RaveBookforumOperatic ... The sections of Ordinary Notes that occupy domestic, private, and imaginative spaces are warmer, less cruel-to-be-kind, more tropical with their truths, and devastating because with that candor they enter the storm and not its carefully curated aftermaths.
Hilton Als
RaveBookforumAls writes to reconcile the twin Princes and finds it nearly impossible without the intervention of a third interlocutor, a quieter love. I close this book only to loop it in search of the center of its knot of nerves and detachment. It’s a song, a ballad with aching techno undertones and a popular thread we can all recognize—projecting silence onto the thoughts of the dead and famous, who, when we pin them just right, are interchangeable, the carrion of our most frightening desires, souls we must devour to hide the fear that will otherwise devour us. We appropriate those who we deem pinups so we don’t have to witness what they tell us when we let them speak backstage. Prince is the commodity or pinup who speaks and combats the fantasy with ideas of his own. Als is able to allow that psychic distance between him and his would-be lover here, but Prince can’t quite achieve permission to not be one single being. He’s an idea propelling the culture forward before he’s a man ... I love this tragic, gothic-casual look at the untranslatable ambiguities between love, adoration, and entitlement. Prince is so generous here. He is quiet and takes the blame for being irresistible and impossible to not love, and is quiet when those qualities result in him being denied love and collaboration, and is quiet when he turns into someone he’s not for the sake of a love that wouldn’t have arrived without his music. If we don’t know what love is until we look Prince in the eye and need him forever after, then maybe we’re his pinups and puppets and he’s translating for us an emotion we’ve kept so remote from our conscious minds that he has to go beneath his soul to dig it up. That is the solace of Als’s account of close encounters, his flash of a songbook—that it honors Prince’s commitment to being untranslatable, unsampleable. My Pinup’s eyes are nothing like the sun. Pin Prince to your own limits and they vanish, or to a sound and he goes silent, evacuates the spotlight of your bias. It must have hurt, to have all those pins in him, and Als admits how much it hurt to put them there, and leaves it at that, irreconcilable.
John Edgar Wideman
Rave4ColumnsThe book’s style is so deceptively modest it stares you down and waits for you to realize it’s cut your heart out while you coasted along on the calm surface of the syntax into a seething indictment of every aspect of society. Wideman’s is the most effective kind of indictment because he does not deploy oversimplified abstractions or blame nameless structural demons for the wrongs of the world. He offers himself and all that he loves as the evidence of things not seen but felt and suffered and overcome. He lets us into his prison, his \'death row,\' his lifelong trial, and the bleak turmoil of each anticlimactic verdict ... Wideman’s tone possesses a measured dignity that only a vague but palpable humility bordering on self-loathing corrupts. When he is less strategic and succumbs to a prevailing childlike awe toward his own experience objectified as fiction, it’s just as honorable and considerate of his needs and the reader’s. The cruel balancing act between imagination and reality is the protagonist in these stories; what he decides to remember dictates what he is capable of inventing ... Wideman deftly avoids becoming his own celebrity witness.
