Curt Barnes > Recent Status Updates

Starting Louise mid-book after reading Cartarescu's epochal Solenoid, I can say I like my poetry plainspoken and prosaic and my prose dense, poetic and convoluted. Go figure.

I may not finish this; it's a kind of college text for future teachers rather than the deep-dive into the psychology of converting squiggles to mentally reconstructed sounds to pictures to ideas that I was hoping for. The book I was looking for is probably out there somewhere, but I haven't found it here.

So far read "The Spot on the Wall" and "The New Dress," both full of quotable lines and marvelously rambling in structure, aping the narrators' interior lives.

So far, three sad tales with no larger philosophical point than to recount modest lives and beset them with tragedy and/or disappointment. Am curious now to psychoanalyze Ms Lahiri, which is not a good sign.

So far, three sad tales with no larger philosophical point than to recount modest lives and beset them with tragedy. She writes well, and these are original situations in my experience but I am curious now to psychoanalyze Ms Lahiri, which is not a good sign.

So far, three sad tales with no larger philosophical point than to recount modest lives and beset them with tragedy. Am curious now to psychoanalyze Ms Lahiri, which is not a good sign.

Having had recent success reading outside my expertise with Ed Yong's " An Immense World," I thought Ellenberg's "Shape" might do the trick for solid geometry, but alas, no. Too much detail in a field I'm only marginally interested in; a magazine article might have served me just fine. I'm tabling this indefinitely after 80 pages or so.

The gay author is of the generation that insists on they/them pronouns for all gay and trans people; this makes for annoying and sometimes ambiguous passages for me. She is a highly skilled writer of energetic, colorful prose, but the jury is still out whether the story will add up to more than silliness

She's a capable writer with comic twists, but so far I'm annoyed by the use of plural pronouns for gay characters. More later.

Re-reading after 30 years, and laughing out loud all over again. Sorrentino's most popular work, a "meta" travesty or multiple satire, one of those. It's from a more exuberant, optimistic era, maybe. I've almost everything he wrote, and this isn't his most important, but it's great fun.

Intro only, but what a fact-filled beginning! I've been misusing "sensorium" when the concept I needed was Umwelt.

What a great craftsman is this writer! I love his economy, his way of getting into a story so breathtakingly fast. His dialogue is whip-smart but never beggars belief. And tremendously entertaining. His poor Latinx and black Houston residents are rarely themselves upbeat, though life forces many to be rock-hard realists. He wrote these stories, still in his 20s. His background? An interview revealed how staggeringly

Gould's magnum opus, a sprawling, ruminative celebration of his field in a focus on one of its greatest discoveries. Gould is erudite as has been no paleontologist before him and deploys his brilliance and fertile mind to create a volume that entertains the literate reader well beyond the usual science book intended for a lay audience.

I've read all the other Sarah Vowells I could get my hands on, and there are great passages here that don't require a deep familiarity with 70s pop music, but finally I may be stalled and have to call this quits. I wish she'd write more quirky American history, but maybe the well is dry. Alas.

Seemingly a specialist in short-story reading recently, I should have come to Smith's dazzling virtuosity sooner. Only Eisenberg can match her variety, and even that's debatable. Who knew she'd be focused on Manhattanites for this tome? Great stylistic variety and the ethnicity of her protagonists as well. If she oversteps the injunction ("write what you know"), I can't tell.

Having read only a couple of her short stories in the New Yorker, these were unexpectedly dazzling. First, she makes as good an American writer as an English one, for cognizance of our ways and expressions. Second, "Miss Adele and the Corsets" was so vividly dead-on for a match-up between a Black transvestite and a Jewish corset shopkeeper that I was left gasping. Crazy insightful.