READ WATCH PLAY FEAST + OFFICE HOURS!
AUGUST EDITION
Gang!
Back in Japan to see a dear friend, who was recently and gravely hospitalized. I’m at the age where these sort of visits are happening more and more. Landed in the middle of a heat wave, the new summer normal, and when I took my daily long walk I had trouble deciding what was jet lag and what was the blast-furnace-heat-humidity hammer. Fucking brutal. What kept me ambulant were all the viejitas doing their thing under the UV insulated umbrellas. I couldn’t let the obasans lap me. If they can stomach it…
Even though I’m a hardcore FFFL — fantasy freak for life — I haven’t started watching the new season of House of the Dragon. First season left me underwhelmed (same with Rings of Power), but I figure I’ll eventually get around to it. But I did catch a bunch of gems this last month that I’d like to share with you. Hopefully they will inspire, entice, unsettle — or, like the best art, they will accomplish all three.
Anyway…
As always: big thanks to all our subscribers. Your insights and interventions and support have made StoryWorlds into a beautiful community.
ALSO:
TIME FOR ANOTHER OFFICE HOUR!
If you have any questions at all regarding building stories or the creative life in general — if you have any questions about anything we’ve been discussing — please post them in the comments section of this very post or message me directly.
And now onto what’s been keeping me nourished this last month.
READ
This novel is a flat-out marvel. This will be your best friend for the next week or month or year or life.
Here’s what I said after reading it for the first time: “Epic doesn’t begin to describe this extraordinary novel…as vivid and wondrous as your best dream, as unsettling and unforgettable as your worst…they say you can’t fit the entire world into a novel but Puyana comes close. What a gift Puyana has given readers, what a profound shattering inspiring gift. “
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/alejandro-puyana/freedom-is-a-feast/9780316571784/?lens=little-brown
Hawthorne is rightfully famous for his extraordinary art for DC and Marvel in series like Batman, Spider-Man, Deadpool.
But in HAPPINESS WILL FOLLOW Hawthorne delivers something even more extraordinary: a heartbreaking memoir, a Puerto Rican family epic that reminds us how family bonds can become their own curse, which only hope and love will dispel.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Happiness-Will-Follow/Mike-Hawthorne/9781684155453
This is the ONE. I’m on my second read through and it’s like I’ve been given new eyes. I wish I could assign this book to all my classes every semester. Brown has crafted a lens that will not fail you and from which anti-blackness’ occult powers cannot hide.
The write-up says it better than I’ll ever will:
“Photography’s history, inextricably linked to colonialism and white supremacy, is a catalog of othering, surveillance, and the violence of objectification. In the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, photographs after the fact tell viewers that blackness comes with a corresponding violence that no human intervention can abate. In Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, photographic “evidence” of its sovereign failure suggests that the formerly enslaved cannot overthrow their masters and survive to tell the tale. And in South Africa and the United States, a loop of racial violence reminds black subjects of their lower-class status mandated via the state. Illustrating the global nature of antiblackness that pervades photographic archives of the present and the past, Mortevivum reveals how we live in a repetition of imagery signaling who lives and who dies on a gelatin silver print—on a page in a book, on the cover of newspaper, and in the memory of millions.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739532/mortevivum-by-kimberly-juanita-brown/
WATCH
Created and written by Rapman (who I first encountered through Shiro’s Story). This is a Misfits / The Umbrella Academy for Britain’s African diaspora. I won’t ruin the surprise but with an amazing cast, blistering soundtrack, and an I-should-have-thought-of-that conceit, SUPACELL is pop-culture perfection.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/ten-meter-tower.html
And here is Marileidy Paulino winning her gold and setting an Olympic record in the women’s 400m. Un orgullo dominicano, to say the least.
PLAY
When it Really is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation is a glorious poem. And precisely the poem I needed this summer. I’ve really been struggling with the riptides of depression and been trying to do everything possible to keep myself from slipping under, and listening to Kyle Tran Myhre read this utter gem helped, it really helped.
Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony. And
yeah, we fight for it sometimes, but survival is not
the fight. It is the healing after: the soft hum of
someone you trust applying the bandage, the
feeling of falling asleep in a safe place.
Survival is a symphony.
I will remember this.
I will remember this.
https://poets.org/poem/when-it-really-just-wind-and-not-furious-vexation?mc_cid=c4bdcd809b
FEAST
Boston-area folk rejoice: Amba is open in East Cambridge, near the Galleria!
Their blondies and borekas are not to be missed, but they’ve got a showstopper of a rotisserie chicken and I could eat their chicken shawarma all day!
(Boston/Cambridge are not NYC or LA or Tokyo; every good restaurant that opens is a cause for celebration).
https://www.theinfatuation.com/boston/reviews/amba
I guess you can have it all—moving image, poetry, learning, and feasting! What a treat!
Thanks for this-
House of dragons S2 is like S1, only more so. I won't say anything else because it hurts to denigrate other people's work. It seems shot better, I'll say that.