We Are Having a Party

on celebrations to come

I’m planning a party. A birthday party. Not my own, but for Largehearted Boy when it turns 21 in late January. Old enough to drink.

Largehearted Boy is not me. People often meet me and say, “Oh, you are Largehearted Boy.” I nod and smile, appreciative that they are aware of the website and possibly readers. But Largehearted Boy is more than me. Bigger. Largehearted Boy is a community of contributors, of readers, of authors, and of musicians. The arts give me something to evangelize, and thankfully readers find the content interesting enough to share the word, and writers and musicians are open to contributing.

The party will be in late January or early February, I am ironing out the details. There will be books and music, spirits and beer, and the warmth of a community coming together. Look for more news in a month or so about the forthcoming shindig.

Largehearted Boy’s feature content has been light last week as well as this week due to some medical issues. The site will return to its feature-every-weekday schedule next week.

Largehearted Likes

1. Bagel Point bagels - After I line up the Largehearted Boy posts for the day, I often walk for a bagel (poppyseed, garlic, onion, or salt) with a cream cheese decided on the spur of the moment. Not tasted yet: their French toast bagel.

2. Sweet Tea - Having spent my formative years in Alabama and Georgia, I developed a taste for this southern version of iced tea. Strong and so sweet your teeth hurt after a single drink. Last week my partner was catching up on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and Sutton had Erika Jayne over for a conciliatory luncheon of Popeye’s chicken on bone china and sweet tea (I was reading, but couldn’t help catching the show out of a corner of my eye, don’t judge). I was triggered, and the next day for lunch headed to Popeye’s for a chicken sandwich and this heavenly drink.

3. Popeye’s fried chicken sandwich - See above. And so what if the staff at the Popeye’s around the corner know my name and usual order?

4. Vol. 1 Brooklyn - My favorite literary online destination. Interviews, reviews, essays, monthly book previews, and short fiction, Vol. 1 Brooklyn has it all.

5. Bookshop.org - The indie online bookstore is a great alternative to Amazon.

6. Bandcamp - The online place to buy music and merch from your favorite musicians. On Fridays, they wave their fees and the artists profit!

7. Storiarts - Literary gifts for babies to adults, scarves to sweaters to bed linens. The holidays are approaching, I will be spending much time here.

8. Music lists, like Rolling Stone’s 100 best debut albums of all time

9. My Ventura guitar - Rescued from the trash last year by my partner, I finally cleaned it up and restrung this beauty. The Notorious KBZ now attends the occasional house show where I stumble through Microphones songs (he doesn’t complain much).

10. Sunshine - Hurricane Ian’s remnants gave us four straight days of rain and heavy clouds. Today is clear and bright and warmer. Hooray!

11. Annie Ernaux winning the Nobel Prize for Literature

Largehearted Links

1. The trailer for the documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom

   Watching Meet Me in the Bathroom, a new documentary about the explosion of New York City’s indie rock scene in the early 2000s, is an almost transcendent experience. You’re taken inside the dingy bars, shitty apartments, abandoned warehouses, and DIY venues where the defining bands of that era were born.

2. New fiction by Rachel Khong

3. Mariana Enríquez interviewed

4. Katie Marya interviewed, on Louise Glück:

   I mean, I think she’s just brutal. I first read her when I was getting my MFA, and one of my professors had recommended The Wild Iris to me as a study in persona and form. I was just floored by that book because it’s structured around the monk’s spiritual day, even though it really has nothing to do with that. It felt like a book that was godless and full of god at the same time, and I think that was the only way I could get on board with spirituality.

5. Namwali Serpell interviewed

   In some ways it feels like a privilege to be allowed to write a book like this. When you look at the history of literature and the books that have stayed with us, many of the reference points that we have for the novel as such, you find that the long history of the novel is very interested in these forms of disturbing or unsettling readers’ expectations, even if it’s manipulating your expectations in one direction and thwarting that expectation.

6. beabadoobee’s cover of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles”

7. A conversation between members of the band Horsegirl and Pavement’s Bob
   Nastanovich

   LOWENSTEIN: I think if we weren’t in Chicago, none of this could have happened. To be 15 and feel like, “Oh, I can start a band.” You have to see other people do it in order to think it’s possible.

8. Want to learn songwriting from Phil Elverum (of Mount Eerie and the Microphones)?

9. Ryan Lee Wong on activism and his debut novel

   In my experience in American fiction, there’s not that much on activism. Sometimes politics are addressed, or big global events have impacts on characters’ domestic lives, but in general in American fiction, there’s a bit of a bias away from organizing as the subject matter.

10. Alvvays’s Molly Rankin on the band’s new album

11. Lydia Millet profiled

    How we treat animals always reveals something about our capacities for cruelty and compassion, and one arc of “Dinosaurs” concerns how Gil takes responsibility for the creatures — human and nonhuman — around him. But for Millet, animals are more than props in a human drama; she’s interested in them for their own sake. In some novels, sex or desire is the key to all meaning. Millet says those impulses inevitably lead back to the quagmires of self-projection, narcissism, fantasies of ego. Animals are something else, entirely other. Protecting them, in life and art, is a way of protecting our connection to the most mysterious cosmic forces — of getting closer to (or at least becoming aware of) what lies outside the self.

Last Week on LHB

Mallory Smart's playlist for her novel The Only Living Girl in Chicago

Norman Lock's playlist for his novel Voices in the Dead House