“come by— / the song is yours / if you want it— // this piano sitting by the / side of the road, playing / dead music in the breeze.” – Mitchell Nobis, “Ghost Ballad”
Oh man, you ever loved a writer so much that you read too much of their work too fast and got burned out? It’s not like I ever stopped liking one of this week’s authors, but I have not read him for something like 18 years. The other book I read this week is by a friend. A friend who is a Detroit Pistons fan. The United States is so polarized, so divided. Yet I am friends with, like, a lot of Detroit Pistons fans. Where’s my fawning profile in one of the New York rags?
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Two books with green covers and environmental focus. It just made sense to pair them together. Two books that deal heavily with fathers and sons. Two books unafraid to state things plainly, and let you marinate in the truth of one line/sentence/stanza/paragraph. Two books that I definitely think you could syllabus together, probably with Percival Everett’s Telephone and a Lydia Millet novel and Bernadette Mayer and Dan Beachy-Quick. I’m talking, of course, about Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut and The Size Of The Horizon, Or, I Explained Everything To The Trees.
Galapágos by Kurt Vonnegut: 18 years ago, I would’ve called this a top five Vonnegut book. I might still feel that way, but honestly, I think every Vonnegut book except Mother Night and Slaughter-House Five would feel like reading for the first time for me. I did not remember much of anything about this novel. I still really liked it, but I will say this: reading Vonnegut after two straight weeks of Percival Everett is a little like watching the 1988 Dunk Contest immediately after watching the 2016 Dunk Contest. Nique and MJ are great, but neither of them went between the legs from the foul line. Not that Everett would appreciate being compared to anything as flashy as dunking, probably.
Idk man, I liked a lot about this book and there were things I didn’t like. It is basically one big dramatization of the Law of Natural Selection, with the idea that humans’ big brains are emphatically not an advantageous adaptation. I really like that idea for a novel! With asterisks, which we’ll get it. Our narrator is ghost, telling the story of a 1986 apocalypse from one million years in the future. On a long enough evolutionary timeline, the book says, human action is meaningless. A million years in the future, humans live on the Galápagos Islands with beaks, flippers, and a life expectancy of 30. 1986 economics and politics don’t matter, which is good, because those things were bad in 1986. Financial crises, greed, runaway technology, war—good thing we’re rid of all of those things in sunny 2025. Our characters are (unbeknownst to them) the last humans. They’ve stowed away on a disabled cruise ship, ran aground on a (made up) Galápagos Island, and began a new Garden of Eden. It’s a fascinating group of characters that are equal parts tragic and comic (classic Vonnegut), with a few cringey, “hey you’re great at a lot of things but writing women and non-white people certainly aren’t two of those things” moments (also classic Vonnegut).
Borrowing from pals Alex Schmidt and Michael Swaim, the Kurt Vonneguys, who had a recurring “Vonne-WHAT?” segment, here’s a brief and incomplete list of things that don’t totally sit right with me: Kurt making up an indigenous tribe out of whole cloth and deciding they are cannibals and dog-killers; the lack of consent or even shared language when Mary Hepburn does her experiments with reproduction; a blind character willingly committing suicide; the explicit long-termerism; the idea that our actions don’t matter. Mother Night is an example of a Vonnegut book that places a ton of importance on what we do with our lives—”we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” swims around my head every moment of every day—and I think that if you’re going to read the “get rid of our brains and take a long view of geology/ecology/biology” book, you gotta also read the “your actions matter” book. Like Douglas Adams before him, not even Kurt could’ve predicted the vile depravity of the Silicon Valley set, and how they’d Torment Nexus his work. What do I know? Kurt actually fought Nazis in Germany. I’ve spent three months fighting ICE in Chicago. In a million years, none of it will matter. But life mattered in the 1940s, and it matters now.
The Size Of The Horizon, Or, I Explained Everything To The Treesby Mitchell Nobis: classic poet concerns in this book—nature, parenting, race and class in the U.S., and basketball. Five years into The Line Break, and we still get people asking “why do poets love basketball so much?1” Whatever the reason, Mitch, a Detroit-area teacher and adoptive father to Black children, is a fan of the sport. If you don’t see how that makes me a fan of Mitch’s book, well, welcome to the blog, first timer! This is a collection of poems that makes me feel less alone in a world I don’t totally understand, mostly because Mitch’s explanations of things to his kids read like shit my kid and I would talk about. The world is hard but also wonderful, and you live in it the way you can. You tell your kids that rivers have language of their own, that there are countless languages meant for non-human living things. You reflect on being the asshole driver, try not to be the asshole driver next time. You tell your kids you love them, and you tell them that a lot.
LINKS!
Hey, first up: yes, ICE is still in Chicago. Ice, too, which has scared most of the cowards in ICE off. BUT. The people in our city are still in danger. I am still wearing my whistle every time I go outside, I am still doing certain anti-ICE actions in my neighborhood. But this week and next week’s links will be slightly less news-heavy. Still collecting those news items, but there is a little bit less in here about ICE in Chicago. Also, I’m scheduling this one on Wednesday and taking Thursday to treat myself to a day of scene-writing for a werewolf novel, so I miss big news? Sorry. Anyway, something to listen to while you browse? A recommendation from Miles Gray on The Daily Zeitgeist has introduced me to Okonski, a jazz trio that sounds kinda the way you want a jazz trio to sound when you just want some good piano in the background. They also sorta feel seasonally appropriate, since so much of December is soundtracked by Vince Guaraldi? Anyway, here’s “The Mountain.”
- “Leeuwenhoek’s Lens” by Eric Williams in Your Impossible Voice
- “Turn, Re-” by LJ Pemberton in Exacting Clam
- If I can do some rhapsodizing, David Roth’s The Conservative Grievance Business Is Always Hiring is so much of the problem with [gestures wildly]. There’s so much here about how I don’t want to live my life. Mallory and I like to joke that we could sell out anytime—could pay for the kids’ college with just one year of her doing Black Conservation YouTube shit, probably—but who wants to be as mad as they all are all the time? I hope that’s a gift link, but here’s an excerpt anyway: “Charlie Kirk didn’t get into the college that he wanted to go to after high school and stayed furious about it in public until the moment he was killed, on a different college campus, at the age of 32; that was his job. Bari Weiss, who has never felt as respected by or comfortable among her peers as she believed she deserved to be, has made a successful career in media that is entirely dependent upon her never, ever getting over that…There is a living to be made doing this, but it seems very much a living hell.“
- Old article, but new to me: What Was The Foodie? by Alicia Kennedy in The Yale Review. Subhed: “what would it mean to take food seriously again?”
- And now, news of the week: 3 Ways To Support Chicago’s Immigrant Arts Scene This Month by Elisa Shoenberger, Raided South Shore Building To Be Cleared Friday After Judge Denies Residents’ Motion For More Time by Mack Liederman and Maxwell Evans, Inmigrantes De Chicago Tienen Problemas De Salud Mental Tras Las Redadas De ICE: ‘Quieren Que Estemos Asustados’ by Ariel Parrella-Aureli, and How Chicago Protest Music Is Meeting The Political Moment by Web Behrens in Block Club; Judge: residents must move out, ICE-raided South Shore building is uninhabitable by Corli Jay in The Triibe; Immigration Raids Disrupt a Program Designed to Protect Chicago Schoolchildren by Rita Oceguera in The Trace.
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. There’s a part early in Galápagos where a sociopathic USian orders two filet mignons, room service, as news of a financial collapse breaks and a starving mob approaches the hotel’s gates. The hotel server—a dutiful capitalist who believes in working hard and meritocracy—brings the meal. The USian then says “the steaks are for my dog, set them on the floor and get the hell out of here.”2 That snaps something in the server’s brain, and he opens the hotel gates for the starving masses. There’s a lesson for people across the class divide in that scene. Have a good weekend.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- Bob recently theorized that it’s because of the audible rhythm of the sport. Sure, why the hell not. I simply fail to see why anyone wouldn’t love both poetry and basketball with their whole hearts, which is the kind of attitude that Mallory and David would point to and say “see you’re just like your father” ↩︎
- it’s something like 80% of that, please don’t make me look the quote up exactly, it’s almost winter break. I don’t remember what page it’s on but it’s before page 200 ↩︎