Books I’ve Enjoyed In the Last Three Months But Foolishly Didn’t Bring With Me to Write About So More On These Later
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
- Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
- Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

Songs.

Songs.

I don't know how to start this shit, Nasir Jones voice. I hope everyone got a chance to read Claire Dederer's What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?, which was included in last week's Good Word. It's a wonderful exploration of how to reconcile enthusiasm for a work in a vacuum with the unavoidable monstrosity of its creator, and more broadly a re-assurance of the primacy of one's personal, private feelings over canonical or correct tastes.

A word on what went into this: I have this thing that I do (as a prank) where every time I travel I completely forget my digital camera’s memory card and have to scramble to either buy another or get a couple of disposable cameras. This hasn’t been a problem before, not least because it last happened in Ireland, where they speak a language almost like English. Not so in Mexico.

DJ Screw’s music goes well with drugs - I believe this has been well-established - but the underappreciated reason for this is that DJ Screw’s music goes well with everything. I vividly remember my first encounter with it: my first year in college, fresh off an early exit from whatever that insanely bad Intro to Business course was, I found myself in dire need of a restroom. Naturally, I was wearing headphones; while wandering the halls, I absentmindedly threw on DJ Screw’s Vol.

1.

Las Vegas is an endlessly interesting place that I’m very eager to leave. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I’m here for a conference on something called Sitecore, although three days have gone by and I remain pretty in the dark on what that is. Not literally, of course - I’m not sure that there’s a square inch of this city that isn’t neon-lit around the clock.

There are actually two points that I want to make here, both revolving around Atrocity Exhibition. Rather than breaking them out into distinct, formalized pieces, I’ve combined them for a couple reasons: primarily that this style of writing is atrociously exposition-heavy and it would be pretty boring to re-tread the contextual stuff, and secondarily that I just don’t like the album enough to spend two weeks writing on it.

Memphis rap is my only truly seasonal musical interest. There are the obvious Halloween tie-ins, but it’s more than that - the music is bleak, cold, and nihilistic, balancing the difficulty of a dire situation with the certainty that it will only get worse. It’s music for when you first notice the days getting shorter, for when winter is imminent and suddenly it’s a little hard to remember summer.