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Jumping the Rails: On ‘Slade House’ and Not on ‘The Sixth Extinction’
Posted on November 16, 2015 1 Comment
By Ryan Joe I decided to make like Colin Kaepernick’s career and jump the rails. Instead of reading this week Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction — which I’ve every intention of reading — I picked up David Mitchell’s Slade House. I grabbed Mitchell’s haunted house/Hansel and Gretel fairy tale at the behest of our friend Chandler, […]
Circling Around Something Abstract: On ‘Speak,’ White Space, and What We Do When We’re by Ourselves
Posted on November 14, 2015 Leave a Comment
By Dan Bjork I spent around 90 minutes last Wednesday night (November 4th) on Periscope watching a man and his girlfriend give a tour of their apartment. I don’t know either of them, or rather, I have a pretty good feel for them — I was watching because I already felt like I knew them […]
Book 10: Carmen Gimenez Smith’s ‘Milk and Filth’
Posted on November 10, 2015 Leave a Comment
This week, Football Book Club is reading Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk and Filth — and posting about Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and Speak by Louisa Hall. Milk and Filth is Giménez Smith’s fourth book of poetry — she has also written a memoir and several chapbooks and edited a fiction anthology — and was […]
The Joys and Perils of Math Rock: On Rush, Guns N’ Roses, and ‘Speak’
Posted on November 10, 2015 3 Comments
By Adam Boretz Let us begin our discussion of Louisa Hall’s Speak by quoting Ryan Henry Joe: Here’s my fucking problem though: Individually, each subplot is a drag. The narratives work well only as pieces of a puzzle, and the character arcs really overextend themselves. Yeah, okay, Mary misses her dead, soulless dog and is […]
Shit Needs to Go Down: On AI, Speech Technology, and ‘Speak’
Posted on November 9, 2015 2 Comments
By Ryan Joe 1. When your team sucks, there inevitably comes a point when you treat the season as a curiosity, like a mutated animal floating in a jar of formaldehyde. How did this happen to you? (Owner abuse.) Was there any chance that you would have lived? (No.) What does the future hold for […]
Lighting Up: On Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’
Posted on November 1, 2015 1 Comment
By Adam Boretz Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts — a work of “autotheory” and a memoir of sorts — pretty much destroyed me. I loved the fragmentary, mosaic storytelling — which Dan described in his great post from earlier in the week — but more than that, I loved the way Nelson’s prose affected me. While reading The Argonauts, I […]
The Freedom Inside White Space: On ‘The Argonauts’ and Being a Jets Fan in Manhattan
Posted on October 28, 2015 1 Comment
By Dan Bjork 1. So, I made it through the first real test of my FBC: I did not watch Jets-Patriots. This is the first rivalry game I’ve missed since the late ’80s and Ken O’Brien. According to my Facebook feed, we lost “in the most Jets-y-est way possible.” But I don’t know what these […]
A House Party Full of Strangers: On Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’
Posted on October 28, 2015 1 Comment
By Ryan Joe Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts gets its title from the ship the Argo, which was replaced piece by piece over a long voyage – as described by Roland Barthes – until it was both the same ship and an entirely new one. This is not unlike how the 49ers, a few years removed […]
Book Extras: ‘Speak’
Posted on October 21, 2015 Leave a Comment
If you’re digging this week’s book — Speak by Louisa Hall — here are two reviews of the novel, one from The New York Times and one from NPR. Plus, check out the below author interview with Hall from All Things Considered: Naturally, it goes without saying, dear reader, that you should check in with […]
The Shame in Thinking You’re Simply Soft: On the Paradox of Other People in ‘Hyperbole and a Half’
Posted on October 18, 2015 2 Comments
By Dan Bjork This week was tough for me. My S.O.P. for these entries — extremely close readings and (attempts at) abstract subtext analysis — wasn’t really an option. Everything in Hyperbole and a Half is presented with a single-entendre straightness I admire. I’m truly digging its blog-roots (the word blog being used without any […]
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