It\u2019s June 2016. A group of friends gather in the courtyard of a New York City bar to discuss their days, their dates, their philosophies of art and life. In November there will be an election whose consequences can\u2019t quite be imagined yet. The Brexit vote goes through in England. In Minnesota, Philando Castile is shot to death at a traffic stop by police. As a cohesive book, this novella resists definition\u2014both in terms of its construction and its central energy. The friends break into the day-by-day, diaristic format of the narrative\u2014which includes shopping lists, the plots of movies, and the news of the day with equal import\u2014to tell their own stories of chance encounters, overheard conversations, or personal epiphanies. In San Francisco, John, the curator of these many narrations, goes on a quest to locate the studio where Neil Young recorded the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch\u2019s Dead Man for no reason other than to see if he can. In a philosophical throughline, multiple characters bemoan the loss of the analog experience. Speaking again of Young\u2014specifically his habit of working out early drafts of songs live onstage in the pre-YouTube era\u2014one of the friends says, \u201cA form of life, of artistic practice, that required the presence of other people is no longer possible; the audience is no longer able to be there as people, only devices, recording and comparing.\u201d Whether or not this may be true for Neil Young fans, it does not feel true for readers of this book, who wash in and out of the flood of images conjured by John and his friends only to come up hard against the immutable fact of a headline that both binds us to the experience through shared history and underscores the privilege of hindsight. While some readers may search for a point among all this overlaid ephemera, Searls\u2019 insistent return to the moments when analog experiences interrupt the forward momentum of events\u2014a girl taking a surreptitious photo on the train, lizards on a hiking path startled by lightning\u2014show that the book\u2019s real interest lies in the ordinary power of sensation, rather than the flashbulb sensationalism of event.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s June 2016. A group of friends gather in the courtyard of a New York City bar to discuss their days, their dates, their philosophies of art and life. In November there will be an election whose consequences can\u2019t quite be imagined yet. The Brexit vote goes through in England. In Minnesota, Philando Castile is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4525"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}