2023 read #46: Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien.

Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien

83 pages

Published 2021

Read from May 3 to May 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

This book thunders and glides with impeccable grace and gravity. A collection of poetry at the intersections of eldritch horror and Black magnitude, of hip-hop and the cosmic, of white violence and the radical significance of Blackness, Tentacle hooks you in from the cover and never lets up, never lets go. In a cruel universe of horrors, “We are here,” as O’Brien writes in his author’s note, “because we have made an effort to remain, and to value what remains, as we must.”

It’s impossible to choose any particular favorite poems here; basically every piece has lines of multifaceted beauty and power, every stanza has a weight of importance. That said, I always like to single out particular poems:

“Hastur Asks for Donald Glover’s Autograph”

“because who she is matters more than her words”

“the repossession of skin”

“Lovecraft Thesis #1”

“postcard 20xx, where there are no dirges”

“Birth, Place”

“Young Poet Just Misses Getting MF DOOM’s Autograph”

“The Metaphysics of a Wine, in Theory and Practice”

“time, and time again”

“That Business They Call Utopia, Part One”

“drop some amens”

2014 read #38: Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd.

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd
468 pages
Published 2002
Read from March 5 to April 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Albion's encyclopedic density recalls Ackroyd's London: The Biography, which I adored but just couldn't get through back in 2012. It is a rich but occasionally unfulfilling stew of anecdote, historical adumbration, and cameo, breezing through quite interesting asides but returning again and again to themes which grow tiresome not a hundred pages in. Albion is a sustained argument for a sort of national character or genius loci, born of place rather than race; not a chapter goes by without ticking through a rosary of Ackroyd's characterizations of the English taste or temper, which he relates nebulously (mostly by means of repetition) to Anglo-Saxon or occasionally Celtic originals. We learn that the English have a taste for surface ornamentation at the expense of internal grandeur, which Ackroyd relates to everything from Celtic knotwork to Perpindicular Gothic architecture to the English detective novel. We learn of the English "embarrassment" or reticence, seen in everything from the wry self-effacement of authors to the screened-in structure of the hidden English garden. We get told again and again of the English (or rather Londonish) taste for variety in emotional effects and spectacle, rather than lingering examination of any one mode of feeling. Ackroyd's disinclination (and presumed inability) to offer explanations for why such a stereotypical "placist" temper could persist over at least a millennium and a half leaves Albion a collection of moods and curiosities rich in superficial detail but lacking inner substance. Likely it's meant that way.

Another thing that Albion taught me is that I have read pathetically little of the classic English literary canon. I gotta start with Chaucer and Langland and work my way forward, one of these years.

2013 read #126: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
353 pages
Published 2007
Read from September 27 to September 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Ever since I was 12, I have had music almost constantly stuck in my head. It began when my father had taken me and fled from Ohio after my brother had ran away to live with our mother's family. It was a disordered time, a time of escalation for my father's debilitating paranoia; while I, having lost my only "friend" and point of stability in the world, was left trying to cling to fragments of my old life (I resumed writing, with a persistent idea of showing off my stories to Randy after he "came back"), Eric was desperately trying to shed effects and belongings and ties, streamlining (as he thought) his efforts to seek "asylum" for us in various foreign countries. The car that drew us west lacked a working radio, and Eric kept hold of only two or three cassettes, one of which was the Moody Blues' Seventh Sojourn. As autumn chilled the plains and volcanic mesas of western New Mexico, I heard Seventh Sojourn again and again and again, the only music I knew for months; when Eric grew sick of the repetition and refused to play the tape, I reconstructed it note by note, song by song in my head. I could begin with the opening thrum and drums of "Lost in a Lost World" and replay the album all the way to the whistling and clapping and synthesizer blurt that closed out "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)." From those cramped, crippling days more than half a lifetime ago, I've rarely known more than a few minutes' peace from the intrusions of musical earworms.

Whether because of this or just out of general intellectual curiosity, the subject of music's effect on the brain has long fascinated me. And since I already like the work of Oliver Sacks, this book was an obvious choice. Although Sacks is a fluent writer, his neurological works are, necessarily, oriented for the appreciation of lay readers. "Tales" is indeed an apt description of Musciophilia's contents; Sacks describes various patients and correspondents, an edifyingly broad array of musical pathologies and anomalies, but I came away from it not feeling that I understood much more than I had before. Sacks' analysis rarely delves beyond the correlation between certain neurological abnormalities and musical maladies and prodigies; a line from the closing paragraph, "Music is part of being human," is just about all I took away from this book. Granted, anything more involved would get technical quite rapidly, and the "purpose" of humanity's musicality is of course the topic of unresolved (perhaps unresolvable) debate. I can't fault Sacks for his safe, descriptive format, but Musicophilia felt more like a list of neurological curiosities than anything insightful.