My Computer Broke!

and other stuff I've been up to

I’m writing this post on a fairly doomed computer. It’s the screen that’s broken: big black band on one side, what looks like a snaky silver crack—and the rest of the screen is full of flickering horizontal lines, like when you were staying at your grandmother’s house in 1985 and you tried to watch something on the channel that came in the third best.

Like so.

Annnnnd, hello again from a full week later. I’m now writing the rest of this post on a brand new computer, albeit one that does not have Word yet—a small problem when I’m supposed to be, you know, a writer.

A fun thing that happens when your computer breaks, even when you know you have most things backed up: You start to question how sad you would actually be if you lost your work-in-progress. It turns out that my current answer would be not all that sad, in large part because I’ve done very little typing so far, and what I’ve typed is kind of irrelevant to the project.

There’s this moment in the movie (and I guess probably the play) Amadeus, when Salieri, in disguise, shows up to ask Mozart for the requiem he’s commissioned. A very drunk Mozart assures him that it’s done, and when Salieri asks where it is, Mozart says “Here. It’s all right here, in my noodle! The rest is just scribbling. Scribbling and bibbling, bibbling and scribbling!” He’s supposed to be halfway off the deep end at this point, but it makes perfect sense to me, and he’s at very little risk of losing his work to ink spills or fire, the malware of the 18th Century.

Coincidentally, also my current hair situation

I Spent All Summer Reading Canadian Fiction

I was one of five judges this year for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, considered to be the top prize for fiction in Canada. I’ve judged book prizes before, but this one was uniquely humbling in that I was simultaneously reading all these great books and trying to wrap my head around the daunting Canadian literary scene. One of my grandmothers was from London, Ontario; this helped me not in the slightest, but it made me feel at least like 1/4 less of an imposter.

I cannot tell you what I read or what I like or what I loved, but the longlist announcement is live on Facebook at 9:30 Eastern on Tuesday, and you can watch it here. You’ll have a bunch of fantastic recommendations, and you could do worse than to buy all the books immediately.

But Now We’re Back to Circling the Globe!

As most of you know, I’m in the middle of reading my way around the world in translation. That project was put on pause for the summer, for the sake of the Canadian books (although some of what I read was translated from Quebecois French!)… but now we’re back to the Arabian peninsula and ready to go.

I’m reading The Stone of Laughter, a Lebanese novel from 1995 by Hoda Barakat, translated by Sophie Bennett, and I hope you’ll join me!

From the publisher’s description: The Stone of Laughter is a virile novel which brings forth the contradictory history of a city under fire through the life and dilemmas of a gay man. It is a bold and radical novel, full of black humor and cynical observations about life in war-torn Beirut.

I’m aiming to finish it before I leave for a Polish tour late next week, so I’ll be posting about it in the next week or two. Maybe from Poland, which is of course the best place from which to write in English about a Lebanese book.

But Also, The Bell Jar

Can you believe I’ve never read The Bell Jar before? Here’s why: I have a (perhaps inaccurate) memory of my sister, when she was maybe 16 and I was 6, having to read it for summer reading. And I remember her lugging it to the pool and complaining about it with her friend Tracy. Or maybe Tracy was the one who didn’t like it. Anyway, it went down in my subconscious as probably a bummer of a book.

I’m about a quarter of the way in (a nice balance to war-torn Lebanon) and it turns out it’s hilarious and juicy. I need to know if anyone out there has ever tried the alarming recipe of grape-jelly-and-french-dressing in an avocado, which sounds like a crime against humanity but I’d also maybe believe you if you told me that it was somehow embarrassingly good.

I Got to Be Prudie

Fulfilling a lifelong dream I didn’t know I had, I got to be a guest Dear Prudence for Slate this summer.

Man, I love giving advice. Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to do an occasional writerly-advice column here on my Substack… Meanwhile, you can read what I wrote here.

I Wrote About Extroversion Post-Pandemic

The Washington Post has been running a series of opinion pieces called “Post Pandemic,” and I contributed an essay on our increased societal introversion, and the way extroverts like me feel torn between trying to bring people (safely) back out of their shells vs. leaving them alone the way all their memes say to do (but perhaps at a great societal cost).

Fab illustration by Joseph Rogers.

I was braced for more angry blowback from readers who only read the headline, or who thought I was advocating for the licking of doorknobs, but mostly I got a bunch of notes of agreement from people frustrated at empty book events and at friends who just can’t manage to make plans anymore.

I wrote the piece in late winter, and it felt a little less relevant by the time it appeared (early July) and slightly less relevant now, but I do think we’re still dealing with so much of this. You can read the essay here.

Happy Labor Day and/or Memorial Day Weekend!

I honestly can never remember which one it is.