evan stephens hall

Evan Stephens Hall (of the band Pinegrove) performing “Need 2” at The Sanctuary (@thesanctuarynj ) in Boonton, NJ on 7/21/23. Support The Sanctuary and help us to continue providing for our community!

thank you for doing the pinegrove shuffle

There are more books that I want to read than books I have read in my life. &, damnit, the more I read the more I learn about books I want to check out. Part daunting, part thrilling. But for the first year of my reading life I have felt the press of time. Who knows why. Maybe it’s the world beginning to reemerge from isolated living. On the other side the ascendence of a new generation is obvious. It's also more apparent than ever the vision the ruling class has in mind for us. The fight for the ownership of our own lives, our own time, is getting harder. This year bore undeniable witness to an advancement in capitalism's end goal, the privatization of everything—wealth concentrated in fewer & fewer hands, where access to our shared world is offered only to those with money enough to justify their presence. One example ringing in my ears this morning: Missouri, as of January 1st, has made sleeping outdoors on public lands illegal. The ultimate end is to fully & finally criminalize poverty, to shunt away 'undesirables' out of sight & into for-profit prisons. So it’s time to get smart. To read is to practice the interpretation of texts & of events. Media literacy is more important than ever, & reading a lot prepares us for the viciously complex task of parsing the world. I've found that the only way to get good at something, unfortunately, is to do it a lot. In my continuing efforts of trying not to get good at something stupid by spending all my time doing it, I know that time is never wasted reading. I know that my mind is not a steel trap. It’s more of a breezeway. To get any momentum on a thing I need to do it all the time. This realization has led me to dedicate my time more intentionally to what I'm drawn to—questions of humanism, consciousness, revolution—all of which I've found in the study of 20th century lit. & with more clarity than ever, I see this enormous field as comprised of many smaller questions. There’s no short cut. It’s putting one foot in front of the other, word by word, page by page, bird by bird. So may we read as an act of resistance, of self-love, of preparation—acts which become amplified with practice. Here's to another page! HNY

Next weekend ☀️ Evan Stephens Hall (of Pinegrove) plays at Felice County Fair! A few tickets still available at felicecountyfair.com 🎡

broccoli

hello & welcome to another annual recap of my reading habits. folks, it's been a year. another year in-doors, though less so, with increasing opportunity to be distracted by stuff that's not a book. this year i managed to machete through the thicket of sensory overload to the final page of 57 books. you'll find mostly novels in here, mostly published in the 20th & 21st centuries, in the order which i read them, which is preserved to reflect the choices i made when deciding on the next — would i continue the path of inquiry or switch focus? what would pair nicely with this cheese? is a palate cleanser required after a stinky or otherwise arduous one? should i, after a lighter course, dig back in with a truly funky selection? on the reader's high holy day, new book day, i would celebrate by gathering a short stack of 5 or so from my shelves that spoke to me, & read the first page of each. occasionally the 1st choice wouldn't take. in fact this year i felt more comfortable than ever abandoning a book that wasn't right for me, a skill i've had to cultivate. with every book in the world to read, why settle? of course there's a constant fomo-element in the selection process, so some degree of deliberate commitment is necessary. i'll usually give it to page 80 before i walk away if by that point i still feel iffy. but it's far & away more common for me to love a book i read. actually, due probably in large part to the self-selected nature of this list, i'll say with sincerity that nearly every single one of these books i at very least enjoyed & would recommend in the right situation. it's my hope that this list might give you some ideas for what to try next, or just might offer some motivation or readerly solidarity in general. it is, in today's world, somewhat uncommon to choose to spend hours of your life deciphering wiggly hieroglyphics. but i see it as form of meditation, a form of prayer to the gods of imagination & to a better world, which we create in our ambitious imaginings — & which we make more possible with practice. [the list is posted in 2 parts in the comments (character limit)! please help me by liking the posts, so they'll be easier to find!]

books i read in 2020 in the order i read em: Winter (2017) by Ali Smith An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) by Aimee Bender Lanny (2019) by Max Porter The Unconsoled (1995) by Kazuo Ishiguro Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) by Ocean Vuong The Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker (audio book)* Running in the Family (1982) by Michael Ondaatje Civilwarland in Bad Decline (1996) by George Saunders** As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner** The Yellow House (2019) by Sarah M. Broom Waiting for Godot (1952) by Samuel Beckett* A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015) by Lucia Berlin Bags (or a story thereof) (2014) by Patrick McHale Little Wonder (2018) by Kat Gardiner Reality Hunger (2010) by David Shields* Bird by Bird (1994) by Anne Lamott for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1977) by Ntozake Shange Friday Black (2018) by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Annie John (1983) by Jamaica Kincaid Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) by Teju Cole Vertigo (1990/1999) by W. G. Sebald/ trans. by Michael Hulse Long Division (2013) by Kiese Laymon ...list continued in comments!

i think if you’re gonna say black lives matter, you’ve gotta support universal health care, child care, housing, public education, a jobs guarantee, & defunding the police/military. what do you think?

hello & here’s a little ditty thats been bouncing around my head these past few weird days. it’s a pump up song, designed to pump myself up for phone banking, which yes, felt well outside my comfort-zone at first but soon became a terrific way to talk to people out there in this vast country about some stuff that rly matters. people actually want to talk about this stuff! it impacts their lives, they have opinions about it, so many opinions, insightful observations & heartbreaking stories. what bernie is proposing would begin to heal a lot of what’s wrong out there. universal healthcare, paid sick leave, workers rights, tenants rights, compassion towards freelance workers and those in the gig economy, i mean cmon! this is exactly the sort of thing he’s been trying to prevent for decades. there is so much left to fight for. THIS IS NOT OVER. the corporate media would love for u to think it is, it’s not. LETS GET TO WORK!! 💙

hey there folks. i'd like to celebrate 2019’s adjournment with a list of the books i liked, featuring none of the books i didn't. this is my second year writing down all the books i've read in an iphone note, & it continues to be fun & exciting to do that for some reason. i recommend it! & if i may, i'd like to conclude my year of reading with a thought or two about why i think it's a good way to spend one's time. reading fiction is a radical gesture in the year 2019. with many other terrific & quicker ways of ingesting art, choosing such a slow format is an active signal of resistance against a world that seems to increasingly value reactionary politics, hot takes, cold listicles, frozen cynicism. as activities go, it's one that requires a lot of patience, & actually i've found that doing it has helped me develop my own capacity for the stuff. as such i wanna acknowledge how hard it can be to do it regularly. to anyone reading this whose new years resolutions include reading more, i'll say that in my experience the more you do it, the easier it gets. (the inverse is also true.) so more than anything for me it's been about building momentum. a lot of it has to do with choosing the right book! & more & more, it has to do with deliberately rejecting fast screens & screaming advertisements. so, to my peers in the common quest for more intentional living, i raise my novella to you: this one's for the bookworms who looked up & noticed all those bright scintillating lights & considered jumping into the pulse of it but instead redirected their noses downward & said, you know what, giant shiny inflated corporate mascot? thank you but no thank you, i'm gonna chill here with this book. happy 2020 & fuck amazon! 🥳 Traveling Sprinkler (2013) by Nicholson Baker How Should a Person Be? (2012) by Sheila Heti Motherhood (2018) by Sheila Heti Fox 8 (2019) by George Saunders McGlue (2014) by Ottessa Moshfegh Homesick for Another World (2017) by Ottessa Moshfegh Tap Out (2019) by Edgar Kunz Conversations with Friends (2017) by Sally Rooney Normal People (2019) by Sally Rooney Mr Salary (2019) by Sallary Roonery Giovanni’s Room (1956) by James Baldwin If Beale S

>>\\y

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