Quentin's Weeknotes 7/29/18-8/4/18
This week
I’ve been slowly working my way through The Weird: A compendium of strange and dark stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (himself famous as the author of Annihilation, the basis of the recent bizarre movie. ) The book is a historical anthology of weird fiction, including the usual suspects like Lovecraft, Blackwood, Leiber, and M.R. James. However, the Vandermeer’s included stories from much more literary figures like Kafka, Saki, Borges, Chabon, and Joyce Carol Oates. There are also some pieces by non-western authors from Asia and Africa which make for delightful discoveries. The only problem (if you can call it that) is that it’s huge–over 1100 double-columned pages, and is a large format tome (7" x 9"), so it’s a little unwieldy to read casually. Robert Aickman’s “The Hospice” was a particularly creepy revelation, but realistically, there hasn’t been a bad tale in the bunch.
I’ve been making my way through a lengthy back-log of episodes of The Best Show w/ Tom Scharpling. It’s a long-running (since 2000!) radio show turned podcast that combines live call-ins, music, bizarro comedy and misanthropy. I was delighted and surprise to be listening to an episode from early July only to hear the voice of my old friend Ryan H. Walsh discussing his new book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. (Ryan and I met in a frankly surreal creative writing class at Boston University). The book (which I’ve only had time to skim so far) uses Van Morrison’s time in Boston while he was writing his legendary masterpiece Astral Weeks as a starting point for undertaking a psychogeography of 60s-era Boston and is full of bonkers tales of cults, counter-cultural media, and organized crime. Kudos to Ryan for writing such an interesting book, and for making it onto the Best Show!- I listened to an episode of Chris Hayes' podcast Why is This Happening? in which he talks with documentary filmmaker Giorgio Angelini about the history of housing in the US, since WWII. Angelini has been working on a documentary entitled “Owned: A tale of Two Americas” that charts the cultural, racial, and economic contradictions of American housing since the modern, government-sponsered equity version was set up in the 1940s. As with a lot of complicated subjects, there was a lot to unpack, but one of the things that stuck with me is a quote from William Levitt, creator of Levittown, which is basically the model of our contemporary suburban built environment. Levitt famously said “No man who owns his own home and lot can be a Communist, he has too much to do.”
- I read a new essay by Laurie Penny in The Baffler about the new iteration of Queer Eye on Netflix. Man, can Penny write! She’s managed to get me, a White, cis-het male, interested watching Queer Eye, despite my historical disinterest in fashion and my (not-entirely unjustified) suspicion of the fetishism of consumer-based personal self-improvement. Though critical of the show’s commercialism, performative homosexuality as a palliative to masculinity, and over-emphasis on
the need of people with vastly different access to social and economic power finding common ground, Penny’s enthusiasm for the show as a hopeful vision of the future comes shining through. As she says, Queer Eye is “not about queerness at all. It’s actually about the disaster of heterosexuality—and what, if anything, can be salvaged from its ruins." UPDATE: My wife and I finally started watching the series, and we’re really captivated by its charm and genuine humanity. - I finished reading Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch. It’s a wonderous and strange novel about a teenage Nigerian (Igbo) girl who discovers that she is part of a community of magic users called Leopard People, and follows her as she enters their world. I loved Okorafor’s Binti books, and this one continues her brilliant drawing on West African folklore and culture to build an imaginative and engaging fantasy novel.
- I grabbed a cheap copy of the 2015 S/T album by the post-punk psych group Preoccupations (formerly Viet Cong). So far, Continental Shelf is my jam (NSFW).
