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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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July 4th, 2024: Simone Weil’s “L’Enracinement” (The Need for Roots)
The below is a slapdash review I put together immediately after finishing “The Need for Roots”. Mysticism plus French exceptionalism plus spiritual socialism plus the battle between good and evil. It has it all. Another in the wide canon of 20th Century works trying to diagnose and resolve that which ails modern society – with…
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June 10th, 2024: Édouard Louis’s “Changer: méthode”
The duality of mankind: We need ambition to advance towards an evermore ideal society and we loathe the ambitious if they appear above their station. Though I suppose there can be qualifiers for the ambitions we hate and the ones we endorse. If your ambition is to find a cure for cancer or reduce our…
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June 1st, 2024: Beauty, Photography, Humanity
The other day I began reading a book titled On Beauty & Being Just by Elaine Scarry. It is a small thing, 140 pages or so; a written version of a lecture Scarry gave in the late 90s. The purpose towards which Scarry worked was the redemption of beauty. To bring beauty back to the…
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May 20th, 2024: It’s Good To Be Here
About 10 minutes in to a run this morning, I came to a pause at a stoplight. The jog wasn’t meant to be, nor was it, anything special, really. 45 minutes at a light pace to get a sweat. As I waited for the light to turn, though, a surge of joy hit me like…
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March 12th, 2024: Javier Marías’s “Berta Isla”
The first time you read a novel by Javier Marías, it is easy to succumb to the invitations of his imagination. Enmeshing the ordinary (a translator, a teacher at a university, a ghostwriter) with the absurd (the uncovering of a murderous past, the marriage to a spy, the sudden death of a first date in…
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