I’m posting late this month, and this will be more scattered than usual, but I have a good excuse. I spent most of it moving and teaching, and am now on the road indefinitely. I started writing this in a Portland Airbnb. I’m posting it from Memphis after driving 2500 miles, in four days, in an overloaded 2008 Prius, with a very understanding copilot and a dog who has a situation in her hindquarters that a thousand dollars in veterinary care has thus far failed to diagnose.
City life
I’ve lived for the last eight years in a college town in semi-rural Oregon, where I lost my sense of city life. It’s been interesting to be back in cities lately. The plan is to wind up back in Portland at the end of this odyssey, whenever that might be. I’ve spent a lot of time there in the last year or so, as I did some inchoate preparation for the move. Since moving to Oregon I’ve sometimes found myself arguing with people, often family members and dear friends from distant states, about Portland—basically, assuring them that despite whatever they might have read or heard, the whole city was not on fire, and that I actually liked most things about it. But it is true that the city somehow feels both charming and apocalyptic. Pretty much every experience I had there on this most recent trip—meals, bars, a last-minute car repair—was better than what I’m used to. But I also hadn’t been to a grocery store that had armed guards in a while.
Lo-no
A few people reached out after last month’s post about my attempt to buy Lobo, a ghost town in West Texas. We wound up being finalists, but it worked out the way I expected: we lost out to a higher offer. Technically I think we’re still one of the backups, although I’m not holding my breath. If you hear about any other nice ghost towns near the border that seem suitable for a possibly ill-advised writing residency/conference space/weirdo desert commune, let me know.
Becoming a wine hipster
A while back, my friend Connor introduced me to Antica Terra, an unassuming winery in a warehouse outside Dundee where I wound up getting to taste a Château Rothschild, among other rare wines my plebeian palate did not properly appreciate. Turns out the woman who runs it is some kind of genius, according to the Gray Lady. Glad I went before it was famous. I don’t know wine, but for what it’s worth, I was a big fan of the Glories.
Moby Dick
Summer is the only time I really get to read for pleasure, not for work/research/whatever. For the last few summers, I’ve been trying to catch up on big books I pretended to read in undergrad or had otherwise avoided. Last year it was Ulysses; this year it’s Moby Dick.1 I’ve tried to read it at least twice before, but never made it past all the cetology. This time I plowed through that section—teaching and writing essays seems to have raised my tolerance for research-based digressions—and am really enjoying it, even though I’m reading it slowly and with a lot of moving-related interruptions. I’d forgotten how weird and funny it is. “Flask, alas, was a butterless man!”
A few other quick recs from the last month:
Early this month Connor pointed me toward this glorious Tiny Desk concert by Juvenile. Just trust me on this and watch it, ideally on some kind of substance.
I’m late to this, as usual, but I was happy to read this post about Holly Wendt’s forthcoming novel. I’m going to preorder Heading North as soon as I have a new address to ship it to.
I’ve been listening to Killer Mike’s new(ish) record Michael a lot this month. His last solo album, R.A.P. Music, pretty much defined a six-month period for me after it came out, the time leading up to my first book’s release ten years ago this month, and Pledge 2 has been the soundtrack for this endless novel I’ve been writing. I don’t think I’m going to wind up liking this one that much, but I do seem to like it better than most reviewers. As is often the case, I wonder how much of that has to do with the way American mass culture is produced, discussed, reviewed, and otherwise mediated by a near-monoculture in terms of class, race, and political ideology, which he discusses at some length in this interview.
I went to Little Bighorn on the trip, which was totally worth a half-hour detour, and reminded me of one of my favorite slept-on books: Evan S. Connell’s deeply weird essayistic book about Custer, Son of the Morning Star.
Which I recently realized is hyphenated, and has a second title: it’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Is there a word for that kind of alternate titling? It’s not really a subtitle …
100% agreed re: Juvenile’s Tiny Desk concert!