One Podcast:
I had the pleasure of talking with Alex Kuchma of the New Books Network podcast about my recent edited collection, Boogie Down Predictions, as well as my books Dead Precedents and The Medium Picture. A student of hip-hop culture like me, Alex is steeped in the stuff. He came to the discussion with sharp questions and insight. It was a pleasure.
Check it out here, on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Many thanks to Alex and the New Books Network for the interest and the opportunity.
Two Synchronicities:
I was at the Chamblin Uptown Café last week, one of the locations of the great bookstore in Jacksonville, Florida, looking for a Philip Larkin book. After going through all of the poetry section, I looked through their extensive biography section, to no avail. I went by the other location before leaving town, and I checked poetry again, then gave up.
As I was looking through the essay collections, I came across The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis. My friend Will Wiles mentioned this book specifically when Amis passed a couple of weeks ago. Though I'd never read anything by him, he'd been on my list since I read my first Will Self book about 20 years ago (Amis blurbed it). So, I flipped it open to the table of contents, and there’s a chapter on Philip Larkin...
Then, when I got back home, my mom had gotten me a book. It was the lone text in a shopping cart she bought from this bargain store she frequents. They regularly load up whole shopping carts of stuff and sell them for $10 each. The book in this one was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I’d read it years before, but its sudden appearance felt important.
A little while later, I remembered that there was something in one of my notebooks that I wanted to double check. I thought I'd left that particular notebook in storage, but then I spotted it in a pile of recently retrieved stuff on the coffee table. By then I'd forgotten what it was I wanted to look up, but I opened the notebook, and on the first page were “The Three Essential Things”—from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury…
I wrote about synchronicities like this (as well as research magick and associative trails) in my recent column for Lit Reactor, and now they seem to be happening more often.
Keep your eyes open.
Three Essential Things:
By the way, according to Faber in Fahrenheit 451, the Three Essential Things are as follows:
Quality, texture of information.
Leisure to digest it.
The right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.
These seem unfortunately germane, lo these 70 years later…
Thanks for listening, reading, and responding,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com