-
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.
-
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:…
-
“A few days after he had sent the Cuxa postcard, he read her some chapters from the autobiography of Michael Ashman, a minor travel writer who had walked across Europe in the late thirties…” The above passage comes up in the first third of M. John Harrison’s 1992 novel The Course of the Heart. I read it for the first time in 2010 (or so Goodreads tells me) and it left little to no impression on me. After reading a bunch of Harrison’s work for a Literary Hub article, I returned to it and found myself devastated by the book.…
-
Watched Rian Johnson’s latest film on the big screen solo last month, and watched it at my folks’ place this week while visiting. (I’d also watched Knives Out with them on a Jersey visit, so it seemed fitting.) Definitely a film that (for me, anyway) rewarded multiple viewings. And, good lord, Janelle Monáe’s work in the film is just fantastic. Also, the brief reference to a certain late-20th century American novel is one of my favorite visual gags in recent memory.
-
Travel to the end of the interstate highway near the border of Monmouth and Ocean Counties and you’ll find what remains of the town of Okcidenta, founded in 1923 and later abandoned after the mayor and town council were implicated in a horse racing scandal. The town council numbered twenty-six residents in total; the town’s adult population was thirty-one, which spelled doom for its municipal future, and many of the homes were subsequently broken down and used to build a local amusement park. In his acclaimed 1992 memoir Defenestrating Krampus in the Pine Barrens, the infamous big game hunter Herman…
-
I have a “professional” site up elsewhere. In the early days of the pandemic, I thought, What if I had another space somewhere? Somewhere for, shall we say, old-school blogging? And then pandemic-era depression set in and I did nothing else with this space for months. Scratch that, a year. Scratch that, two years. But hey. Better late than never, eh?
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Notes, thoughts, & miscellany 