Emery Marc Petchauer

Emery Marc Petchauer

What I'm reading, writing, teaching, & listening to this week: 05.10.21

Reading

I’m reading Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I picked it up in a nice stack a few weeks ago during a session in an actual bookstore. How filling the time was. It’s true: I’m shallow enough to judge a book from the first sentence. This book begins with an excellent one:

The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort.

It’s not lost on me that this opening flash takes place at a diner, and many interactions in Bennett’s other novel, The Mothers, also took place at a diner. It’s not the same diner, and it might not matter at all, but I like those kinds of things and always look for them when I read multiple novels by an author.

Here’s another great string of sentences from my first 20 minutes with the book:

Telling Stella a secret was like whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight. Nothing escaped her. But she hadn’t imagined then that Stella was keeping secrets of her own.

Whispering into a jar and screwing the lid tight. I know that image will be in my heart all week.

Writing

Still working on my promotion essay. I riffed a bit on relationality this week. I don’t think this part is in final form, but it’s getting there – and writing around it taught me something I hadn’t realized about relationality and my work.

The connections among these pursuits is neither a matter of consequence nor of “expertise” trickling down to teaching and outreach. Rather, these connections are a matter of relationality. I don’t mean relationality only interpersonally. I mean “being well attached….By identifying more threads of association, we are better able to see these attachments not as constraints but as forces to harness” (Unflattening).

Teaching

No teaching as the semester is now finished. I have on my mind to complete a post-mortem for myself, debriefing on the new class I taught, but I’ll have to get a few things off my plate first. I’m hopeful that too much time won’t have passed before then for it not to be useful.

Listening