Molly Young in Space and Music

Dear reader,

Do you know the difference between astronauts and astronauts? The distinction lies where -naut was trained. Astronauts come from astronauts from America, Canada, or Europe from Russia and astronauts. However, it is not in China. The Chinese version is Taikonaut. If there are other jobs with three different names with similarly silky mouthfeels, I can't think of them.

The -naut distinction was one of several vocabulary upgrades that I receive from Samantha Harvey's “Orbital,” which took the book by storm. No one obsessed with a particular book at once pays us. It just happens. (If we were paid, you know. Our fingers will be heavy with diamonds.)

To counter the vast dreaminess of “Orbital”, I fell and smudged with Ian Penman's collection of musical essays. If you're looking to see things like James Brown and Prince (particularly), if it's covered in X-ray plate penetration and poet besottendess, Penman is your companion.

– Molly

How strange it must be to be present in a place without the weather. Where you can't enjoy the relief of gravity presence floping to bed after a long day, and what feels like floating, is actually a state of freedom silence at about 17,000 miles per hour. “Orbit” teleports you there and goes to a space station that circulates the Earth. The 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel covers a day in the lives of six astros/astronauts.

I previously wrote about the author Samantha Harvey. Her memoir of insomnia, known as “shapeless anxiety,” is my second favorite source of meditation on insomnia following “Macbeth.” Her debut novel, “The Wilderness,” focused on a man suffering from Alzheimer's disease. These entries are mentioned in Harvey's back catalogue. Because they emphasize her interest in how humans experience time. In the case of insomnia, distill slowly over time. In Alzheimer's disease, the chronology is confused and in outer space it returns to “orbit” – time is psychedelically distorted, with every day 16 sunrises and sunsets.

From Philip K. Dick to Star Trek: The Next Generation to Interstellar, the imaginative routes for humans to imagine the universe are a useful way to map the health of our collectives. Do you look at the universe with an optimistic gaze? Do we have a dollar symbol in our eyes? With Imperial design? Despair? I don't reveal much about the tone of the “trajectory” other than saying it is heart-warming.

Read on if you like: spend time at NASA Image Archive, John Wyndham, The Films of Terrence Malick, Daydreaming.
Available: a good library, a good bookstore, or a shelf of people working in this newspaper.

“It takes me home, this curve track,” Ian Penman

Criticism, 2019

Penman's book is a journey through all the brows, high, medium and low. He is one of our best living music critics. He is the man who simultaneously admits that young Francis looked like “Semolina fabric Mickey Mouse” while paying homage to Frank Sinatra's vocal technique. (It's not that he stopped scooping women up from side to side!)

This volume frames essays by James Brown, Elvis Presley, Prince, Charlie Parker, Steely Dan, and John Fahey. All of the works have a sense of exhilaration, but James Brown is my favorite. The delicate etiology of complex men, illuminates the music, spurs a noisy personality, sheds light on the (unrelated) mystery of Brown's one affection for the PCP-induced reduction.

Read it if you like: Peter Schjeldar, the great deceased art critic. The great Gary Indiana, who died. The great Manny Farber has passed away. A fantastic mini-documentary about Village Vanguard, known as Bill Morrison's “Vanguard Tape.”
Available from the FITZCARRALDO edition.

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