It’s the beginning of this previously announced monthly feature, so the first thing I’ll do is review my plans for it, sure to develop over time. A Reader’s Review is a new, two-part series here on planet Vitruvius.
The first part will be a free post, every four weeks, on Thursdays, titled “A Reader’s Review.” In this monthly review, I’ll offer recommendations of some of the best of what I’ve been reading in periodicals over the past month, in print and online, including Substack. The standards will be idiosyncratic – my intellectual, artistic, or emotional interests and whatever strikes my fancy at a given time. All depending, I’ll provide very brief summary description, some comment, and some striking representative quotation, with links.
I will offer the recommendations in changeable categories, according to what I read that month and what I responded to. I welcome recommendations!
Then, on the Monday after will follow “A Reader’s Review: A Closer Look.” In that paid subscriber essay (always with a substantial free portion at the start), I’ll explore ideas from one of the selections in the previous Thursday’s review. I’ll dig deeper, think more widely, make connections, take issue and argue – all depending.
Let’s get started!
“Miles Davis and the Recording of a Jazz Masterpiece,” by James Kaplan, in Esquire.
Recreates the Manhattan world of March and April 1959 when Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans and the rest recorded the historic Kind of Blue, with particular attention to “So What.”
The Five Spot was closed on Mondays, but on that March Monday Davis, Coltrane, and Evans had other business anyway: in Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio, they were joining the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb to begin making, under Miles’s leadership, what would become the bestselling, and arguably most beloved, jazz album of all time, Miles’s Kind of Blue. March 2 and April 22: three tunes recorded on the first date (“So What,” “Freddie Freeloader,” and “Blue in Green”), two on the second (“All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”). Every complete take but one (“Flamenco Sketches”) was a first take, the process similar, as Evans later wrote in the LP’s liner notes, to a genre of Japanese visual art in which black watercolor is applied spontaneously to a thin stretched parchment, with no unnatural or interrupted strokes possible, Miles’s cherished ideal of spontaneity achieved.
The quiet and enigmatic majesty of the resulting record both epitomizes jazz and transcends the genre. The album’s powerful and enduring mystique has made it widely beloved among musicians and music lovers of every category: jazz, rock, classical, rap. This is the story of the three geniuses who joined forces to create one of the great classics in Western music—how they rose up in the world, came together like a chance collision of particles in deep space, produced a brilliant flash of light, and then went on their separate ways to jazz immortality.
“So What.” was for many years the ringtone on my cellphone. (Currently, it’s Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1.) Somehow that didn’t make it into Kaplan’s account.
From 3 SHADES OF BLUE: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan, to be published on March 5, 2024, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by James Kaplan.
Speaking of cool, you can read my disquisition on cool, a veritable interrogation, with naked, swinging overhead light bulb and hard stares, here:
“The Last, Improbable Refuge for the World’s Endangered Languages,” by Ross Perlin, in the Atlantic.
That’s my home New York City borough of Queens, Perlin is talking about.
For the past decade, one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world, square mile after square mile, has been my home: Queens, New York.
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In my neighborhood, like in many other working-class immigrant neighborhoods in the city’s outer boroughs, hundreds of language groups from around the world have carved out entire communities.
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These are the places where the Endangered Language Alliance, the nonprofit I co-direct, has recorded New Yorkers speaking more than 100 languages that the census and other data sets say don’t officially exist, and more than 700 in total.
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The archetypal New Yorker is neither an artist nor an actor nor a banker, but a working-class, multilingual immigrant. Close to 40 percent of New Yorkers were born in another country, a figure that is only slightly lower than it was a century ago. Numerically, they form the largest foreign-born population of any metropolitan area in the world. About half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home, and many of the rest have non-English-speaking parents or grandparents.
But Perlin writes not just to celebrate diversity, rather also to warn against processes that systemically, institutionally suppress and extinguish minority languages.
The article is excerpted from Perlin’s new book, Language City.
The Last, Improbable Refuge for the World’s Endangered Languages - The Atlantic
“Caesars and Sopranos: The Shadow of Suetonius,” by Tom Holland, in Antigone journal.
Holland explains how the medieval Frankish scholar Einhard, seeking to write a biography of the recently deceased Charlemagne, in 814, turned for a model to the Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69–122 CE).
Tranquillus had lived . . . during the heyday of Roman power, and a single copy of his most famous work, a series of biographies of the Caesars, had been preserved in a Frankish monastery.
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Twelve lives in all featured in Suetonius’ collection. The first was that of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), the dictator whose name had become synonymous with imperial rule; the last that of Domitian (AD 51–96), an emperor who had come to power eighty-one years after the birth of Christ.
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Einhard, studying Suetonius’ method closely, had absorbed the lesson. In his own biography, narratives of Charlemagne’s conquests were combined with the most personal details. The value of Suetonius to Christian scholars was decisively demonstrated. His reputation as the model of how to write the biography of a great ruler was ensured. In a similar manner, the twelve Caesars whose lives constituted the theme of his collection were enshrined as the very archetypes of emperors.
So they remain to this day. That Rome tends to live more vividly in people’s imaginings than other ancient empires owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Pharaohs and Shahs may have presided over civilisations quite as brilliant and influential, but no one ever wrote about them as Suetonius wrote about the Caesars.
Holland goes on to trace this influence into Twentieth Century popular culture and beyond.
Caesars and Sopranos: the Shadow of Suetonius – Antigone (antigonejournal.com)
“Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?” by Joshua Hunt, in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
A detailed and fun read about how the Criterion Collection and now, too, the Criterion Channel, evolved over 40 years into the current standard and sought after imprimatur of quality in international film.
Each year, Criterion selects 50 or 60 new entrants to add to its catalog, which now includes 1,650 films. Some Hollywood directors campaign relentlessly for their films — or their favorite films from the past — to make the list. For legions of film fans, Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with “an aura of hip,” the writer and director Josh Safdie told me in an email. When Safdie’s film “Uncut Gems,” which he directed with his brother, Benny, entered the Criterion Collection with the spine No. 1101, he said they couldn’t help feeling as if they had “snuck in” to the museum that they had admired for so long. “Being a part of the collection is something that we’re both incredibly proud of,” Safdie told me. “It may sound corny but it was more meaningful than awards.”
Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
"Life as a 'Non-standard' Narrative," by Hannah Kim, in The Philosopher.
In the West, very much in the United States, we have become culturally determined to understand our lives narratively – everything’s a “journey.”
There’s something natural about understanding ourselves as main characters, at least in stories that are our lives. We describe stretches of our lives as chapters or label them as eras. A canon event leads us to become who we are. Some philosophers argue that thinking of our lives as narratives helps us understand and direct our lives. It provides a sense of coherence, a shape to a life that can be satisfying and meaningful. Call this the Life-as-Narrative View of personal identity. Jerome Bruner, a psychologist, goes as far as to say that we seem to “have no other way of describing “lived time” save in the form of narrative”.
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It’s not just that the telos-driven Life-as-Narrative View set us up for failure, or that there is more to life than what the agency-driven quest story can capture. It’s also that the insistence on the telos-driven or agency-driven form belies a problematic view of which lives are satisfactory. Standard narrative forms with plot that progress through characters’ decisions take the dominant class’s life experience as “expected” and thus “satisfying.” Note – as Salesses does – how African American literature normalizes coincidence and reunion plots, and how luck or fate had largely been the domain of storytellers of color in America. As a result, we’re given the impression that a “universal” human story is one that doesn’t rely on coincidence. Insisting on the standard narrative form is harmful not only to the person who holds the Life-as-Narrative view, but also to those whose lives aren’t viewed as “standard”.
The essay develops on two levels, one in which the salience of narrative form as a metaphor for lived time is questioned in itself, the other, as just above, in which analysis proceeds through a prism of hierarchical privilege. Each on its own and in tension with each other is worthy of further consideration I may offer in a future essay.
"Life as a 'Non-standard' Narrative" By Hannah Kim (thephilosopher1923.org)
“The Unlikely Heroes of Percival Everett,” by Nadifa Mohamed, in Alta.
Everett is the author of Erasure, the novel from which the current critical film success American Fiction was adapted.
Across his many novels, Everett does not allow much to limit his creative scope. Absurd plots and character names. Dead-end narratives. Obscure and irrelevant asides. Thinly constructed protagonists and unknown antagonists. All of the bête noires of contemporary creative-writing workshops appear unabashedly in his writing. Many novelists claim to not have a reader in mind when they write, but in Everett’s case, I believe him. He seems to be pushing the reader away or perhaps goading them on. You don’t read him for a straight novel. You read him for a trip around his weird and wonderful mind.
Compared to Erasure, American Fiction offers almost a warm, conciliatory embrace, though we can certainly see the latter in the following.
Over a wide range of novels, Everett has kept a place for the academic, a usually melancholic figure who holds his irrelevant knowledge close while the rest of the world slips away.
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Everett said in an interview that race is a “bogus category that we are forced to adopt because people recognize it.” He recognizes what he must but stretches and deforms it until we see something new.
I hope, finally, to offer deeper consideration of ideas in the novel and film on Monday.
The Unlikely Heroes of Percival Everett (altaonline.com)
SUBSTACK RECOMMENDATIONS
I’ve been searching for a way to do this sort of thing for a while, and now I’ve found it. This isn’t a recommendation of particular writers and Substacks, though it’s fair to say that those recommendations are implicit in what this is: recommendations of individual pieces of writing that have struck that fancy of mine. I’m not going to try to make up for lost time by catching up on the various Substack writers I’ve been favoring all along. By nature of their quality, they’ll all appear soon enough. These are two works that came to mind because they are both longer, serialized efforts of a kind many people may not realize are available on Substack, and they are both so good and in progress. To adapt Ezra Pound from one of his better utterances among many far lesser ones, good writing is “news that stays news.”
’ s serialized novel, free, In Judgement of Others, subtitled A dark comedy of psychosis in the Home Counties, in weekly installments.We’re up to installment 23 as of now but the great thing about free online installments is that you can start at the beginning now. Ever since I discovered Eleanor, I’ve been praising her sentences. That’s high praise from me. If you don’t have the sentences, you may write, but . . .
Everyone was looking at her; Clare on the sofa, Scott in the middle of the room, the two women in blue jackets, Dr Stemping one step closer, the policewoman - where was the policewoman? She was sure she’d been there. People were appearing and disappearing, and she couldn’t make it out. The man in the trilby smiled. Tessa ran for the stairs. One of the women in blue jackets caught her as she reached the first step.
The rest was a blur for Tessa, a blur she knew too well. Arms held down, screaming, and crying and kicking at Scott and women in blue jackets. A strap too tight, an ambulance too bright, shouting and lights smacked with darkness, a sleep that gave no rest, a knowledge, deep inside, that she was dying. She struggled and kicked. She cried and pushed away, refused the drugs, and shouted at them to let her go. They never gave her enough time. They never let her be. They always interrupted as if they knew. They didn’t understand she could see stars.
In Judgement of Others - by Eleanor Anstruther (substack.com)
In turn romantic (always romantic), funny, achingly poignant, and poetically allusive, our empathy for the grief of Mary’s loss and her struggle to understand and then overcome compels us through the chapters.
I had been married twenty-one years when D. announced, “I need to live alone.” Oh so Greta Garbo. There was absolutely no noise. I was sixty years old and had been chasing him around the bedroom—to no avail—for ten years. Bill Maher in a comedy routine on HBO not so long after he had been dumped by ABC only to arise again with Politically Incorrect, said in a joke about older women, “menopause.” Get it? Men A Pause. Yeah, I got it.
I Need to Live Alone: Chapter 1 - by <Mary L. Tabor> (substack.com)
There’s more, but this is long enough. I hope some of these recommendations intrigue you. Every one of them rewarded me with deepened knowledge and the pleasure of good reading. Maybe you, too. I’ll be back Monday with “A Reader’s Review: A Closer Look,” this first time around, free to all in its entirety.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
Jay, This is such a valuable compendium. Thank you for doing this.
I'm looking forward to reading the Life as Narrative essay. Agency vs. fate. A way to think about both life and literature.
Jay - tremendous resource you have compiled here for us. I love this type of article because it allows me to be exposed to things I might not find in my normal daily routines. Really appreciate this.