On Roughness, Recurrence, and the Book That Refuses to Behave

I’ve been obsessing lately over what to call the book I’m finishing. Not just in the practical publishing sense, though that’s part of it. I mean in the deeper craft sense. What is this thing I’ve made? Is it a novel-in-stories? A composite novel? A short story cycle? Or is it simply a book of stories that insists on being read as something more than a collection?

I keep thinking about this. So, I keep writing about it.

The closer I get to finishing the manuscript, the less that question feels like a marketing question and the more it feels like an artistic one.

I’ve been reading The Composite Novel–The Short Story Cycle in Transition, and it has given me language for something I think I’ve been doing for years without fully naming it. I’ve always written toward recurrence rather than straight lines. I’ve always trusted return, echo, fragment, and accumulation more than the clean architecture of conventional plot. I’ve often written stories that feel complete in themselves, but that also seem haunted by other stories nearby. One scene calls to another. One character’s trouble deepens or refracts another’s. A setting gathers force through repetition. Meaning arrives not only through what happens next, but through what happens again.

That, to me, is where the real craft question lives.

Because what interests me as a writer has never been the overly neat shape of fiction. I’ve never liked writing that feels too explained, too polished, too determined to guide the reader to a single, tidy conclusion. I want more roughness than that. I want energy. I want edges. I want the work to feel lived in rather than overdesigned. Maybe the best comparison is punk music: not because it is careless, but because its force comes partly from refusing refinement as the highest value. The power is in urgency, texture, pressure, sound. The power is in what stays jagged.

That roughness is aesthetic, but it is also structural.

The stories in my book return to the same neighborhood, the same family, the same emotional weather. The Ortiz family appears again and again, sometimes from different angles, sometimes across different stretches of time, sometimes through first person, sometimes through third. The work, at least to my mind, is not unified because everything moves in a single neat line. It is unified because the same people, places, losses, troubles, and forms of labor keep resurfacing. The book builds not by marching forward but by circling back. It accumulates its force.

That matters to me because family itself is often experienced that way.

Families are not remembered or understood in a smooth narrative. They come to us in stories, fragments, repeated anecdotes, private myths, corrections, arguments, silences. One person remembers an event one way; another person reshapes it by telling it differently ten years later. Whole stretches of history go missing, then return in a gesture, a voice, a sentence someone says at the dinner table. In that sense, the so-called disjointedness of a composite book may actually be closer to the texture of lived experience than a perfectly linear novel ever could be.

And that, too, is a craft decision.

A book like this asks the reader to participate in making the whole. It asks them to recognize patterns, hold gaps, notice echoes, and feel the pressure between separate pieces. A story stands on its own, but it also changes when placed beside another story. That is one of the deepest pleasures of this kind of form for me. Meaning is not only in the individual piece. Meaning is in adjacency. In arrangement. In recurrence. In the way a later story can deepen, wound, revise, or enlarge an earlier one.

To write in this mode is to believe that wholeness does not require seamlessness.

That may be the clearest statement I can make right now about my own aesthetic. I am not trying to erase the autonomy of the stories. I want each one to carry its own weight, to feel complete and alive on its own terms. But I also want the book to gather emotional and narrative force through accumulation. I want the reader to feel, by the end, that they have moved through a larger design—even if that design is patchwork rather than blueprint.

Patchwork may actually be the better metaphor for the kind of book I seem always to be writing.

Not brokenness. Not randomness. Patchwork.

Something stitched together from separate pieces. Something patterned through recurrence. Something whose beauty depends partly on the visibility of its seams.

That last part matters to me. I do not want to hide the seams. I do not want the book to pretend it came into the world as one smooth, uninterrupted gesture. I want the reader to feel the movement between stories, the pressure of omission, the little leaps in time and point of view. Those shifts are not accidents or failures of control. They are part of the experience the book offers. They ask the reader to enter the work as an active participant rather than a passive receiver.

So maybe the question is not whether the manuscript is a novel or a collection of stories. Maybe the better question is: what kind of coherence does this book believe in?

Mine seems to believe in coherence through return. Through place. Through family. Through recurring trouble. Through tonal consistency and emotional deepening. Through the old neighborhood as a container. Through characters who reappear not as devices but as people still living beyond the edge of a single story.

I think that is why I keep resisting labels even while wanting one. A label can clarify, but it can also flatten. “Stories” can make the architecture disappear. “Novel” can make the autonomy of the pieces disappear. “Composite novel” may be the most accurate term in a scholarly sense, but it can sound more clinical than the work itself feels. “Novel-in-stories” gets closer, maybe, because it preserves the tension. It admits the doubleness. It allows for independence and design to exist at the same time.

But whatever I finally call it, the deeper truth is this: the form I keep returning to is one that trusts fragments to make a whole.

That is not indecision. That is not a failure to commit. That is the commitment.

It is the form closest to how I hear stories, how I remember people, how I understand place, and how I want fiction to move. Not too polished. Not too on-the-nose. Not too eager to explain itself. A little rough. A little disjointed. Alive with recurrence. Built from pressure and return.

And maybe that is the real answer I’ve been after all along.

Not just what to label the book, but what kind of book I believe in making.

Reading Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender

Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender struck a deep chord with me. As someone who grew up in Southern Colorado and the San Luis Valley and who has long been drawn to the history of the Southwest, I felt pulled in almost immediately by the novel’s powerful sense of buried historical memory. This is not simply a work of historical fiction. It is also a meditation on how history is shaped and narrated.

Set against the Apache Wars and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the novel keeps returning to questions that I find especially compelling: who gets remembered, who gets erased–what the familiar myths of the American West leave out. That metahistorical dimension is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Enrigue does not just revisit the past; he challenges the stories that have been handed down about it. In doing so, he reveals a Southwest that feels far more complex and unsettled than the simplified versions of history many of us grew up with.

At times, the novel is fragmented and demanding–blending a creative nonfiction feeling family roadtrip with untold borderlands history. But that difficulty feels integral to its vision. And I am pro-difficult novel. The form itself reflects the instability of memory and the violence of official narratives. For me, Now I Surrender is the kind of novel I most admire: intellectually ambitious, historically alive. Historical and personal. Unafraid to unsettle its reader. It expands the imaginative and conscious contours of the Southwest in ways that feel both urgent and lasting.

Quick Review–Why Four Thousand Weeks Hit Home for Me

I have spent years trying to be more productive. I have kept journals, made lists, set goals, and, more recently, filled pages of bullet journals with plans for how to use my time better. There is something hopeful in that practice, I think. The belief that if I can just organize things well enough, focus hard enough, or plan carefully enough, I might finally get ahead of my own life. That I might just be able to finish more writing projects.

That is part of why Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman stayed with me. It speaks directly to that desire so many of us have—not just to be productive, but to feel less overwhelmed, less behind, less haunted by all we have not yet done.

The central idea of the book is simple: if we live to about eighty years old, we get roughly four thousand weeks. That number hit me harder than I expected. For someone who has spent so much time trying to manage the days better, Burkeman’s point felt both unsettling and strangely freeing. He argues that the real problem is not that we have failed to master time. It is that we keep imagining time can be mastered at all.

What I appreciated most about this book is that it does not mock the urge to organize your life or try to do better. It understands that urge. But it also gently pushes back against the fantasy that the right system, the right notebook, or the right routine will somehow make everything fit. It reminds us that our lives are limited, that our time is finite. It reminds us that this is not a flaw in the system. It is the human condition.

As someone who has spent years bullet journaling and striving to be more productive, I found that message both humbling and comforting. The book helped me see that a meaningful life is not about getting everything done. It is about choosing what matters, accepting what must go unfinished, and trying to be fully present inside the life I actually have.

Four Thousand Weeks is not really a productivity book in the usual sense. It is something deeper and more generous than that: a reflection on time, limits, and what it means to live honestly. For me, it felt like a reminder that the goal is not to control every hour, but to live those hours with more intention, more peace. And maybe a little more mercy and empathy for myself.

The Program That Changed My Life

Around 2000, I was one of the students in what I remember as Project 2000, a program that helped open the door to graduate school for students like me. At the time, graduate school did not feel like an obvious path. It felt distant, expensive, and meant for other people. I knew I loved writing and learning, but loving those things and imagining a future in higher education were not yet the same thing.

What that program did was make graduate school real.

It helped with the practical barriers that stop so many students before they even begin. It helped pay for GRE costs. It helped with application fees. It helped me think seriously about where I could apply and what kind of future might actually be possible. Those kinds of expenses may sound small to some people, but when you are trying to build a life and stretch every dollar, they can be the difference between applying and giving up before you start.

That support mattered more than I can say.

I remember the process of applying to schools as both exciting and intimidating. Every application felt like a statement of hope. Every envelope, every form, every test score carried the question: Do I belong in this world? Programs like Project 2000 did more than provide money. They gave students encouragement, structure, and the sense that someone believed we had a right to aim higher.

Because of that help, I applied to several graduate programs and was accepted to more than one MFA program, including Oregon State. That changed the course of my life.

It is hard to overstate what that moment meant. Getting into graduate school was not just an academic achievement. It was a turning point. It gave me the chance to deepen my writing, to study seriously, to imagine a life in literature, and to begin becoming the person I would later be. Without that opportunity, I do not know that I would have become the writer and teacher I am today.

When people talk about educational opportunity, they sometimes speak in abstractions. They talk about access, equity, pipelines, and outcomes. I understand those words, but I also know the human side of them. Opportunity can look like someone helping you pay for the GRE. It can look like someone telling you that your application matters. It can look like the simple but powerful act of making graduate school possible for a student who might otherwise have been left out.

That is what this program did for me.

I cannot help thinking about all of this in light of the condition of the Department of Education today. The department remains in place, but after sweeping layoffs, efforts to dismantle parts of it, and reports of reduced civil-rights enforcement, it is hard not to feel that the country is turning away from the kind of public investment that changed my life. I know firsthand what these supports can do. They helped me get to graduate school, and in doing so they helped make my life as a writer and teacher possible.

I think often about how many lives are changed not only by talent or hard work, but by timely support. There are students everywhere with ability, discipline, and vision who still need someone or something to help bridge the gap between promise and possibility. I was one of those students. Project 2000 helped bridge that gap for me.

I carry that history with me now in the classroom and at the writing desk. Every time I teach, every time I write, every time I try to encourage students to believe in their own intellectual and creative futures, I know I am also honoring the people and programs that helped me get here.

Ten-Minute Plays Brought Me Back

For a long time, writing meant the long haul: fiction drafts that asked for stamina, immersion, and a kind of deep solitude. Then depression hit, and that whole approach stopped working. The page didn’t feel like possibility anymore—it felt like a room I couldn’t enter.

What surprised me was how ten-minute plays opened a door back in.

Not because they’re easy—they’re not. But they’re contained. Ten minutes gives you a small, clear container: two people in a space, a problem, a want, a pressure point. Instead of asking, How big can you make this? the form asks, What can you make happen right now? When I didn’t have the energy for a long project, I could still write a scene with teeth. I could still finish something. And finishing—even something short—helped me feel like a writer again.

Playwriting also changed how I think about craft. Fiction can let you linger inside a character’s head. The stage won’t. Onstage, feeling has to become action—words, choices, silences, moves between people. Ten-minute plays taught me to listen harder, to trust conflict, and to build scenes around what characters do to each other instead of what I can explain about them.

The biggest shift, though, is that theatre brings other humans into the process earlier. I had a table read recently that went really well—actors in a room, real laughter where I hoped it would land, and that attentive quiet when the room leans in. It made the work feel alive outside my head. And there’s a chance one of these plays will end up in a ten-minute festival at UIS this coming fall. Even the possibility of that—an audience, a night where the piece lives in real time—feels like momentum.

I still love fiction. I’m not abandoning it. But ten-minute plays have given me a sharper sense of what writing is: not waiting for the perfect mood, not proving anything, just returning to the work and making something happen on the page—small, focused, honest.

Sometimes ten minutes is enough to start again.

Iran, the Headlines, and the People We Don’t See

Missile strikes. Sanctions. Nuclear negotiations. Drone attacks. Regional escalation. Regime change. The language is almost always strategic: deterrence, retaliation, regime stability, security interests.

But if you step back and ask a simpler question — who is living inside these headlines? — the story shifts.

This is where Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States becomes unexpectedly relevant.

I teach Zinn nearly every semester.

Zinn’s central argument was simple but disruptive–and I keep reminding myself and my students: history is usually told from the viewpoint of governments and power, not from the viewpoint of ordinary people who experience the consequences of those decisions. Presidents and generals narrate events; workers, families, and civilians absorb them.

When we apply that lens to Iran — especially in moments of renewed tension or military escalation — we begin to see a different story beneath the official one.

For many Americans, the U.S.–Iran story begins with the 1979 hostage crisis.

For many Iranians, it begins in 1953 — when the CIA and British intelligence helped orchestrate the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. The coup reinstalled the Shah and deepened authoritarian rule.

I know this from reading Zinn.

And that history matters. Not because it excuses present-day policies. But because it shapes memory, distrust, and identity.

Zinn often argued that when we ignore earlier interventions, we misunderstand current resistance. Power doesn’t operate in a vacuum; it accumulates over time.

When tensions flare today — whether over nuclear policy, regional conflict, or sanctions — they land on decades of layered history.

In official statements, sanctions are “pressure mechanisms.”
Airstrikes are “targeted responses.”
Retaliation is “strategic.”

But from a people’s-history perspective, we ask: What does a collapsing currency feel like for a family buying groceries? What does an internet blackout mean for students trying to communicate? What does escalation mean for a parent deciding whether to leave the country?

And now, as new reports make tragically clear, we must also ask: What does it feel like to bury your child after they were killed at school?

According to multiple news accounts, a girls’ elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab was struck during the current wave of U.S.–Israeli military operations. Iranian officials say that at least 148 people — primarily schoolgirls — were killed and dozens more injured when the school was hit on a Saturday morning while students were in class. Images and local testimony describe backpacks and schoolbooks among the rubble and families desperately searching for victims. Independent verification is limited, but verified footage shows the devastated school building and shocked residents at the scene. 

As one Iranian health official reportedly described it, this was “the most bitter news” of the conflict so far. 

Iran has also vowed reprisals, and officials have condemned the attack as a “war crime,” stressing the impact on children and civilians. 

Iran has experienced waves of internal protest in recent years — women demanding autonomy, young people pushing for reform, citizens resisting repression. These movements rarely fit neatly into geopolitical talking points.

They complicate the narrative. They remind us that a nation is not its government.

Zinn’s approach insists we hold two truths at once: Governments pursue power. Ordinary people pursue dignity.

When Iran appears in the news cycle, coverage often swings between two extremes: Iran as a threat. Iran as a victim.

A people’s-history lens avoids both simplifications. It asks instead: Who is deciding? Who is resisting? Who is paying the price?

Zinn believed that history should not make us more patriotic or more cynical — but more aware. More conscious of how power operates and more attentive to those who rarely get to shape the narrative.

If we only follow the official storyline — sanctions announced, missiles launched, leaders condemning one another — we see strategy.

If we widen the frame, we see society.

And once we see society, the conversation becomes less abstract.
It becomes human.

The most important lesson from Zinn isn’t that the United States is uniquely aggressive or that Iran is uniquely wronged. It’s that history is always incomplete when told only from the top down.

A “people’s history” of the current moment in Iran would include: Women resisting state control. Young people navigating censorship. Families coping with economic hardship. Diaspora communities watching anxiously from abroad. Parents mourning children killed at school. Civilians caught in escalation they did not design.

When we shift perspective this way, the headlines don’t disappear — but they become more complicated. And maybe more honest.

In moments of international tension, it’s easy to speak in the language of nations.
Zinn would remind us to speak in the language of people.
Because long after leaders issue statements and policies change, it’s ordinary lives that carry the weight of history.

Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 1 and 2 as a Modern The Misanthrope

Recently, I’ve been rewatching old seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and what surprised me this time wasn’t just how funny Season 1 and 2 still are—it was how classical the comedy feels.

I expected the usual things: Larry David picking at social rules, minor misunderstandings turning into full-scale disasters, everyone getting offended over something tiny. But watching it again, I kept thinking: this is basically Molière. More specifically, The Misanthrope. A play I studied back in the day.

Season 1

That might sound like a stretch at first—17th-century French theater and HBO cringe comedy don’t seem like obvious companions—but the deeper I got into Season 1 and 2, the clearer the connection became. Both works are built around the same comic engine: a man who cannot (or will not) play along with the polite fictions that keep society running.

And that man, in Molière, is Alceste. In Curb, it’s Larry.

In The Misanthrope, Alceste hates flattery, hypocrisy, and social performance. He wants people to say what they mean and mean what they say. He is disgusted by the little lies that make polite society function.

Larry David is obviously not Alceste in some neat one-to-one, “updated adaptation” kind of way—but he lives in the same comic and satire territory. In Season 1, Larry keeps running into situations where everyone expects a script: the polite response, the socially acceptable silence, the fake apology, the ritual kindness, the thing you’re “supposed” to do.

And Larry, like Alceste, keeps resisting that script.

What makes this so good (and so uncomfortable) is that Larry is often not wrong. He notices the absurdity. He sees the hypocrisy. He catches the contradiction. But he also pushes, nags, insists, and escalates until the question is no longer “Is he right?” but “Why can’t he just let this go for five minutes?”

That’s exactly the comic tension Molière understands too. Alceste isn’t just a truth-teller. He’s also rigid, vain, and socially impossible. Larry’s version is more neurotic and modern, but the structure is familiar: the guy who exposes social nonsense is also, himself, a problem.

Rewatching Season 1 and 2, I kept noticing how much the humor depends on manners, etiquette, and status—not just punchlines.

That’s what links Curb to Molière so strongly. Both are comedies of manners.

The laughs come from:

  • social expectations
  • conversational traps
  • reputation management
  • awkward obligations
  • people trying to save face

In The Misanthrope, those pressures play out in salons and courtly social life. In Curb, they show up in LA dinners, charity events, marriages, casual encounters, industry friendships, and all those situations where everyone is pretending to be relaxed while actually keeping score.

Larry moves through these spaces like an anti-courtier. He won’t flatter. He won’t pretend not to notice something. He won’t let a contradiction slide just because “that’s not how this works.” He keeps saying the quiet part out loud, and then everyone has to deal with it.

That’s Molière territory.

What really makes the comparison stick is that both The Misanthrope and Curb are asking the same question underneath the comedy:

Can you be fully honest and still live among other people?

Alceste’s answer is basically no. Society is built on performance. If you refuse the performance, you become an outcast.

Larry’s answer isn’t philosophical in the same way, but Season 1 and 2 keeps dramatizing the problem. Every time he refuses a social nicety or challenges some unwritten rule, he exposes how much daily life depends on small performances—little acts of tact, omission, exaggeration, and fake ease.

And here’s what makes both works smarter than simple “truth-teller vs fake people” stories: neither one lets the difficult man off the hook.

Molière doesn’t present Alceste as pure moral heroism. And Curb definitely doesn’t present Larry as some saint of authenticity. In both cases, “honesty” can become its own kind of ego. It can be less about principle and more about the inability to tolerate discomfort.

That complexity is why the comedy lasts. The misanthrope is right and unbearable.

There’s something about the first season in particular that makes this comparison feel especially strong. Season 1 has that stripped-down quality where the show’s core idea is so visible: put Larry in ordinary social situations and watch how fast things collapse.

It’s almost theatrical in that way.

Season 2

A small offense becomes a public issue.
A minor misunderstanding becomes a moral conflict.
A social gesture becomes a referendum on character.

That rhythm—small incident, escalating embarrassment, exposed vanity, broken decorum—is exactly the kind of comic architecture Molière uses. The stakes are often “small” on paper, but they feel huge because reputation, pride, and appearances are always in play.

Watching these episodes again, I found myself laughing not just at Larry being Larry, but at how old the mechanism is. The setting is contemporary, the dialogue is loose and improvised, but the comic design feels centuries old.

Molière’s salons were spaces of wit, performance, flirtation, gossip, and status. Everyone was talking, watching, judging, and positioning.

Season 1 and 2 of Curb feels like a modern version of that world.

Los Angeles in the show is all soft surfaces and social management. People present themselves constantly. They network while pretending not to network. They perform generosity, ease, tolerance, charm. And then Larry walks in and starts tugging at the seams.

He’s not just awkward—he’s disruptive in a specifically social way. He refuses the unspoken agreement that allows everybody to keep moving smoothly through the room.

Which is what makes him such a perfect comic figure, and such a useful parallel to Alceste.

Saying Curb Season 1 and 2 has something in common with The Misanthrope isn’t just a fun literary reference. It helps explain why the show feels richer than standard cringe comedy.

Yes, it’s awkward. Yes, it’s petty. Yes, the situations are often ridiculous. But beneath that, it’s doing something that great comedies of manners have always done: testing the rules of social life by putting a difficult person inside them and watching what breaks first—the person, the group, or the illusion that everyone was being honest to begin with.

That’s why Curb can feel both trivial and strangely profound at the same time. It’s about tiny social moments, but those moments reveal bigger questions:

  • How much hypocrisy is necessary for social peace?
  • When does politeness become dishonesty?
  • When does honesty become cruelty?
  • Is the “misanthrope” morally superior—or just impossible to live with?

Molière asks those questions in a French salon. Larry David asks them in restaurants, living rooms, and parking lots.

Same problem. Different century.

Rewatching reminded me that Curb Your Enthusiasm isn’t just a great modern comedy—it’s part of a much older comic tradition. Larry David may not be Alceste in any formal sense, but he absolutely belongs to that family: the difficult man who can’t stop exposing the absurdity of social life, even when it would be easier–and kinder–to just smile and move on.

And maybe that’s why the show still hits so hard. We recognize Larry because we all know the rules he’s breaking. Most of us just break them privately, in our heads.

Larry, like Alceste, does it out loud.

Hamnet (2025) — The Most Emotional Film I’ve Seen in Years

I don’t say this lightly: Hamnet might be the most immersive and emotional film I’ve seen in years. Not because it’s manipulative, not because it tries to wring tears out of you with dramatic speeches or swelling music—but because it does the opposite. It stays quiet. It stays human.

Directed by Chloé Zhao and co-written with Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet is a slow, haunting meditation on grief—specifically the death of an eleven-year-old boy during a plague outbreak in 16th-century England. But it’s also a story about what happens after the tragedy: the days that keep coming, the household that keeps moving, the silence that fills the rooms where laughter used to be.

What struck me most is how the film portrays loss as something physical. Grief is not just sadness here—it’s weight, absence, disruption. Every gesture feels altered. Every glance between the parents carries a different kind of meaning. The film doesn’t treat mourning as a plot point. It treats it as an atmosphere.

And for writers, Hamnet hits especially hard because it’s really about how art comes out of sorrow. Shakespeare’s writing is not shown as genius descending from the heavens—it’s shown as something born from damage. The film quietly suggests that writing is sometimes the only way we can shape pain into something survivable, something that doesn’t destroy us completely.

One of the most haunting elements is the way the character of Shakespeare responds by leaving—by going to London, away from the home where grief has taken up residence in every room. The film doesn’t frame this as simple abandonment, but as a complicated human instinct for work and money and intellectual engagement: the desire to escape the place where loss happened, the desire to outrun memory, the desire to keep moving because staying still might crush you.

That’s what makes Hamnet so devastating: it’s not just about the death of Hamnet. It’s about how the living keep living. How love continues, even when it’s fractured. How memory becomes both a comfort and a wound.

By the end, Hamnet doesn’t offer easy closure. It doesn’t hand you healing. Instead, it gives you something more honest: the sense that grief never disappears—it transforms. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it transforms into story.

This film stayed with me long after it ended. It felt like being asked to sit beside someone else’s heartbreak—and recognizing your own.

Who Gets to Speak–James by Percival Everett

Years ago—long before James existed as a book—I taught Huckleberry Finn the way I had been taught to teach it. Carefully. Respectfully. With all the right caveats. I told students it was complicated. I told them it was “of its time.” I told them Mark Twain was trying. All of that is true. None of it ever quite settled the feeling that something was off.

There was always a silence in the room that didn’t belong to Huck.

Reading James by Percival Everett felt like someone finally naming that silence. Or better yet—letting it speak.

Everett gives us James, not as the figure we remember trailing along the riverbank, but as a man fully awake to the danger around him. A man listening closely. Measuring every word. Performing a version of himself when white people are nearby and dropping it the moment they’re gone. The first time I realized what Everett was doing with language in this book, I had to stop and just sit with it. Because I recognized it. Not from literature, but from life.

I grew up hearing stories that shifted depending on who was in the room.

My grandparents didn’t talk the same way around outsiders as they did around family. There was the public voice and the kitchen-table voice. Spanish that disappeared when certain people walked in. Jokes that only landed when everyone listening already knew the rules. Silence as strategy. Silence as safety.

Everett understands that. James understands that. The novel isn’t just about slavery; it’s about survival through performance. About intelligence that has learned when not to show itself. About what it costs to always be listening.

What struck me most is that James doesn’t ask for sympathy. It doesn’t soften itself for comfort. It’s often funny—sharp, dry, almost playful—but the humor never lets you relax. You’re always aware of the stakes. Always aware that one wrong word could end everything. That’s the tension Everett sustains, page after page.

And Huck—poor Huck—is suddenly what he always was: a kid. Not the moral hero we leaned on so heavily, but a child stumbling through a world he doesn’t fully understand. The weight of conscience shifts. Responsibility shifts. James carries it all.

After finishing the book, I kept thinking about how many stories I’ve read where the most observant character is treated like background noise. How often American literature has mistaken restraint for ignorance. How often we’ve congratulated ourselves for “including” voices without ever letting them lead.

James doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t apologize for existing alongside Huckleberry Finn. It talks back. Calmly. Precisely. With receipts.

And maybe that’s what stayed with me most. This isn’t a book shouting to be heard. It’s a book that knows it’s been listening all along.

The people I come from were listeners too. They watched. They remembered. They told stories later, when it was safe. Everett’s novel feels like one of those stories finally written down—not to correct the record politely, but to tell it straight.

I don’t know if James replaces Huckleberry Finn. I don’t think that’s the point. But it changes how I read it forever. It changes who I imagine was paying attention.

And once you hear James speak, it’s impossible to pretend you didn’t.

A Quick Love Letter to The Savage Detectives

The Savage Detectives isn’t just a novel—it’s a dare. A challenge to follow an entire generation of artists.

First published in 1998, the book follows two elusive poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as they roam Mexico City and the wider world chasing poetry, obsession, and the ghost of a forgotten literary movement. What starts as a scrappy coming-of-age story quickly fractures into a wild, collage of voices: lovers, exiles, academics, drifters, and dreamers, all circling the same question—what does it mean to live for art?

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Formally, the novel shifts perspectives, jumps decades, and lets unreliable narrators do most of the heavy lifting. That instability is the point. Bolaño captures the way artistic movements actually work—not as clean manifestos, but as messy constellations of desire, rivalry, memory, and mythmaking.

What makes The Savage Detectives endure is its emotional voltage. Beneath the bravado and literary swagger is a deep sadness: youth slipping away, ideals dissolving, friendships scattering across continents. The book understands that devotion to art can be both exhilarating and ruinous—and it never pretends otherwise.

Reading it feels like eavesdropping on a generation that believed literature could save them, even as it quietly didn’t.

If you’ve ever fallen in love with a book, a movement, or a version of yourself that no longer exists, The Savage Detectives will feel uncomfortably familiar—and absolutely necessary.

the shining in IMAX: when the hotel gets bigger—and stranger

Seeing The Shining in IMAX: When the Hotel Gets Bigger—and Stranger

Last week I went to the movies with friends. Takes a special film to get me out of my house. But I can tell you watching The Shining in IMAX is less like revisiting a classic and more like being swallowed by it.

Kubrick’s film has always been about space—about corridors that stretch too long, rooms that don’t quite agree with one another, and a hotel that feels less like a building than a thinking organism. I love the maze motif. In IMAX, that spatial anxiety is amplified. The Overlook isn’t just looming; it’s asserting itself. The scale makes the hotel feel predatory, as if the walls are leaning in and the carpeted hallways are actively conspiring.

One of the great pleasures of seeing The Shining projected this large is how obvious the hotel’s spatial impossibility becomes. Longtime fans have mapped it obsessively: windows where no exterior wall could exist, hallways that shouldn’t connect, offices that seem to float inside the structure. Kubrick isn’t careless here—he’s precise. The Overlook is a labyrinth that only pretends to obey architectural logic.

In IMAX, your eye has time to wander. You notice how Danny’s tricycle loops through spaces that feel subtly wrong, how corners arrive too early or too late. The hotel doesn’t just disorient the Torrance family; it disorients you. The unease comes not from jump scares but from the creeping realization that this place could not exist—and yet it does.

The opening interview scene has always felt deceptively calm: Jack Torrance seated across from Ullman, polite smiles, bland professional language. But on an IMAX screen, a detail snaps into focus that feels almost like a private joke from Kubrick to the audience.

There’s a small, shiny axe near the American flag visible on the office desk:

It’s easy to miss on a television or laptop. In IMAX, it’s unmistakable.

The axe sits there quietly, not emphasized, not framed as a threat—just present. It turns the scene into a kind of visual foreshadowing that’s more disturbing than any overt hint. Jack doesn’t need to say anything ominous. The future is already in the room with him, waiting. The tool of violence is institutional, decorative, normalized—part of the hotel’s history and part of Jack’s fate.

Seeing that axe at that scale reframes the entire interview. It’s no longer a job screening; it’s an initiation perhaps.

IMAX also sharpens the film’s use of sound—or the refusal of it. The low drones, the hollow echoes, the sense of vast emptiness become physical sensations. Silence feels cavernous. When characters speak, their voices seem small compared to the spaces they occupy, reinforcing the idea that the hotel is the dominant presence.

Kubrick’s compositions—already meticulous—become overwhelming. Symmetry turns oppressive. Balance feels hostile. The famous wide shots don’t just look beautiful; they feel controlling.

The Shining has always rewarded repeat viewings, but IMAX transforms it from a psychological horror film into an architectural one. You don’t just watch people lose themselves—you watch them try to survive inside a space that refuses to make sense.

The Overlook Hotel isn’t haunted because of ghosts alone. It’s haunted because it breaks the rules of reality. In IMAX, those broken rules are no longer subtle. They’re unavoidable.

I left the theater not thinking about Jack Nicholson’s grin or the elevator of blood—though they’re still there—but about hallways that shouldn’t exist, windows that lie, and an axe that was quietly waiting in plain sight from the very beginning.

date night with ten min plays–the cary grant of san luis–jan 25 (video)

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