Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Wow! My book is reviewed in this week's TLS, and Jaya Savige seems to like INSPECTOR INSPECTOR very much. I'm especially pleased and grateful that he came to this book after reading STEEP TEA ("majestic"!), CONNOR & SEAL ("capacious imagination"!), and SNOW AT 5 PM ("hefty"?!?). I will shut up now and bask.

 One of those books that made me wish that I had discovered them earlier in my own education. Walter Rodney's Decolonial Marxism is descriptively subtitled "Essays from the Pan-African Revolution." For once the publisher's blurb on the back cover describes the book's contents accurately:  Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean, and in Africa. He not only witnessed a Pan-African and socialist internationalism; in his efforts to build mass organisations, catalyse rebellious ferment, and theorize an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation, he can be counted among its prime authors. Decolonial Marxism records such a life by collecting previously unbound essays written during the world-turning days of Black revolution. In drawing together pieces in which Rodney elaborates on the nexus of race and class, offers his ref...

Here's a thoughtful and perceptive  review of Inspector Inspector, by Al Lim: "Inspector Inspector is a haunting meditation on death and desire through a father's voice and legacy. Jee Leong Koh's second book at Carcanet Press intersperses several sequences – palinodes written in his dead father Koh Dut Say's voice, gratitude to his poetry mentors, poems based on his sex diaries in New York City, inspections during the Covid-19 pandemic, and life interviews with diasporic Singaporeans. The collection ends with a eulogy – a response to his father's death."

 The four novels in this Grove book are The Square , Moderato Cantabile , 10.30 on a Summer Night , and The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas . It is marvelous how Duras conjures up a poetic intensity from very simple situations. The paraphrasable plot is laughably simple, but the patterning of language and incident is masterly. There are intensifiers deployed—a limited time and place, the intoxication of alcohol, the murder of one's lover, music, a storm—but all woven in so naturally that they seem to come from within the characters, rather than without. The man and the girl would find their way to the park bench one afternoon because they are who they are. The method is to bypass psychology to aim straight for the formal, and intense, emotion.

So grateful for H. L. Hix's clarifying review of INSPECTOR INSPECTOR in Stride Magazine. He found the throughline in all the poetic sequences of the book. I will be reading his final paragraph again and again with much joy and satisfaction.  "The phrases in Inspector Inspector, themselves all carefully chosen, do not reduce to one refrain, but they do reinforce certain thematic concerns, most prominently the will that applies to all the persons in the book (father, son, lovers, Singaporeans…), and into which I take the reader to be invited: let us remain alive to one another."   If you'd like to get Inspector2:  US: Bookshop.org UK: Carcanet

Does anyone here remember downelink.com? Granddaddy of Grindr? Wrote a poem about it. And a poem about recycling Roy Lichenstein. Two "Ungovernable Bodies" published at A Gathering of the Tribes (AGOTT). Thanks, Danny Shot, for accepting the poems.

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I was reading Walter Rodney's essay "The Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment" in  Decolonial Marxism  when I came across this passage: "Central and South American gold and silver played a crucial role in meeting the need for coin in the expanding capitalist money economy, while African gold was also significant in this respect. African gold helped the Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good Hope and into Asia; it was the main source for the Dutch mint in the seventeenth century (which helped to secure Amsterdam as the financial capital of Europe in that period); and it is no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold coin in 1663 they called it the 'guinea'."  "What is a guinea?" a student in my seventh-grade English class asked recently. We had just read that the rich old lady Miss Havisham was giving the young Pip twenty-five...