Emery Marc Petchauer

Emery Marc Petchauer

What I'm reading, writing, & listening to: 05.24.21

##Reading

I finished reading Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I loved it. Looking back, I see how time is an important character in the novel. Time that passes, time that doesn’t, and us as readers wondering what time has done and is doing to the Vignes twins, their mother, and the people in their lives since the twins ran away decades ago. Time makes up the five parts of the novel as well: 1968, 1978, 1968, 1982, and 1985/1988. I won’t say why, but in the end, time collapses through the twins’ mother. The consequences of liner time are no more, or at least not how I expected when The Reunion happens. Looking at the five divisions of the novel and their order, I guess this could be a signal against the linearity of time – that it won’t matter in the end how we think it will – because it has folded over onto itself.

I also finished Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone and Colson Whitehead’s 2011 zombie apocalypse novel Zone One. Perhaps more thoughts on those in the future, but for the moment, I’ll say I had a difficult time appreciating Zone One. A friend who is a zombie novel aficionado has ranked it second on his “all time” list (World Word Z is his #1). When one critic wrote that the heavy and unpredictable use of flashbacks in Zone One “deny the reader any feeling of narrative satisfaction, through denseness and obfuscation,” I can say I felt that. But I also think I get that Whitehead was trying to represent in narrative form the Post Apocalypse Stress Disorder (referred to as “PASD”) that all of the characters suffer from. “PASD” sounds like past, and that’s where flashbacks take you. Get it? I’ll still take The Girl With All the Gifts as my #1 novel featuring zombies, but it’s partly for how it affords a kind of reading about teaching and education.

##Writing

No writing this week, and that’s fine. I took the week off to read in full, as you might detect above.

##Listening

Mixes I’m playing

New discoveries

Reissued Philly soul in this short LP by Mitzi Ross.

Records I’m spinning & sampling

Late 1970s soul from Columbus, Ohio. The WEE record was reissued a while back by Numero, but I managed to land a gifted, original copy through my friend J. Rawls.

Funk from Hawai’i. This standout track, “Hunk of Heaven,” has been reissued on Jazzman records, but this week I got into the deeper cuts of the LP in a studio session with a collaborator.

Former member of the Supremes, Jean Terrell, takes off in this rocket ship of a track.