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Drove out to Montclair last night to watch the New York Red Bulls take on DC United in the US Open Cup. It was my first live RBNY match of the year, due to both scheduling issues and protesting the team’s handling of an incident of on-field racism and the deeper issues it suggested. While I have mixed feelings on Open Cup games happening at secondary locations (i.e. MSU Soccer Park, where the third-division NY Red Bulls II play), I was curious what the team looked like under new coach Troy Lesesne. Answer: they looked pretty good! A 1-0 win…
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I have a couple of events coming up in the next two months, about which you can find some details here. I’m genuinely unsure of what I’ll be reading at them — probably something from Ex-Members in Middletown, but possibly something new (or vaguely new) at the Manhattan and/or Queens readings. We’ll see.
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I’ve been to see live music twice in the last week. (Claire Rousay and FUJI||||||||||TA tonight at National Sawdust; Powers/Rolin Duo at Union Pool last Friday.) I ran into my friend Kevin at the latter, at which point we racked our brains trying to figure out the last time we’d seen one another. Turns out the last time in question was a Mick Trouble show at Alphaville shortly before the pandemic; it was one of a handful of shows I saw before everything locked down. (Garcia Peoples at Wonder Bar was the other.) Since things re-opened, I think the number…
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Currently in Seattle, a trip which not coincidentally coincides with this year’s AWP. It’s my first time out here since 2019, and brings to an end the longest stretch I’ve gone without a trip to Washington or Oregon in ages. All of which is to say, it’s nice to be back out here for a few days. I would share more thoughts in this vein but I’m still somewhat on NYC time, and am rapidly losing coherence.
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Ages ago I picked Gene Wolfe’s Free Live Free for a book group I was in at the time and then utterly failed to read the book when it came time for the discussion of it. Head, meet desk. I’m not sure if the book group still exists or if I accidentally killed it with this choice; either way, I feel a little mortified about it. Anyway, I finally read the copy of Free Live Free I’d picked up at the time. It was my second time reading it; I’d read a mass market edition at some point in high…
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I’m very happy to have new writing in the New York Times Book Review – specifically, a look at three books set in New York City. That includes novels by Matthew Salesses and Dan Kois and a memoir by Patrick Bringley. Spoiler: I enjoyed and was impressed by all three. I have a pair of interviews up at InsideHook as well. I talked with Jamie Kreiner about her book The Wandering Mind, which looks at medieval monks’ practice of concentration; I also conversed with Princeton’s Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer about Myth America, a new anthology that they edited about…
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I’ve known Ned Raggett through music writing circles for many years now, and I’ve found his Patreon to be an invaluable source for new music recommendations. Today was (and still is, for the next few hours) a Bandcamp Friday, and one of Ned’s recommendations was the Irish group Lankum. They have a new album up for pre-order now, and the version of the traditional number “Go Dig My Grave” was enough to get me to hit the pre-order button several times over. There’s an interesting blend of musical delicacy and doomy drone in there; I’m tempted to cite Swans as…
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This week I made my way to Frenchtown, NJ to teach a class at Frenchtown Bookshop. I’m eternally grateful to the store’s owner and the attendees for being understanding when I hit some apocalyptic traffic between Brooklyn and Frenchtown, and I had a fine time once I arrived. Frenchtown Bookshop also has a penchant for shelving short books in different publishing series together, which warms my heart. I picked up a few books in the ekphrasis series, and I’m excited to sit down with them in the coming weeks.
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Got to chat with the esteemed Jasmine Dreame Wagner for BOMB! I think it’s safe to say that we went down some fairly deep 90s-NYC wormholes over the course of the conversation. Shows I can definitely remember seeing at Coney Island High include Superdrag when they were touring for Regretfully Yours, what I believe was a Screeching Weasel/Mr. T Experience show on Halloween 1999, and a Rentals show—which has led to me going down rabbit holes online to see if the show took place during Maya Rudolph’s time in the band.
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As I write this, there’s all of one day left in the year. And, as of a few hours ago, the last year-end piece I contributed to was published. So consider this a kind of omnibus of all four of them… At InsideHook…I wrote about ten books that had especially impressed me over the course of the year. Five works of nonfiction, five works of fiction.RIYL: keeping your literary bases covered. At Words Without Borders…I wrote about a translated book from 2022 that I found particularly compelling, and looked ahead to an anticipated title in translation due out in 2023.RIYL:…
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Notes, thoughts, & miscellany 