Sam Moore

enjoyably gonzo and shot through with dark humour; does the almost farcical escalation of stakes and double crossing that I got from watching The Big Sleep (maybe noir thrillers and farce are inherently similar?)

Jackson at the center a naive, suffering figure but one who remains fundamentally good in the face of a strange and violent underbelly. Love Himes’ ear for dialogue and the bleak poetry in his more protracted description

Fox is too proscriptive about language for his own good here; that his defence and deconstruction of "pretentiousness" begins with millennia-old etymology and Ancient Greek theatrical traditions while, not making the book impenetrable or anything, does seem to be an act of refusal to approach the word through its actual, contemporary usage. Ironically then, I really agree with his conclusions about why this term -- or a term like it! -- matters: why our artistic reach should exceed our grasp and we should always challenge ourselves and cultivate a curiosity about the world around us. I like the ideal of being culturally omnivorous -- or, as an old uni lecturer used to say, "intellectually promiscuous" -- as a good thing rather than just a byproduct of postmodernism collapsing high/low distinctions.

The postscript of his sort of creative and professional becoming, his relationship to his brothers and parents and how formative they were in generating an organic and curious love of everything from the Velvet Underground to Complicite is where this all really shines, shows why it all matters from that human perspective, that the point is discovery. That's what its for. Its for discovery.

Read if you like: Poetry; verses; drinking the haterade; Claudia Rankine; the fact man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what else is a heaven for; trying, failing, failing again, failing better

***

Been thinking about the idea of failure a lot lately and what comes after it so this ended up being very much up my alley for my current obsession; the idea that the point of poetry is to fail -- perfect poems exist in dreams and divinity but we'll never write them down. Love Lerner's willingness to be combative and surprising, even when he talks to himself. All for anything that challenges narratives of the "universal" through what we might diplomatically call a Very Specific Lens; Lerner goes to bat for things and poets that really pleasantly surprised me. This is a great, lean piece of criticism

(read for work)

Epistolary break-ups will always be my jam; all those ghosts and failures, letters as archive of a past, a self, what might have been. Full of really incisive stuff -- obviously reminded me of things like Kraus and Anne Carson -- that I naturally devoured. Haunted, not just by a lost lover but a lost self, one that for better and for worse, emerged through intimacy with a specific person. All alchemy, magic

Fascinated by this formally; its refusal to really do much of anything with plot, and absolute absence of dialogue or character's as individuals -- they're always a couple, always defined together and always through the prism of other things. Their relationship to objects, geography, night clubs, sex shops, all the patchwork that defines them, becoming ever more rigid, as if their sense of selves might calcify and trap them forever. The way distance -- from a time, a place -- changes the way we see it and constantly try to make things seem better than they are (through our own eyes, and when we're perceived). Morbidly compelling, and really rather good