READ WATCH PLAY (APRIL EDITION) + OFFICE HOURS!
Gang,
Hoping everyone is alright, all things considering.
This has been a terribly cruel month, no doubt about it, and our so-called world leaders seem hell-bent on making matters much much worse.
But there’s struggle and there’s hope and I hew to that — always.
Anyway, below you’ll find a sampling of what fired my heart / soul / imagination during these last few weeks.
Also, time for another OFFICE HOURS.
If you have any questions at all regarding building stories or building worlds or the creative life in general — or have any questions about anything we’ve been discussing — please ask your question in the comments section of this very post or message me.
(Nota Bene, with apologies: OFFICE HOURS is for pay subscribers only.)
As always, thank you all for supporting StoryWorlds and for tolerating my nerditry.
And now onto our…
READ
My colleague Duana Fullwiley is one of the smartest people I know. When she left Harvard for Stanford her departure was a big blow for the Cambridge community. Still, we are all fortunate to have her second book, which is luminous, profound, and timely. Duana dives deep into medical genetics, its hopes, its capitalist excesses, and its deep racialization. A must-read for anyone who’s interested in our dystopian 23andme future.
It is the twenty-first century and humans are grappling with which features of their identities matter most, and when. Digital tools that fragment aspects of the person are now adopted to better express a limited part of what can, or cannot, be exposed. Technology platforms and algorithms aggregate social and DNA data, helping people create untold possibilities-and new vulnerabilities. Personal privacy is facing the threat of extinction. Yet people's stories and experiences remain essential to how humans understand the world and how best to navigate it. Science and technology have now been recognized as highly malleable products, shaped by human desires.
In the future that is now, the field of anthropology has updated its interest in the concept of culture to focus on power. Meanwhile, the violence of race keeps reinventing itself, and anthropologists keep calling it a social construct. Some begin to see how the construct can include biology and genetics and that we need better language to describe how this new race is made. In the preface to a book on these issues, an anthropologist archives a scene where the human names of study subjects-at all levels—are replaced with code to disguise them. That their identities are abstracted and possibly effaced does not negate what the codes attempt to obscure.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520401174/tabula-raza
Moises Saman is considered "one of the leading conflict photographers of his generation" and his latest book is an extraordinary meditation on the American-led Invasion of Iraq, a war that is already being forgotten by far too many, especially those who cheered it on. Cannot recommend this enough.
Attaching here, as well, a moving essay that Moises wrote for the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/opinion/iraq-war-20-photojournalism.html
https://gostbooks.com/products/glad-tidings-of-benevolence
I am a huge fan of R. Kikuo Johnson’s first graphic novel, Night Fisher, a book so moving and flawless that I figured Johnson would have a hard time topping it, but No One Else exceeded all my expectations. (For whatever reason I only read No One Else this week but like all the best books it arrived just in time.) A family on Maui is going through it — that’s the capsule summary, but please believe: a finer book about family bonds and family grief, about adolescence and the hold that pets have on us, you’ll be hard pressed to find. Share this book with everyone you care about.
https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/no-one-else
WATCH
Don’t want to spoil this Argentinian “horror thriller” so I won’t hit it too hard. This black-and-whiter won’t be for everyone; it’s elliptical and uneven but if you’re into dictatorship gothic like me you’ll dig History of the Occult. Plus that ending makes up for a lot. A worthy descendant of Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99 and would make for an amazing double bill with Pablo Larrain’s El Conde.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Occult
PLAY
Caught Robert Glasper in Tokyo earlier this month and can’t believe I’ve never seen this astonishing brother live before. He rocked us all out of our minds. Best part was his long time hardcore fans who flew in from seemingly halfway across the world to catch his show. Cannot wait to see him perform again. I’ve attach an older video —they didn’t let us tape anything at the Tokyo show — but you get the idea.
do you have any advice for writing memoir, and/or how to gauge whether your memoir story is ‘interesting’ enough to engage readers?
stemming from the idea that we’re all the main characters in our lives and think we’re much more interesting that we may be
How much of the story do you have fleshed out before you start writing it? In THE SUN, MOON, AND STARS for example, do you already have the last scene hanging upside down with the change flying out of his pockets before you even venture into the story? Or does it start with Magda and you let it take you there as you write into it? Curious!