abstract ideas in her head. She wants to be a circle.”

Collection from 2001-21. Feels like the best of what poetry can be: personal memories & the everyday mixing with the mythical, the historical, the mystic. Truly “mojo songs” with their own distinct music. Evocative, attentive & unafraid. I feel like I‘ve been someplace. Pulitzer indeed. 2021

24 He believes to harmonize is
to reach, to ascend, to query
ego & hold a note

119 Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep again? Come closer.

Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. More lyric essays than poems. Writing on mothering and justice, on love facing violence. Heritage & identity. Sometimes felt too prosey, direct, not enough space for language to weave magic. 2019

37 “By raising a boy, do I understand what it means to live as a black boy? How do I speak of his existence without appropriating his existence? I return to the language of mothers.”

Fast-paced, direct, breezy humor in Beijing. Dust storms, police crackdowns, pirated DVDs, migration, urban survival, economic inequality, desperation, entrepreneurialism, living by your wits. “Making it.” Wild final scene. Great trans. Eric Abrahamsen. 2014

43 “Ha, people were all too vain to withstand love.”

6 “ the sun was dropping steadily in the sandpaper sky […] looking more and more like a giant millstone weighing on Beijing‘s shoulders.”

^^p55 names, writing, MEANING narratives of enslaved people

21 “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don‘t disappoint them”

23 “ ‘February, translate that.‘
‘Da mo‘ betta dey feels, da mo‘ safer we be.‘ “

126 “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.”

Reminder of the breezy likability of this oddball pair. Story told from Jim‘s perspective offers more palpable violence & fear than adventure. Everett offers a reason for Jim‘s attachment to Huck that is maybe unnecessary. Can‘t they bond out of mutual need & care? Or is that a white luxury? Everett plots do stop abruptly. A few more callbacks? Code switching, fear, self-preservation, performance of self, love. Reading & writing & witnessing. 2024

Rushdie reflecting on the knife attack that came 30 years after the fatwa ordering Muslims to kill him. Felt heavy on medical info & self-regard, light on insight, but maybe insights hard to glean from violent acts both horrific & mundane? Sprinkled w/ literary references. Imagined convos with assailant felt therapeutic but off. 2024

P13 “Why didn‘t I act?”
P13 “The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.”

Intergenerational loneliness and shame. The surface telling, and the deeper history. Guilt. Truth. Family. Denial. Migrant challenges. Tabloid journalism. Processing trauma. Beautiful sentences. When sensationalized stories become ordinary, but no less painful. 2024

P43 “the only surefire way to reduce a problem‘s importance was to replace it with a new and more urgent problem.”

P113 “Do you know how rare it is to start over?”

Muderbot plots are so good because as security personnel, MB is always assessing risk, predicting threats & prompting anticipation & anxiety. You turn pages to see what MB got wrong, and how he/she/it heroically adapts. “Competence porn.” But this mission felt too boring for too long. Still great sardonic quotes: P84 “we proceeded down the stupid tunnel, into the stupid danger.” 🤣 2023

P193 “I would be panicking more, but I didn‘t have time.”

Trading freedom for peace & well-being. Echoes of Huxley & Zamyatin. Politely overprotective society organized to prevent anxiety, conflict & exclusion. Impulse=taboo, selfhood repressed. Breaking conformism. Beautiful graphic play with text as The Sensor picks up dangerous words & colorizes them in The Graph. Guitarist Agustín Barrios. “The tuning fork is in your heart.” 2017

P9 “Push it away, Mira A. This moment. This feeling. The frustration.”

Feels like characters in service of research, checking off a list of experiences during and after the Vietnam War and having Frankie and her friends experience them all. Having just read a biography with first-hand accounts of the front lines, this definitely feels researched and at a distance. Still, Frankie‘s persistence pulled me forward and yes to more writing on women's experience at war. Julia Whelan really is a great audio narrator. 2023

^quivering epicenter

P55 “cupping our hands to the sides of our faces to block out the two lesser works”

P50 “I saw the end of the world, the barbed edge of nothingness, and it was not something to fear, but to relish.”

P53 “I see myself and all humanity in the eyes of the holy donkey”

P58 “One must paint, he said, believing the Antichrist is traipsing through the next village.”

P129 “Who knows the inner workings of your soul better than I?”

^^critic‘s mind vs. heart. Linking Schmidt & Beckenbauer.

P26 “because of mediocrity‘s unrivaled capacity for annihilating beauty, it will always be victorious.”

P20 “Schmidt said he well understood why Caravaggio would appeal to someone like me, an incurious American toddler nursed on the teats of an illiterate culture.”

P115 “even though he called the United States an ‘exercise in the ludicrous‘ or ‘an obese infant with a head injury‘” 🤣

What is art criticism? Academic frenemies “chat about chaos, agony, and the end of the world.” A bit of Bolaño, satirizing academics, + Beckett, exhausting language. Repetition & variation. Style reinforces narrator‘s obsessiveness & makes you question his reliability. Same info over & over to show his limited focus? Outlandish subject of study: 16th century sex-addicted, syphilitic pig farmer painter. But someone must be the expert. 2022

Saving the universe from star eaters. “Memory gap / flashbacks / amnesia drugs” chronology flipping is cheesy, but allows Grace interaction outside of isolation. Lotsa space chemistry. I resisted Rocky, but found fondness. Would watch Rocky sleep. My new mantra: “I may not have all the answers, but I‘m here.” 2021

P390 “I‘m not the right guy for this job. I‘m a last-second replacement because the actually qualified people blew up. But I‘m here.”

I tried. I bailed. 2023

Hubkaphone!

P243 “It‘s all about the combination of players. […] Count Basie without Freddie Green, without Lester Young? The Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock: there were key people in that orchestra who made that sound. […] People forget that sometimes and only look at the leader‘s name on the date. But the musicians are the ones who realize the blueprint. And it‘s the ability to open up a blueprint that brings a work to life.”

Vietnam: P153 “One of the main ways that war transforms you has to do with your sense of hearing. […] It‘s like I grew a set of antennae over there. When I returned, my reception equipment was different. And even if the war messed up my head in a million other ways at the same time—and even if I didn‘t ask for any of it—I‘d have to admit that that heightened sensitivity became one of the main things that shaped me into the composer I‘ve become.”

Love this. Already a Threadgill superfan, but this cements it. A new fave music bio. Explains his background & influences, while insisting nothing can be explained. Extended musings on performance and composition. Big ideas & sly humor. Vietnam. Goa. Englewood. The East Village. Hubkaphone! Houseboat rehearsals. Collaboration. My jazz heroes tying knots on the motor home in a panhandle tornado. Gorgeous sentences—kudos to Brent Hayes Edwards. 2023

Family, siblings, deathdrive, dreams. Shifting 1st person POV centered on orphaned Iranian-American poet Cyrus Shams. Obsession with martyrdom and “a death that matters” masking a search for meaning and “goodness.” Open and heartfelt. Saw the twist coming, but it still did its work. 2024

10 “Cyrus didn‘t write so much as he drank about writing”

114 “It‘s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury”

7 “Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity.”

25 “You become numb when you swallow too much sadness at once. The reason it feels like no boundaries have been crossed is because the concept of boundaries has been obliterated.”

175 The locket: “I‘d turned him into jewelry and jewelry into him.”

185 “How do I keep you buried and keep you with me at the same time?”

^^human need for intention and causality—what did I do to get burgled?

A book of ??s seeking impossible answers:

46 the dreaded “Did you know?”

53 “Do you have to forgive a person who dies by suicide?”

60 “You do realize we‘re all going to get old and die without you?”

61 “How could you have left the dogs?”

64 “How will he know you loved him unless you try to destroy yourself?”

68 “Can we ever get back what‘s lost?”

115 “Were we snobs?”

Blow-by-blow of 2 losses in close proximity: family heirlooms, beloved Russell. Question-filled, loving look at impossible topic: making sense of the suicide of a friend. Musings, not-knowings, wounds. Some of Crosley‘s work crosses into too-cleverness for me & this one gets gossipy. But it works. The suddenness & enormity of the losses, her vulnerability & guttedness, make all the clever & trite bits a desperate attempt at self-protection. 2024

“There There” prequel & sequel. Shifting 1st per POVs (one 2nd person). Addiction & recovery. Bullet as star. Early characters feel in service to research—little dialogue or interiority. Missing the urgency of “There There.” But lovely bits. 2024

P114 “You are from a people who survived by making their surviving mean more than surviving.”

P135 “He was still trying to figure out what was pain & what was relief, what were dreams & what were drugs”

THICK WITH LANGUAGE. Rich fare, had to read in dips. Fluid flashbacks, analysis, intensity. Characters talking and KNOWING, observant & well aware. Skin & sexuality, bias & prejudice. Sensual & snarky. Anger and passion crowding out affection, friend circle running towards each other and away, making mess and melodrama. NYC. 1961

P 199 “The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world.”

Sly, lots of digs at both commercial & academic publishing, inventive dialogue between artists (Joyce & Wilde, Rauschenberg & de Kooning). What is radical art? What is new narrative territory? What is a Black story? 2001

P155 “epiphanies are like spicy foods: coming back, coming back.”

P2 “I told him that I was living a black life, far blacker than he could ever know, that I had lived one, that I would be living one.”

Love spending time with these families. Fave reread: slim book thick with language & emotion, throwing shade & spreading tenderness. Arbitrary, wrongful incarceration. Gorgeousness & pain. Frank‘s end still feels abrupt & off, but offers up the families‘ despair while giving the lovers another day. 1974

143 “When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has something of a sacramental air.”

^p78 twisting language to preserve white character‘s agency & perspective in “To Have and Have Not.” Wesley can‘t even yell “Fish!”—Harry has to “saw he had seen” the fish.
“A better, certainly more graceful choice would have been to have the black man cry out at the sighting.” Observations, small details.

P30 “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”