Blurb is a funny sounding word. It’s phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition—an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one—carries some of the same meaning as another unattractive word, blubber, which evokes excess in its dual definition as both an expostulation of unrestrained emotion as well as excess fat. For these reasons alone, any sensible person should beware of blurbs.
My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.
I looked at the objects in the house
the titles of the books
strange incandescence from the windows
The kebaya became a word used for both men and women's robes or blouses, but from the 19th Century onwards, it became synonymous in Southeast Asia with a women's blouse paired with a batik sarong. This style became popular with Dutch women during the times of the Dutch East Indies (in what is now Indonesia), and was also adopted by women in Southeast Asia who followed Islam and wanted to dress more modestly.
Melinda Moustakis’ fiction is an expert tutorial in braiding a story’s environment with its characters’ paths, as much as it is an unveiling of how that braid is not a braid at all but an inseparability, place inextricable from human life. In her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award and also garnered a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 selection, that place was the Alaska wilderness across thirteen stories that intersected with survival, with the toughness an unpredictable environment requires, and with the vulnerability of surrendering to a landscape. Moustakis delves even deeper into the Alaskan terrain in her debut novel, Homestead, exploring the tension between taming and untaming, between human willpower and the will of a terrain, and between characters who seek both togetherness and solitude in a new-to-them place. The result is a luminous and fierce portrait of early marriage as a territory moves toward statehood.
Who on earth ever loved Margaret Atwood for her cautious restraint? She swings at all pitches, and sometimes she misses. (Her 2015 novel “The Heart Goes Last” lost me at the Elvis sex bots, but good God, it was fun.)
I’d be more tempted to dwell on the puzzle of that grab bag of middle stories being sandwiched between realistic, virtuosic, elegiac linked stories if the reasoning didn’t so simply present itself: This is Atwood. This is our four-faced Janus, who’s got one face turned to the past, one to the present, one to the future and the fourth inside a spaceship, telling stories about eating horses. Long may she reign.
Frameworks like crip time and Afrofuturism suggest two things: that linear time as we experience it in the West is a colonial construction, and that each person’s experience of temporality is—or, at least, once was, and could be again—informed by their identity, geography, and lived experience.
Both of these ideas are at the heart of Jenny Odell’s new book, Saving Time. A writer and artist from California, Odell became a near-household name in 2019 with her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. That book argued that doing nothing in a society that constantly demands our productivity and attention is a difficult but crucial task, and that “solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.” Her newest book falls along similar thematic lines, but rather than arguing for the importance of “wasting time,” she is exploring the nature of temporality itself.