I’m excited to announce a fun project. In my new Substack newsletter I Can Barely Play This Thing I’ll share updates on my novel-in-progress, news about The Quiet is Loud, thoughts on creativity, the odd poem-ish thing, what I’m reading, and not-boring life snippets (fingers crossed). It’ll supplement the sorts of things I write here, …
Recently, I heard Jeanne Dielman described as “three and a half hours of a woman in her apartment going about her daily life. I watched it once in college when I was really depressed.” I decided to watch it based on this description alone. A couple of the IMDB tags for the film are “peeling …
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Read More »
Javi came to life before I got into bookstagram (as little as I consider myself “into bookstagram,” that is), and his love of books was extrapolated from my own. But during final edits of The Quiet is Loud, I started to worry that maybe I had been an unwilling host for an invisible AI entity …
Did I create this character, or did bookstagram create this character? Read More »
I recently asked people on Instagram to recommend “pretty and fartistic” movies to me, and I got several good suggestions. I picked the first two, The Terrorizers and La Notte, at random, and was pleasantly surprised to find that books and writers featured heavily in them. These movies were also very pretty, and I took …
Writing & books in movies: The Terrorizers and La Notte Read More »
When I think about some of the memorable parts of my years writing online, I’m usually most nostalgic for the earliest years: 1997-2001-ish. But recently, I fell into a different sort of nostalgia spiral. I forget how it even started, but I found myself missing the way blogging was just a handful of years ago.
In 2016, I wrote the following blog post for my history blog, The Small Histories. I was thinking about it again recently and wanted to share it here as well – book lovers will appreciate it! Also, I had to actually laugh out loud when I read “I’m not a worldbuilding sort of writer” – …
There is a middle-aged woman in the building behind mine who I relate to. She has a big comfy chair by the window, and she likes to sit in that chair with her computer or a book or a crossword. There’s a lamp right next to the chair and a desk across the room, but …
Overheard, in a book store: “Must it be rhyming couplets?” “Oh, yes.”
The boy crosses the street towards the School for Bad Children. It is cold but his jacket is unzipped and hangs from his shoulders. He calls cheerfully to his waiting teacher, “I just saw some of my old friends but I walked right by them!” And I think of all the worlds of meaning in …
