At three in the morning, / the mind becomes a house / where all the doors have been left unlatched. / It doesn’t think of grand things. / It doesn’t solve the equations of the stars / or settle the ancient debts of the heart. / Instead, it watches a single curtain move. / It counts the seconds between the refrigerator’s hums. / It remembers a gray sweater lost in 1994and wonders where it is keeping warm tonight.
Very little is certain in our tumultuous times, but one thing I can always rely on is being let down by a popular or acclaimed piece of contemporary art. There are various reasons behind these disappointments, but a common blotch they all bear is a flagrant, disciplined indifference from their artists — young and old, established and underground — toward reflection and refinement.
Vanessa Ogle: You’ve written memoirs and even a children’s book, but most know you from reality TV, your podcast empire, and social media. Why is it important for you to still make space for literature in a world where social media can be more profitable?
Kail Lowry: For me, I felt like I was spending too much time on social media. I was doomscrolling for a long time. I didn’t really feel like I could be present in anything I was doing because I was so busy making content or consuming content.
I’ll say this for Digger — it made me think. Specifically, it made me think about two things: 1) just how condescending Alejandro G. Iñárritu is being towards his audience; and 2) whether Tom Cruise is simply too great a movie star to be a great actor as well. In an attempt to honor the spirit of this ultimately unpleasant film, I’ll begin by pretending to answer the first question, until I can’t, at which point I’ll begin to answer the second, until I can’t, at which point I’ll simply give up and point to the world outside . . .
In the cloud of rumors and allegations engulfing him, I discerned the outline of a kindred spirit. The stern language of the university’s sexual harassment report, the annual email from the campus women’s group warning about the dangerous criminal law professor . . . I confess all this only intrigued me. No one offered concrete details, just a ceaseless murmur of conclusory phrases like “unwanted advances” and “sexual harassment.”
At the tail end of summer, Dwight Garner accomplished what few legacy media critics have since the days of Michiko Kakutani: he wrote a review that helped sell a book. A literary novel of more than 600 pages, no less. It was a conservative first printing. At 37,000 copies, Riverhead Books was not expecting a bestseller, despite the author’s previous Booker Prize-winning 2014 epic A Brief History of Seven Killings having sold half a million copies worldwide.
“Heteronormativity is just so broken,” declares Alex (Glori Dei Filippone), a Gender Studies master’s student at Columbia, in the opening minutes of Floating Carousel, a new indie dramedy that made its New York debut last month. Alex then suggests that her dinner host, a Doctor of Entomology, may not be able to completely follow her research.
There’s a certain wistfulness that permeates the disposition of millennials and Generation X regarding the overly digitized world of today. Gen Z used to scoff at the nostalgia-afflicted millennial superiority complex by way of “Only ’90s Kids Remember This” internet memes of the 2010s, yet that same nostalgia affliction has caught up to Gen Z now.
The title of Guillermo Stitch’s last novel was Lake of Urine. His latest is The Coast of Everything. Clearly the man is a fan of geography. But, then, as a novelist why shouldn’t he be? Bodies of water persist as some of our richest, most versatile metaphors, and if memorable, imaginative storytelling banks on any one device, it’s metaphor.
This was the last year Henry would kill the pig. Henry told me so herself, standing on the porch, looking left from the door to the field. It was the first thing any of the Laurensons said that afternoon, after they turned up 40 minutes late. They always talked about it that way, “the pig,” like it was the same one they killed every time.
This ambivalence stands in marked contrast to some of the earliest Covid novels — like Lucy by the Sea and Day and The Vulnerables — which have what feels like an obligatory positivity to them, a conviction that the bleak, anti-social nature of pandemic life nonetheless proved something universal and affirming about humanity’s heart and heartiness. Despite their deference to the crisis’ severity and their piousness about suffering, these books feel oddly optimistic.
No beating around the bush here, since the film itself doesn’t: Na Hong-jin’s Hope is extraordinary. Is it also ridiculous, bloated, and a bit overlong? Sure, yes, who cares. Is it trolling its audience with its last-act alien shenanigans? Possibly, though a sequel is (hopefully, eventually) on the way. Is it given to dangling important threads in front of its audience, only to distract them with the equivalent of a piano falling on someone’s head? Absolutely. But none of this matters.
In The Frenchmen, her new chronicle of postwar French philosophy, New York Times Book Review senior editor Emily Eakin has done something truly impressive, arranging some of the most brilliant but bilious figures of late-20th-century continental thought into a narrative that is lively and informative, never pretentious and never dull.
In the cave beneath the waterfall, / he takes off his shirt and runs / straight into the jets of hard mineral / water funneling down the rock, / all dark except for his shining back / twisted with muscle. He throws water at me / and I scream, droplets spattering / my plastic poncho. This is the same boy / who, across the table at the restaurant, / confided in me the inner workings of miracles.
Nostalgia for the indie rock of the 2000s has not abated. There are more indie sleaze retro dance parties in New York City than there are Duane Reade pharmacies. There does not seem to be as much fondness for the alternative comedy boom of that decade. Comedy doesn’t hold up to hagiography as well. It’s less romantic, doesn’t age as gracefully.