Readings for September 24, 2023

I’m trying something new this week: I’m throwing links into a draft of this newsletter as I read them, preserving their freshness for your and me both. Let’s find out how it works together.

First up: the Ignobel Awards! If you’re not familiar with this ceremony, which has run for more than three decades despite every year being declared the “first annual” awards, this year is as good as any to learn. The ceremony itself is a lot of of fun; the NPR show Science Friday usually has a broadcast, so you can surely find it to listen if you like. This year’s awardees include a toilet that recognizes users via an “analprint,” counting the nose hairs of corpses, and reanimated dead spiders, which is a literal nightmare for my arachnophobic friend Jason.

I am new to the Percival Everett bandwagon, but it looks like a lot of people are finding their way onto this wagon. There’s a new movie called American Fiction based on his novel Erasure, and it’s all about the publishing world. Literary Hub has a short essay by Kathleen Newman-Bremang followed by her insightful interview with the director, Cord Jefferson. It’s not a comfortable movie, but it does star Jeffrey Wright, who can do pretty much anything. It’s a movie intended to prod audiences toward thought and conversation rather than toward offense or outrage, and I am eager to see it. I mean, here is Jefferson stating his intention, which I admire:

I want people to know I don’t know my own opinion about some of the conversations in the film because I think that these are complex conversations. Society, in general, needs to get better at understanding that some things don’t have right answers. That complexity and nuance, especially in America, is difficult. People have difficulty with the idea that there is no right answer to this sometimes.

You, dear reader, probably know that my tiny press has two books coming out in the next six months (an expanded edition of Beat the Boss and the first volume of Memoirs of a French Courtesan). I have the other three volumes on the schedule, plus two more Gunn Flagely novels and a trilogy of historical novellas to write. I’d also like to create an audio version of this Substack for those who prefer listening to reading. And I’d like to keep freelance editing. And have I mentioned the master’s degree I’m working on? Not in the last five minutes, it seems. All of this is to say that this interview with Kelsey McKinney, who transitioned from freelancing to owning a media company, is very inspiring to me.

This is maybe my favorite kind of literary writing: threading authors and artists and history and the present together. The National Portrait Gallery in London acquired an important portrait of Omai, a Polynesian man who visited Britain in the 1770s. The poet William Cowper wrote a description of Omai based on newspaper reports, and the author Jane Austin not only loved Cowper’s work in general but “cherished” this poetic description. This essay by Jane Darcy in the TLS delves into the idea of home and exile in the lives and work of these three figures.

Let’s end with a poem about a sculpture, which means it might qualify as one of my favorite words: ekphrasis, writing in a focused, descriptive way about a particular piece of art. Ilya Kaminksy has written a poem about Giacometti’s sculpture Walking Man II. Even if you think you don’t like poetry, this one is accessible and comprehensible and meaningful. Click through for lines like this:

Perhaps you too have an enormous, impolite need to drink with the long-legged statue, but no
beverages are allowed in the gallery & even Giacometti’s
“Walking Man” is afraid of the guard & wishes
him bird droppings in his hair.

l’Homme qui marche II, Alberto Giacometti, 1960