From above, it looked like a monster had chewed off chunks of flesh, gaping wounds in the body of the forest.
"Are Multi-Sensory Maps Possible?", Madhuri Kurak for Container
Submitted by Kelsey with the following comment: "The piece itself offers dense information, easily digestible, about mapping indigenous places in the face of encroachment by capital and Palm Oil plantations. Forests are instrumental to 'seeing like a state,' and what I like best about this quote is that it offers an alternative, that aerial views can reveal to people what remains of a world beset by the machine of capital."
Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves.
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
Submitted by Sebastian.
In the daylight, the deserted town would be composed of scabrous, peeling pastel tones.
The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler
I listened to the audiobook of this book this week (great reading by Eunice Wong!). The humid southeast Asian archipelago setting and its sometimes fever dream paranoia/spy thriller-y moments were well-suited to lying in a bathtub with a fever.
The New York Public Library wasn't budgeted for secret passages, but that's what happens when you hire an Irish design firm.
Sewer, Gas, and Electric, Matt Ruff
I decided to read this after listening to Ruff on an episode of Our Opinions Are Correct about Ayn Rand's legacy as Silicon Valley's most beloved sci-fi writer. It's pretty silly, like there's a mix of Vonnegut-style weirdness for weirdness sake and sort of no-nonsense New York-ness that reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge.
It is variously trapping you in its methamphetamine armpit and chasing you around with a worm, but it doesn’t appear able to do anything else.
"Where be your jibes now?", Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books
Patricia Lockwood writing about David Foster Wallace is a real gift, one that helped me think about my own ambivalent relationship to his work (I wrote a little about this in a Perfect Sentences highlighting Lauren Oyler's Goop cruise essay, which Lockwood also mentions). Some more highlights:
All of them carry, as if in briefcases, their own small, sensuously specific details.
Whether he’s living up to his potential, to his regional titles, bending and trimming himself like a boy bonsai, sleeping at night with his talent in a pair of vaselined gloves.
The book is the thing that will not let you leave the house, because it might let you write it that day.
As someone currently trying to Write Something, this particularly stung!!