Last Words: a blog where I’m finally getting around to some things

Windfall covers a universe inside North Dakota. Alas, I only have 200 words.* So I’ll focus on what I saw as the three bravest moves of the author, Erika Bolstad.** Brave move #1: Centering women and Indigenous stories. The experience of women in the northern prairie and towns got star treatment — not usually the…

If Monocle Radio and KOPN Community Radio had a baby it would be Speaking of the Arts. Diana Moxon had been making a delightful, intelligent show — focused on Missouri art! — for half a decade, and it ended six months ago. Gah! Why was I listening to British journalists interview international artists on Monocle…

Reading My Volcano felt like listening to Radiohead. Multiple storylines. Alternate realities. A literary analogue to complex time signatures. Paranoia around greed and power peppered the story, not sneering so much as ironic, which made Stintzi’s critiques even more powerful. And a wall of loneliness flooded parts of my heart I’m otherwise unwilling to feel.…

“Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding — seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions — and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped our known.” – Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing,…