letter from brooklyn: difficult beauty
yapping abt various cultural offerings, meditation on being thirtysomething, notes on baskets
Hi hi hello,
How is it late September already? We don’t approve.
I decided that one of the things that would be useful to me at this precise moment of living/writing would be to go out and do things: watch, dance, listen, read, get my hands something other than clean. Here we are in the process of weaving a basket.
Here are a couple of recommendations for you, should you want them.
If you live in the NYC area and have the means to, go see Counting and Cracking, a masterful, wildly entertaining, sometimes shattering Tamil-Australian play. A gripping nineteenth-century novel brought to NYU-Skirball’s floorboards fr. From an email I sent to various friends a week ago (so far have heard from eight of them who’ve seen it since, and they all raved about it.)
There are only six shows left before it ends its run on 9/22. Run, don’t walk. You can use the code CC24 for a discount.
I reread Housekeeping and Marilynne Robinson is really that girl. The first time I read it I chafed a bit at the slow, magisterial prose and pacing. This time around I wanted to throw the book across the room in sheer admiration. Robinson asks that you put a little work in, and your effort and attention are so rewarded.
Reading Emily Witt’s Health And Safety right now and delighting in its acrobatic powers of observation, its coiling and artful renderings of using drugs, and its merciless + trenchant + sometimes elegiac treatment of New York in the mid-tens.
Predictably, self-parodically I loved Kristin Ross’ The Commune Form; I wished I had its language and historicizing to draw from when I was organizing in the early days of Bed-Stuy Strong; what I will say is that it is lightly academic and at the meeting point between history and theory, and if that sounds like your speed, you should check it out.
I was retrospectively noting down, having briefly fallen off the documentation horse, the films and books I’ve taken in this summer. I was reminded that Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person was one of my favorite watches of the last couple of months. Sweet, dark, captivating, an easy and charm-filled time. It’s out of theaters now, and a fairly easy rental.
Speaking of recent watches…here is why I can never be A Critic
Finally, if you’d like to come see me read and also be in conversation with a few great writers, details (and feet pic) here. (I need to update my website so bad….) An especial plug for this 9/30 event I’m doing at Books Are Magic with the legend Dionne Brand for her new nonfiction book Salvage: Readings From The Wreck. ICYMI, I wrote about her collected poems, Nomenclature, here.
One final plug: profiled Garth Greenwell and his new book for NYMag, if you want to give it a look.
Watch Sweet Refuge, this lovely short film from Maryam Mir
My friends are DJing at Drom 9/27 and you should go.
Okay what else?? I had a funny experience a couple weeks ago at an EP release party for the band Fcukers.
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