“Rolling Stone really took a John versus Paul approach to the universe — and they were on John’s side — but everyone wanted to know where you stood,” says Kozinn, who was 15 at the time. “I was a John guy.”
Not anymore.
Kozinn went on to cover music for the New York Times; over the decades, during which he wrote about the Beatles and even got to interview Paul McCartney, he evolved. He has just spent eight years working with Adrian Sinclair on “The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969-73,” the first of four planned tomes, exhaustively detailed, examining the songwriter’s post-Beatles life and career.
The loss of Bookforum is a tragedy, and probably a completely unnecessary one. We need a culture that talks (and argues) about books. Books make us smart, and being smart (which is not synonymous with being credentialed or having a high “IQ”) is crucial if the members of a democratic society are going to make good governance decisions. As book reviews disappear, so does intelligent public discussion about history, politics, and culture.
Connell, who died in 2013, is in part to blame for his own obscurity. More than just camera-shy and subdued, he avoided anything that resembled a traditional career, and—writing almost always on spec, without a contract—was uninterested in developing a literary brand.
Bernadette Mayer was the greatest minor American poet of the 20th century, and the 21st too, in which she has become less minor. There are other contenders, of course, many—but Mayer is mine.
"Bet you can't run a marathon" or "bet you can't learn a second language" or "bet you can't quit drinking soft drinks." Most of the time the voice is my friend, but sometimes it leads me astray. Once it had me doing a sleep experiment that sent my mind into meltdown. That's probably the worst thing the little voice told me to do.
The second worst? Cold showers. Please allow me to tell you why I've been taking nothing but cold showers for the entirety of 2022.
Morimi’s trick is to wrong-foot his reader, denying us the pleasure of branching fates, and instead using each iteration to poke at the narrator’s unreliability — the ways he shunts blame, ignores his own damage, blinds himself to Ozu’s sneaky charisma, eschews the pretty good in pursuit of the perfect. In his final run-through, the narrator discovers that he is alone in a labyrinth. Whenever he tries to exit his bedroom, he enters the exact same room, laid out with the exact same straw mats, that titular “tatami galaxy.” His psychic despair has been given architectural form. His escape, after 80 days of wandering, is a treat better left unspoiled, and impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t yet walked the ever-deepening grooves of this cyclical novel. Rest assured it offers an emotional and expository release valve for all of Morimi’s meticulous repetitions. Under all the technical whirring of “The Tatami Galaxy” is that old pang, familiar to anyone who has ever been an adolescent lump in a tiny room, aching for something rosier than the contents of a mini fridge. There is no time loop quite like self-pity.
Show me your teeth. Can you lift your arms?
Try to smile. Close your eyes. Swallow.