I am drawn to music with lyrics in languages I don’t understand, which allows me to hear, unmediated by meaning, the emotional synthesis and counterpoint of sound. Two of my favorites are Trio Mediaeval from Norway, and Mariza from Portugal. Isn’t our work as writers similar? We choose our words, not just for meaning, but for what their sounds make us feel.
Every Cripple a Superhero by Christoph Keller is a great example of a hybrid memoir. There are photos, poems, flash prose, cultural criticism, and a Kafka-esque surrealist short story interspersed throughout the book. An earlier and slightly different version of the manuscript was first published in German in 2020.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I moved to Kelowna three years ago. I was coming from the rainforest. The Okanagan landscape seemed parched and barren. I was suspicious of the constant sunshine. I mourned the loss of my velvet forests full of ancient red cedars and Douglas firs, and set about trying to find a way to love this new land.
Anjimile’s Giver Taker would do well to be filed under: a sovereign sibling to tUnE-yArDs and Sufjan; songs that make you feel possible; songs that make queerness feel possible; what I wish I had at-hand when I was coming out; the embodied voice of a late August day when the space between ending and beginning is dead-leaf-thin; for fans of a heart-breaking track one and a foot-shuffling track two; an ode and a promise, in track four’s 1978, to a lover, a god, or oneself; an album closer that gently lifts away
Lost in Translation (film by Sofia Coppola) and Interior Chinatown (novel by Charles Yu) by Francis Chang
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle posits that it is impossible to know the exact location or nature of a particle at any particular moment because the act of observation itself causes a slight shift in position of the observed subject. The resulting alteration in trajectory from the present moment will magnify over time, until the next act of observation and reflection.
As someone in the thicket of middle age, I wonder how much my recollections of the past shift my understanding of the world. Even in this later stage of life, I still obsess over the questions “who am I” and “what is my place in this world”? It is with this mindset that I rewatched the movie Lost in Translation and read the novel Interior Chinatown.
Myth is on my mind. My partner and I recently tore through the first season of KAOS, a new Netflix series that plays fast and loose with classical Greek Mythology. In this retelling, Gods and humans live in a stylized world that somewhat resembles our own. Zeus, played to a tee by the ingenious Jeff Goldblum, lives in a gaudy mansion on Mount Olympus and wears velour tracksuits and gold-rimmed glasses.
“How old are you?” This is the question that everyone asks best-selling historian Nell Painter when she returns to school at age 64. She retires from teaching at Princeton and pursues her lifelong dream of becoming an artist. Not a dabbler, not a retiree taking a few classes, but a “serious artist.” Art may be all about seeing, but artists are about being seen. Painter doesn’t just want to paint; she wants to get her MFA and be seen as a professional artist.
I have been a fan of Abigail Thomas ever since I read her memoir, “Three Dog Life,” years ago. I recently re-read it along with everything else of hers I could find. I just finished her latest, “Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing,” with a beautiful photo of her multi-lined face on the cover and a beloved dog in her lap. I love her for the way she observes her life in moments, nothing longer than a few pages, exploring how she came to be the person she is. The everyday and the ordinary are her territory, and where her mind goes “when it’s off-leash,” as she says.
Leonard Cohen almost always ends up on my Spotify Wrapped. His gritty, sensual, laconic, husky voice resonates with my melancholic spirit. His music is enduring—sardonic, philosophical, and rhetorical. It’s his refusal to be boxed in that draws me in: his waltzing numbers, pacing and bringing in the unconventional—accordion and string quartets, diverse cultural influences, the dark comedy, and, of course, a relentless inquiry. I’m also a sucker for a good synthesizer.
I order oodles of books from the library.
