Gia wants to disappear. This is an ordinary desire while in pain. In moments of hardship, it is tempting to admire the ascetic. The imagined glory of solitude is that our inner life will become a source of endless pleasure. Of course, this is fiction. Everyone is touched by loneliness, while alone and in company. To bear it, we must find something from beyond to sustain us. This is what Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera seeks.

Polek’s debut novel, published last month by Graywolf, shows us the mechanics of a mind negotiating a rupture. It’s easy to say that Bitter Water Opera is about a breakup, but that would be a narrow view. As in real life, the relationship comes undone downstream from a more preeminent but obscured event in the emotional life of one or both parties. Gia’s relationship seems fine. It is sparsely characterized, mostly through memories of excursions dotted with palms and bougainvillea. But for Gia, this pleasantness is intolerable. She starts acting erratically, flirting with strangers. Soon after, she leaves both him and her post in a university film department. Her mental state is vague, made up of a loose association of memories, summoning trinket-like facts, like “the prevalent tone in nature is the key of E.” She has traded a life in exchange for something she has not yet learned to want. But what is to be done when desire turns its cheek to you? What is there to want when you’ve stopped wanting what you wanted? In the absence of wanting, it is helpful to find a human example to follow, try to insinuate yourself in their map of desire and its attendant habits.

Through the figure of the dancer and choreographer Marta Becket, Gia tries to summon a model for a life she could find agreeable. “Marta got through without needing, grieving, or waiting on someone, and now, after death, I was her witness, hoping that she, in some act of imitation on my part, could fix my life.” Becket was a real woman who abandoned her life as a ballerina in New York in favor of the oblivion of Death Valley, where she dedicated herself to running a previously abandoned recreation hall to showcase her one-woman plays and ballets. At the Amargosa Opera House, Becket performed her own choreography for nearly fifty years. In the early days, her only audience members were the faces of heroes and loved ones that she had painted into the trompe l’oeil mezzanines, from which they permanently applauded. Her husband, Polek writes, was off with the prostitutes in town, trying to withstand the fact that Marta did not need him. Eventually she became a cult figure, luring crowds, the press, and lost women like Gia into her orbit, even after death.

After Gia writes her a letter, the ghost of Marta enters Gia’s life, and with her a flurry of activity. The pair have full days together: painting, picknicking, hiking. For a while Gia pantomimes Marta’s actions, but it soon becomes evident that she is not yet ready to stand up to the task of living (she attempts to get back together with her ex-boyfriend). The ghost of Marta exits, taking her watercolors with her. Gia descends into catatonia. Towards the middle of the novel, Gia looks out over the pond outside a house in the country where she’s staying alone and sees the floating corpse of a dead deer. This visceral encounter with a rotting animal draws Gia out of the misty, desultory realm she has lived in for so long and forces her to contend with the bare facts of nature, and the nature of herself: she does not live the life of an embodied subject. Her central problem is her tendency for “limerence,” as she calls it, which leaves her chronically unable to connect with the present. But this insight is brief, and an epiphany does not cohere. “The smell faded for good, and with it my revelation.” Here she is confronted with the mystery of herself: something has peeked out from the curtain behind which her mind stages a secret play. It is a glimpse at something that will eventually be revealed in full, but she must wait. Insight tends to come soon after we are emptied out completely. As the epigraph notes, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

If you’re a comics lover or want to dip your foot into the comics world, look no further than this year’s slate of Eisner Award nominees. The Eisners are given for excellence and achievement in comics and among the most prestigious honors given to comic creators and their work. They are given to comics published in the United States, though creators themselves do not need to be American.

The award began in 1988, and as of 2024, Eisners are given in 32 categories. This year’s nominees include over 150 different titles, both in print and online. Several titles and creators were nominated in multiple categories.

Here are a handful of the categories and their nominees.

One star for Francis Ford Coppola's 'loopy' retro-futuristic passion project

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes these books are brand new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. This week, let’s talk about a novel set in a redwood grove in California.

Warning: no Premier League CEOs were egged in the making of this podcast.

Marcus, Luke, Andy and Pete preview the final weekend of the Premier League season! Can David Moyes spoil the party in Manchester? Pete thinks so! Can the supercomputer be proved wrong? John Cross thinks so! And will Jürgen Klopp turn up to his final game at Anfield in just a baseball cap and nothing else? We all think so!

Plus, Andy drops a bombshell about Klopp and Pete drops a bombshell about his past life and a terrible incident with the Hobgoblin hobgoblin. Come join us!

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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April 13 – May 17, 2024

March 21 – May 17, 2024

The quantity and quality of consternation caused me by the publication of Alec Wilkinson’s Moonshine in 1985 is difficult to articulate. This utterance should prove probative. If we are in a foreword, an afterword, or perhaps ideally a middleword, we will shortly be in a model of muddle at the very end of the clarity spectrum away from Moonshine itself, with its amber lucidity, as someone said of the prose of someone, sometime, maybe of Beckett, maybe of Virgil, who knows, throw it into the muddle. The consternation caused me by this book is even starker next to the delight of reading the book itself before the personal accidents of my response are figured in. I will essay to detail those accidents, but I would like to first say something about the method of the writing.

Alec Wilkinson is one of two literary grandsons of Joseph Mitchell, the grandfather of the poetry of fact. “The poetry of fact” is a phrase I momentarily fancied I coined, but the second literary grandson of Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, corrected me, and I have assented to his claim that he coined the phrase. One’s vanities are silly and dangerous. It is a vanity to think to say there are but two grandsons of Joseph Mitchell as well. There are doubtless dozens and, of course, granddaughters, too; what I mean is that Alec Wilkinson and Ian Frazier are the grandsons with whom I am most familiar, and most fond, and so it is convenient to sloppily say they are it.

What is the poetry of fact? Good question. Since I am not the coiner of the term and, at best, a dilettante in its practice, I may be excused, I hope, if my answer is wanting, but I vow to do my best. I, alas, have brought it up. When the justice of the peace who conducted my marriage, Judge Leonard Hentz of Sealy, Texas, asked if anyone objected to the imminent union, he looked up and said, of our sole witness, “Well, hell, he’s the only one here, and y’all brought him, so let’s get on with it.”

The poetry of fact is the ordering for power of empirical facts, historical facts, narrative elements, objects, dialogues, clauses, phrases, words—it is the construction of catalogues of things large or small into arrays of power. The power of the utterance is the point. The preferred mode of delivery is the declarative sentence, simple or compound, without subordination or dependent clauses—without what Mr. Frazier has called “riders.” Power in this instance—in any writing, really—is to be understood as a function of where things are placed. The end of a series or sequence or catalogue or paragraph or chapter or essay or book is the position of what we will call primary thrust. It is what will linger in the brain uppermost because it is lattermost. The beginning of an array, large or small, is the position of secondary thrust: the “first impression” that gets lost but never quite recedes. The middle of an array is the tertiary thrust—the middle gets lost in the middle, ordinarily. This is the middle’s job. Games can be played with these positions of emphasis. A sockdolager, to employ Twain, can be buried in the middle where, because it is a sockdolager, it is not exactly buried and may constitute a surprise. The emphatic middle, let us call it, installs an irony, raises an eyebrow whether anyone realizes it or not. An “unemphatic” end also installs an eyebrow. Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is onto but the very tip of this iceberg with its Elementary Principles of Composition #18: “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” Were it “The words at the end of a sentence are emphatic,” they’d have been closer to the nuanced complexity of the poetry of fact, but let’s move on.

Making the very most of your rented living space can be a challenge –here's how

Little-remembered film Robin Redbreast is terrifying – and back in the spotlight