Review Review Review

Just a quick bit of weekend reading: “Meta-Deference in the Knowable World,” my review of the latest issue of The Normal School, is up at The Review Review. Give it a look!

An excerpt:

When I’m reading something that’s really hooked me, I don’t even know how good it is until I realize that I’ve been reading it out loud.

A couple of things:

I’m not a big reader of nonfiction.

I grew up in Memphis, TN, but I never went to Graceland. By choice.

So imagine the weirdness of suddenly realizing that I’m reading, out loud like a holy incantation, a sentence by Ned Stuckey-French, affirming his belief that Elvis wasn’t by any means, as he puts it, dumb.

What name should we give to that feeling, that light-bulb-going-off realization, when we awake from a pleasurable reading stupor to find that a very talented writer has just caused us to respect—maybe even to like—something which we’d previously disdained? What’s the term for the condition I found myself in, whispering Ned Stuckey-French’s rationalization of Elvis out loud to myself, like it was holy writ? A Writer-on-Artist Lovefest. Meta-Deference.

Thanks for reading!