“Like her second CD, When the Pawn … , the full title of which, at 90 words, appeared, to her pride, in the Guinness Book of World Records, this album’s title is a sort of proverb: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser / Than the Driver of the Screw / And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More / Than Ropes Will Ever Do. For […]
If I close my eyes hard enough, maybe adding some pressure with my thumb and forefinger, I see glints of technicolor atop infinite darkness. I’m transported back to fourth grade, a field trip to the planetarium. Library-quietness hangs in the air inside the auditorium. The seats are plush and recline and swallow up the children. […]
Jacob Singer: The fourth section of this novel worked me over. What I mean by thatis I felt like a piece of dough being worked in a repetitivemotion—except it wasn’t physical at all –it was all mind and soul.Rape, anal rape, murder, unrecognizable corpses found by a road, etc.Bolaño isn’t sentimental about how death looks. […]
Both Flesh and Not, the forthcoming essay collection by David Foster Wallace, arrives in strange times. It’s job seems to be to tidy up the Wallace canon, pulling together what might be the last unanthologized bits of Wallace’s nonfiction. However, the collection doesn’t carry the balance of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing […]
I can usually tell that I’m going to like or not like an album within ten or fifteen seconds. While some make out music likability to an exact science, my sensibility has no pretense like this. Either I like it or I don’t. And it was the test of this theory that inspired me to […]
