Hello, readers.
How are you?
That’s wonderful.
Or not.
Or not so much not as that’s life and things often exist in a place of wonderful-notness, or not-wonderfulness, that most people compress quite neatly into the word ‘fine.’
Which is, as words go, a fine one.
Anyway.
Here are things.
Thing one.
I’ve just finished Another Country by James Baldwin and the world smells, and sounds, like a violent and tender rain falling between two men on an apartment bed, drinking, smoking, and wondering about how any damn body manages the trick of loving and being loved in a world that denies so much of itself.
Thing two.
This week on Storyological, we chatted with Adam Ehrlich Sachs about his book, Inherited Disorders, and about many other things. Such as, for example:
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Cats
- The Simpsons
- Monty Python
- Gertrude Stein
- Fathers
- Shadows
- Flying contraptions
- Thomas Bernhard
- Derek Parfit
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- & the poignancy of precision.
The Rumpus described his book as “endlessly sharp and engaging.”
I describe it as a hilarious and heartbreaking and cut through with the best sort of nonsense.
Which is to say the logical sort.
You can listen to the interview here.
Or you can read an illustrated, and footnoted, version here.
Thing three.
Another thing is that after visiting the Tate Modern Exhibition, The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, I am thinking a lot about photographs. In the gift shop, there were books by Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Geoff Dyer about the nature of photography and I have been devouring them with great intellectual zeal.
I’m not sure I would have ever thought of myself as the sort of person who said things like ‘intellectual zeal.’
But, there you go.
These things happen.
We surprise ourselves if we’re lucky.
Thing four.
On Being is one of my favorite podcasts.
This interview with John O’Donohue, in an episode titled, “The Inner Landscape of Beauty,” is one of my favorite episodes.
If you find yourself facing the end of the world, this is a good one for to listen.
I mean. So long as it’s not the actual end of the world. In which case. I don’t know. Maybe talk to someone. Talking helps.
Happy Thursday, readers.
ttfn.
the magnelephant review 