Arguably the best living poet in English and an author of great intelligence and imagination. She has written a number of masterpieces, including her monumental Nox, and has reimagined what poetic form can do in the 21st century. Writing this in a plane but I want to find her books in my library!

Since it came out, I cannot stop listening to this album. A band that mixes deep, beautiful singing with cinematic melodies that draw from everything from Hans Zimmer to disco to 60s rock to Sade to Billie Eilish to synth pop, to create a music that could at home in a Wong-Kar Wai film. To die for.

Michael Showalter’s Verity is a fun trashy film that is perhaps too shy in its salaciousness and a bit schematic in its plotting, but altogether enjoyable with a strong cast , also worth for the politics of its metafictional representation of the institution of trashy thriller fiction. In theaters.

A smart book structured as a mixture of a campus novel and a semi-faux autofiction, centered on a writer, named like the author, whose perception of the world changes at the neurological level while navigating the Biden-era cultural politics. Pulls the rug from under the assumptions of its genres

Carolyn Forché is one of my favorite poets. I know some people don’t like her declarative style and her idea of poetry of witness but her poems capture powerful snapshots of a world besieged by political violence, in which language both turns it into sense and finds a fleeting refuge against it.

Clocking at 645 pages, American Hagwon is a masterful realist global knowledge that weaves a tapestry of lives tied to a number of educational systems, migrations and financial catastrophes over a few decades. It shines particularly in character development.

Beautiful to receive today two books from dear friends who are both intellectually brilliant and deeply forceful in the politics of their work, both thinking at the cutting edge of their fields, essential to guide our present.

Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, an aesthetically provocative indictment of the sleaze behind televisual justice and its politics of exploitation with a killer performances by Robert Pattinson and Phoebe Bridgers through the visual registers of raw footage and horror. In theaters.

Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana, an unsparing, slow-burning indictment of class and climate injustice, from the eyes of a young tee-girl traversing the absurd, even violent, layers of a golf resort in the middle of a drought. In theaters.

Fab day at the Library of Congress, where the Kluge Center hosted a Salon of books by former Kluge Chairs. It meant a lot that my talk on Taco resonated so much with young Mexican American students form the U of Texas system who were very engaged on my ideas against authenticity and for modernity

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil sets aside the mythology of the Anderson/Jovovich films and instead delivers a very well crafted video game structured in RPG and first-person shooter visuals and atmospherics narrated through levels, upgrades and Easter eggs. In theaters.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner, four precise whodunnit’s wrapped by a marvelous chamber drama set around a brilliant anti-epic, a Stringbergian counterpoint to the Shakespearean jidaigeki of the unrelated Akira. A real masterpiece. In theaters.

Belfast books and films harvest

Final book of the trip, picked up in Belfast, a fantastic novel from the author of A Ghost in the throat, continuing her studies of the spectral in the archive, parsing through the records of a Victorian psychiatric hospital in the process of being gentrified into apartments. Five stars.

Third novel of the trip,a history of the tensions between land and territory and the aftermaths of colonialism in terms of loss and emigration. The spatial writing and expansive imagination are very good but character development is flat. May have been better as an epic or a novella than a 350p book

Here’s the performance I mentioned that channels the ghosts of the Batallón de San Patricio, for when you have 20 minutes: www.youtube.com/live/EdhJPqb...

Concert: Ricki O’Rawe, Paul Stapleton and Conor McAuley

YouTube video by Music at Queen's

youtube.com

An absolute joy to be part of the festivities for the 100th anniversary of the Spanish program at Queen’s University in Belfast, part of a group with Luis Garcia Montero, Claudia Masin, Elvira Lindo, and Juan Manuel Bonet. Thank you to Sarah Bowskill for the invite and Isabel Torres for organizing!

Second read of the trip: a brilliant if pedagogic neo-naturalist novel on the hardening of the Salazar police state and the road to the Carnation revolution as experiences by the contradictory stances of three siblings, a very worthwhile read.

Heading to the UK for the centenary celebrations of Spanish at Queen’s University, Belfast, where I will present my talk “Reframing the Humanities through the Right to Culture” in dialogue with Sarah Bowskill, an amazing fellow Mexicanist. I am very honored to be part of the distinguished group:

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Karl Ove in the house

A lovely family saga imagining the life of the unknown woman in Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady and her fictionalized descendancy up to the present, a bit syrupy but will well-written characters and a strong structure of temporal shifts. A good plane read.