Brooklyn Diasporist Newsletter: November, 2025
Hello again from New York City! Has the ongoing rightward swing of my fellow Americans and the ever-evolving miasma of social media inspired me to resume this newsletter? Yes it has. I go back and forth on social media, feeling the pull of so many friends and artists and journalists and cats, but since Trump’s second election and a commensurate rise in unfettered meanness and greed, I weary of it very quickly. And besides, I’ve been meaning to get back to this newsletter anyway. So here we are.
Item 1: A typically thoughtful piece from Maria Popova at The Marginalian discusses Andre Gregory and the evolution of artistry in the course of one’s life, as well as how art is in us in our lives, even when we’re not in the immediate act of art-making, among other things.
Item 2: Do you know music writer Ben Ratliff’s work? I’m a fan, and Every Song Ever is an especial favorite of mine. Ratliff was interviewed at Pioneer Works here in Brooklyn.
The interview covers Ratliff’s most recent book, Run the Song, whose subject is listening to music while running, how our listening is affected by our bodies, space, and duration. Ratliff’s titular question, “Does all music already exist?” reminds me of Hollis Frampton’s “Infinite Cinema,” a kind of philosophical view that all appearances and images are part of a grand cosmic stream, so the films and images we see are simply extractions from that stream.
Ratliff is perhaps more literal, suggesting that the basis of all music already exists, so what we listen to in a song or piece of music is an arrangement of a segment of that basis. Wonderful stuff, much better-articulated elsewhere. They also talk about Sade.
Item 3: I was introduced to Kerry James Marshall through his 2017 Mastry show at the Met Breuer here in New York.
It was a breathtaking show of awesome skill and intention, an effort to retroactively include Black people among the Old Masters of European painting.
I recently came across a marvelous 2023 article in The New York Review of Books about Marshall’s Printmaking. There’s also an in-depth profile of him in The New Yorker from 2021, “The Epic Style of Kerry James Marshall.” All worth a look.
Item 4: Kyla Scanlon (whom I first encountered on Ezra Klein’s podcast) wrote a thorough and engaging newsletter about her recent month-long tour of speaking engagements and conferences looking into the reality of “American prosperity.” She says,
I spent 30 days on the road to see what prosperity looks like up close. DC, Berkeley, Baltimore, New Hampshire, New York, two cities in Florida, then Prague and Kilkenny, Ireland. The same theme surfaced: people don’t feel the prosperity that’s supposedly surrounding them. They feel the physical friction.
You can read the whole article here.
Item 5: “To write at all is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our troubled individual isolated experiences to the communal consciousness.” — Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book