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January 21st, 2025: Home Again
As I type this I am home and on the road to recovery. The end of 2024 and start of 2025 had been one long sequence of pain and misery without reason. One last Hail Mary round of testing finally led to a diagnosis and an identified cure. Predictably, that solution will be long in…
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Min Kamp Against Knausgård
So Much Longing in So Little Space is a test to see how far a title can carry a book. Do combinations of words get any better than that? This is Karl Ove Knausgård at both his best and his worst. What is refreshing about his writing is how apparently upfront he is about his…
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Han Kang & the Expanding Nobel Net
Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this week. While I’ve not had the pleasure of reading her work just yet, her success is another sign of the expanding horizons of world literature. She is the first Korean Literature laureate, the first female laureate from her nation, the first female laureate from…
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October 5th, 2024: “Brian” by Jeremy Cooper
A novel for the film buffs, the average art enthusiast, and those whose experience with cultural artifacts goes beyond the ephemeral into the all-encompassing. The premise is that of a Northern Irish man, Brian, who leads a solitary life in London, working for a local town council. He is not particularly noteworthy to those around…
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October 1st, 2024: Almost Always Better (Almost Always Worse)
I’ve a combative relationship with math rock. Bips and beeps and zoinks whirling around in an intellectualized insult to the traditional mores of songwriting with an ethos of, “If you can fit it in any time signature, it’ll do,” can be objectively admired without being appealing. That the tunings and guitar tones habitually register up…
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Notes on “Disgrace”
Yesterday, I published my initial take on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, so today’s Daily Note is a review put together this morning. Edited and improved from the rough draft for clarity. Coetzee pulls very few punches here. He isn’t overtly happy or unhappy with the new South Africa of the 90s. It is the tough analysis…
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September 26th, 2024: “Disgrace” by J.M. Coetzee
When was the last time a novel’s conclusion moved you? A parting shot so visceral there is no helping the upsurge of feeling it demands. I was last affected in such a way by John Williams’ Stoner in the late 2010s. Now, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace can take its place on the mantle. It is a…
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September 16th, 2024: Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante has it. In an art form increasingly suffering from contemporary irrelevance, discourse around literature suffers from a form of audience capture that results in an ever-desperate search for new classics to anoint. Truthfully, the count of novels in the post-war period that qualify as distinct and outstanding artifacts that will withstand time’s withering…
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