Friday Links: Do Footnotes Count As Tics Edition
"New York is a Tourettic city, and this great communal scratching and counting and tearing is a definite symptom" - Jonathan Lethem, 'Motherless Brooklyn'
When my kid was starting three-year-old pre-k, I realized I’ve never been able to sit still. Always toe-tapping, finger-drumming. Now that I’m a House Husband (Housband?) and Writer, it’s even worse—always up and moving around, jumping from chores to working and back. Another weird thing is my feet always have to be touching the same thing, like if I step on the bumpy part of the sidewalk before crossing an intersection with one foot, my other foot has to do the same on the other side. Now, my kid has his eccentricities and particularities, but doesn’t have Tourette’s. Neither do I. But watching him, trying to understand him, helps me understand myself, too. Reading a narrator in a book that gives a little bit of voice to your own tics? It’s a magical thing.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
Another re-read that might as well be a first read. I picked this up, must’ve been 2010-11, because I know I was reading it on a boat. Big noir phase when I was working on the boats, maybe because our dock was under a bridge and a Big Bad (Trump Tower!) was upstairs. What I remember is 1) being assured this is a sensitive portrayal of people with Tourette’s and 2) absolutely falling in love with the prose. If you’re a fan of language games—and 22-23-year-old Chris thought language games were the absolute goal of writing, big Salman Rushdie phase during that time, too—you’ll like this book. Also did I mention detective stories? It’s a good detective story. I’m talking, of course, about Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.
Now, all that stuff I was saying up there about finding common ground with Lionel Essrog? I don’t actually know anyone with Tourette’s. Reading up on R/Tourette’s, responses to this book (or at least its film adaptation) range from “this is a good portrayal of Tourette’s” to “I’m avoiding this because any portrayal will make my own tics act up.” This is maybe a lot of, ahem, throat-clearing to say: what writing in this book! This prose must be what reviewers mean when they use that “tour de force” cliche I despise. It is, like Bourdain, breezy while also being maximalist. It is (also like Bourdain) deeply sensualist. Lionel is irritated and inconvenienced by his tics, but he also takes great pleasure in them. He is very in touch with his surroundings, at one with all of the stuff that makes us alive. I think I loved this book so much when I first read it because despite my quibbles (and some pretty real flaws), it is absolutely the kind of book I want to write. Not in a “white writer goes Oscar-baity with portrayal of Tourette’s sufferer” way, but in a “when I picture what a capital-N Novel looks like, this is close.” That said, let’s get into some stuff.
The novel has its 1999-isms: Brooklyn as a rough-and-tumble borough, an obsession with hardboiled tropes (was this a thing for everyone in the late 90s/early aughts or was it just me? I don’t feel like it was just me), Kimmery is not a real character she is a cardboard cutout of a spot on the Hero’s Journey Wheel, extended 25th Hour-style1 discussions of immigrant classes, a white author during the “End Of History” period of the US using a few Diegetic N-Words, or parsing the exact meaning of the phrase “half a f-slur.”2 All I’m saying is be prepped for a very well-written detective novel that is also very 1999.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Why not this set of MF DOOM instrumentals from Oma? Or is it OMA? Either way, it rips.
From awhile back, Sabrina Imbler with a Creaturefector on the parenting techniques of poison frogs. As the father of a child, it thrills me to read about the fathers of tadpoles, who are very involved and have strong backs. A pull quote: “The researchers measured the volume of each pool by sucking the water into a turkey baster, and measured the dissolved oxygen and turbidity of sediment in the water. ‘We cut the turkey baster so it was large enough so that a tadpole, if it was sucked up, would go for a little ride and then go back into its little home,’ Tumulty said.”
This Saturday, tomorrow, Chicago Maqam is playing a benefit concert for Gaza at Constellation. Reporting for Reader, J.R. Nelson and Leor Galil say the show will benefit Doctors Without Borders and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Chicago Maqam is a five-piece that “blends traditional Arab music and contemporary improvisation.” Sounds rad as hell, you ask me.
Speaking of Palestine and Chicago cultural institutions, over 2,000 poets and writers are boycotting The Poetry Foundation over the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices. Dan Sheehan at Lit Hub reporting. This is the latest in a long line of Poetry Foundation fuckups, and I don’t have much to say beyond how disappointing it is that that beautiful of a building situated in the downtown of a world-class city where the entire focus is poetry continually fumbles the bag this much. You pass out free poetry magazines—literally called Poetry—yet you know nothing of the world and its people. Shameful.
Content on the internet is going through a dark time—at least “text-based content written by smart people who got paid for their work” is going through a dark time. In the wake of the zillionth killing/resurrection of a G/O Media product, Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg over at 404 talking about why advertisers don’t want sites like Jezebel to exist. It was bad enough when Mark Zuckerberg was walking into rooms firing all our friends. The idea of a bunch of bitter and sweaty Pete Campbells and Paul Kinseys now decide whether radical writing—sorry, writing “with teeth”—has a home on the internet? That makes me want to puke martinis and oysters all over Madison Avenue.
One more from Sabrina Imbler, and this one for the SFF writers out there: what future does de-extinction promise? Is it worth it to bring back the mammoth? The dodo? To save you a click (but do click): we can’t actually bring these animals back. Not as they were. Nor can they live where they once did. They’d be generic hybrids, confined to Dr. Moreau- or Jurassic Park-style designated habitats. The pull quote is defining: “de-extinction do not really offer atonement, but instead a grand gesture—even if it works, it will not change the path of shortsighted greed that got us here…It cannot restore what has been lost, and overlooks all that we have left to lose.” All that said…SFF writers, please read and use as inspiration.
That’s all for this week, here’s a photo of Brooklyn. I do love rowhouses:
If you’re in the service industry, I sincerely hope no one asks you to put something on a dead guy’s tab. I had so much anxiety for Zeod’s bottom line in this novel. Also I hope your boss doesn’t force you to try to intimidate anyone. May you clean up in tips this weekend.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
GOOD LORD I forgot how Internet Atheist, Reddit-in-2007-coded that rant is. Benioff wrote that! The warning signs for the latter seasons of Game of Thrones were there. Also, I learned how to footnote! Pretty cool, huh? I don’t think so either.
You know which f-word it is because it is against the style guide of this blog to censor “fuck.” Ok, no more fuckin footnotes.