House, Home, Friends
Visiting Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania last week to speak at the — very beautiful! — Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, I had the opportunity to discover the lovely photographs of Jessica Todd Harper. Her book The Home Stage, from which the above image is taken, may be found here.
Christopher Beha on Agustín Fernández Mallo:
Fernández Mallo’s work arrives in the United States as part of a procession of books that have foregrounded the velocity of their composition. Knausgaard’s three-thousand page My Struggle was written at a rate of up to twenty pages a day. His four follow-up books, the Seasons Quartet, were composed as a series of daily journal entries and published without revision. The Scottish writer Ali Smith is now three volumes into her own Seasonal Quartet, books that have been written in a matter of weeks and published almost immediately after their completion. The first of them, Autumn, is set in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and it was in bookstores just four months after the referendum took place. Olivia Laing’s Crudo was written in seven weeks, during which Laing gave her Twitter followers more or less daily updates on her progress. Where once it was a mark of high-art seriousness to work on a book for two decades, now the real cred comes from getting it done in two months.
I’m old enough to remember when taking time to craft your work, to consider second thoughts, to make your work as good as it can be, was considered a virtue. It’s a sad thought that writers of books are condemning themselves to running a race they can’t win — against Twitter. It’s hard for me not to see this as a classic case of people finding themselves unable to conquer their vices and so redescribing them as virtues.
Please read the whole review, though, which is extremely thoughtful about certain trends in fiction. And you also might want to take a look at Chris’s newsletter.
- My friend Austin Kleon’s new book Keep Going will be out soon. I’ve read it and it’s great — maybe his best book yet.
- My friend Michael Brendan Dougherty’s book My Father Left Me Ireland will also be out soon — I haven’t read this one yet but can’t wait to. I’ve pre-ordered it.
- My friend Sara Hendren, who has one of my favorite website home pages, is working on a book about disability, design, innovation, and everyday life that I am so eager to read when the time comes.
- My friend Matt Milliner has a beautiful essay out on “Evangelicals and Zen Masters”; and I have a reply to one element of it here.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Spring Break! And I have a bastard of a cold. Great.
- Music: Too foggy-headed to know what I’m listening to. Some ambient stuff.
- Reading: Still in the midst of the wonderful Tenants of Time. But I’m reading the NYRB Classics Kindle edition — the only one in print right now — and it was OCRd and then edited very carelessly: there are literally hundreds of errors, though most of them are small (missing periods and the like). I am now wishing I had bought a well-preserved codex, because the further I move into the book the more distracting the errors are.
- Podcasts: I just discovered that the Can I Get a Witness? project, run by my buddy Charles Marsh and his crew at the Project on Lived Theology, has an accompanying podcast. I’m looking forward to listening when I recover my mental focus.
- Food: Whatever I can get.
- Drink: I’m working on perfecting the Bourbon Crusta.