![]() ![]() Scanlan’s new book, “Kick the Latch” (New Directions), interlaces the dark threads of violence that run through “The Dominant Animal” with the unsentimental rituals of caregiving that anchor “Aug 9-Fog.” “Kick the Latch” is perched ambiguously between novel and oral history. The stories are wry, startling, and feral, full of malice and hunger, where “Aug 9-Fog” is full of pragmatism, curiosity, and quiet engines of domestic wonder. (“It couldn’t help her because she was dead.”) Animals are everywhere-as mysteries, nuisances, accomplices-but the human characters, as the book’s title suggests, are the most animal of all. ![]() These narrative shards lay bare the menace and desperation lurking inside mundane moments: a boy sticking his hand between his cousin’s legs a constipated boyfriend trying to eat enough salami to “force it out” a daughter bending to pick up her mother’s stray white hairs after the overdue installation of an air-conditioner. Trying to knit pincushion.” The next year, Scanlan published a collection, “The Dominant Animal,” that shrank the short story to its barest bones: forty stories in just a hundred and forty pages. It recounts a year in the life of an eighty-six-year-old woman in rural Illinois, seasons spent tending a home and nursing a dying husband: “He called. Her début, “Aug 9-Fog,” which appeared in 2019, consists of fragments whittled from a diary that Scanlan found at an estate sale. Scanlan’s books are hard to slot into traditional genre categories. Her work traffics in moments and lifetimes, but rarely in the in-between units (days, weeks, years) that compose most narratives. Scanlan makes art about ordinary living-ordinary people, ordinary days, ordinary events-by distorting it: she distorts narrative arcs by alighting on jagged arrangements of anecdotes, distorts her descriptions with unsettling comparisons, and distorts time by stretching it like taffy or compressing it into searing instants. It has a powder I don’t like to disturb, but I cut it apart and set it between us.” The “thing” and its eerie pronouns, the casual violence of its dissection, the lurking beast-baby of a playhouse-all these turns of phrase are saturated by the quiet menace that Scanlan brings to her estranging evocations of daily life. Nothing has brought back the thrill of these walks-the pleasures of excavating strangeness from banality-as sharply as reading the prose of Kathryn Scanlan, who describes a suburban home and its back-yard playhouse as “two of the same animal, large and small, grown and juvenile,” or an ordinary tart as a wild creature at rest: “The thing I’ve made is resting. Those tree roots? They were the knobby fingers of a giant sleeping under the sidewalk. ![]() That garden hose? It was a snake that spewed poisonous tears from its rusty mouth. The trio of cousins spent “six long years of tip jars and word of mouth to earn the major label deal they'd been dreaming of, but then seemingly no time at all to change the face of country music.” The Country Music Hall of Famers went on to release tons of hits over the years, including “Dixieland Delight,” “Mountain Magic,” “Tennessee River” and other fan-favorite tracks.When I was a child, my grandmother and I played a game that involved walking around her neighborhood pretending to be aliens, from a planet called Algernon, trying to discern the nature of every object we saw. Gentry formed the band with Randy Owen and Jeff Cook more than five decades ago. The Associated Press also noted in its report that that Cherokee County Sheriff Jeff Shaver has said that Gentry was arrested during a traffic stop. The band’s spokesman, Don Murry Grubbs, told the Associated Press that he was aware of Gentry’s arrest but did not have an immediate comment. on Monday (September 12), and released at 11:06 a.m. Booking information from the Cherokee Country Sheriff’s Office shows that Gentry was booked into the jail at 10:38 a.m. The 70-year-old musician from Fort Payne, Alabama, was booked into the Cherokee County Jail in the northeastern region of the state and released shortly after. ![]() Teddy Gentry, one of the founding members of the country band Alabama, has been arrested on misdemeanor marijuana possession and drug paraphernalia charges, per multiple reports. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |