Just finished Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. I typically avoid alternate histories, but this one caught my attention. It’s a detective noir set in “an alternate 1920s America where the Mississippian civilization, including the city of Cahokia, survived and formed its own Native American state.” The story follows Cahokia PD detective Joe Barrow as he investigates a brutal murder. Recommended.
Reminded me of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Cabon.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Proper books have the title printed on the spine horizontally.
That Analee Newitz piece is fantastic! I am going to read the hell out of her new book when it comes out.
Also want a piece of merch (which is a rare sentiment for me) and may brave the import fuckery…
In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.”
Innocent they were, but not as naive as he seemed to think. Certainly they knew that he was a celebrity: that was how it started, when fifteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin saw him leaving Carnegie Hall on December 27, 1905, after a matinee song recital by the German soprano Madame Johanna Gadski. Twain, after all, was instantly recognizable, even before he decided to wear only white. He noticed her, to be sure, saw that she wanted to speak to him, introduced himself and shook her hand. The next day, she wrote to thank him: “I am very glad I can go up and speak to you now … as I think we know each other.” Describing herself as his “obedient child,” she ended her note, “I am the little girl who loves you.” He responded immediately, calling himself Gertrude’s “oldest & latest conquest.” Their correspondence was playfully flirtatious: he called her his “little witch”; she called him “darling.” He sent her a copy of his favorite book, the writings of “a bewitching little scamp” named Marjorie, who had died just short of her ninth birthday, in Scotland in 1811. “I have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years,” he confessed in an essay. The child, who confided startlingly sophisticated remarks about books, history and religion in her journal, seemed to him “made out of thunderstorms and sunshine“: “how impulsive she was, how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious … how innocently bad, how natively good,” he exclaimed. “May I be your little ‘Marjorie’?” Gertrude asked coyly. That is how Twain addressed her, in letters filled with what the two called “blots,” or kisses—until 1906, when he was taken aback by her turning sixteen. “I am almost afraid to send a blot, but I venture it. Bless your heart it comes within an ace of being improper! Now back you go to 14!—then there’s no impropriety.” Their correspondence ended, and Twain set his sights on younger girls.
Buoyed by Gertrude’s effusive declarations of love, Twain discovered that it was easy to find other young admirers, primarily from among his fellow passengers on holiday trips to Bermuda. By 1908, he had collected ten schoolgirls, dubbed them his “angel-fish,” and awarded them membership in his Aquarium Club. In Bermuda, he had special shimmering enamel lapel pins designed for them to wear on their left breast, above the heart. In the spring and summer of 1908, one biographer notes, Twain’s letters to his angelfish comprised more than half of his correspondence: one letter sent or received every day. Many contained invitations to the girls to visit him in his palatial house in Redding, Connecticut, which he named Innocence at Home. “I have built this house largely, indeed almost chiefly, for the comfort & accommodation of the Aquarium,” Twain announced in a mock-serious document that he sent to his angelfish, containing the rules and regulations of the club. The lair of the angelfish was his Billiard Room.
Pardon me while i go throw up
Thought I’d cross-post this, as it’s not all that relevant to gardening.
(Well, maybe tangentially)
I finally finished reading Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreactionary A Basilisk. I definitely recommend it, as it was originally published not long after Trump got elected the first time, and it’s clear that some people could very well see these connections between the alt-right, far right, TERFS, and the MAGA movement way back then.
Now I’m reading this…
Which is absolutely excellent so far. It very much confirms a lot of what I think about Sisko as a character within the Trek universe. It’s worth a read if your a Trekkie, and even if your just kind of a casual fan.
Wow. I’m seeing this review making the rounds, by people praising it and finding it funny, but it just strikes me as needlessly and wrongly cruel. I read Vuong’s furst book and thought it was beautifully and bravely poetic. Haven’t read his second yet. Maybe he struck a nerve in such readers? 
I heard Ocean Vuong on Fresh Air last week and it sounds like a lovely book…
Right?
I just don’t understand why that review is so vicious. Unless the writer is some far-right asshole.
I assume it’s this author:
Looks like… not familiar with him or his work… Here is other reviews…
I dunno, maybe he had a bad interaction with Vuong, but maybe then he shouldn’t be writing reviews of his books?
Maybe Crewe is trying to stake out his own creative territory. I hate when creatives attack other creatives while doing that. Just do your own thing, dude.
Just finished it up… yeah, strikes me that he’s doing that… writing scathing criticism of a popular work, and watch the mentions roll in… Honestly, it comes off as kind of classist and maybe even racist. It strikes me that Vuong, having grown up in a family that spoke one language and having to learn another was working to combine the two in expressing his experiences, which seem to be very subjective from the lines Crewes posted… like he keeps whinging about how bullies in these books are not “humanized” but, that’s the subjectivity of Vuong’s experiences as a 6 year old being bullied, it seems to me, and later of a worker trying to deal with unreasonable bosses in a fast food environment.
Anyway, makes me want to read these books all the more, not less.
Exactly, thanks for that. I thought something similar about the rhetorical excess that Crewe finds so unbearable. Especially in the second novel, Vuong says (in a quote that Crewe provides) that he wrote the book as the character might write his own story; that could include poetic language that goes over the top sometimes as a reflection of the character – as a form of characterization.
Anyway, even if we were to attribute the rhetorical excess to Vuong, he IS a (great) poet, and I appreciate writers who work to make their language itself interesting as they tell stories. Sure, they can go too far sometimes, but that’s better for me overall than the staid, boring, unadorned prose that so many writers use.
Agreed on all points! Vuong is going on my to read list, and Crewes is going on my never to read list!
Forgive me for just posting up a newspaper summer reading list without having read it but I often find these fascinating for themes that emerge as well as the great variety of recommendations from writers.
Of note the couple of people focused on Muriel Spark (including the great Ali Smith which reminds me she has a new book out — recommended on this list — which I must read because she’s great), and a couple of people recommending Helen Garner’s diaries which is not my normal kind of thing but really makes me want to read them. Zadie Smith’s recommendations look good right at the start, particularly the upcoming novel Cécé. William Dalrymple’s picks look like must reads too, but I make a rod to beat my back with there!
Back to things I actually am reading and apologies if I’ve said it before but The Odyssey in Emily Wilson’s translation read by Claire Danes. If you’ve been meaning to read this, I recommend this translation. I did read comparative passages from about 20 after reading an article by Daniel Mendelssohn on how he came to translate and how he believed you should revisit it in different stages of your life to get different meanings. This was the one for me, a clear winner, I had only read the Rhieu one before which was the default, Penguin Classics, when I was a kid. This is much better for me. I’m going slowly because of syncing issues on my devices when I’m out running and, happily, I’m not on my own walking the dog these days (though I sometimes sneak him out for another walk to get some me and podcast/radio drama/audiobook time).
I read Le retour de Lagaffe by Delaf. I am massive fan of Franquin’s Gaston Lagaffe [Gomer Goof] and I thought I would hate it but I was pleasantly surprised I was amused by it. It was familiar and jokes about smartphones etc were fine. Maybe it was just nostalgia.
This seems interesting…
