Lorrie Moore

I do remember having to put down the book after reading the first paragraph and just thinking "I am so happy I'm reading this", it was like listening to a New Order record and hearing a new Peter Hook bassline for the first time, you know exactly what it's going to do but in the moment it feels perfect.

DC I basically agree but isn't that roughly what one might have felt about LM for about 15 years?

The Rock thing you mean, I assume, is in the 'Wings' story?

Probably agree re politics, but 'Foes' is tremendously written and funny !

Only realized toward finishing 'Wings' that it was a rewrite of Henry James.

Odd that it's a song about ROCKERS but is presumably not a joke about the band WINGS.

If only Peter Miller were here to humour me.

And 'Referential' is 'after VN' which I take is Nabokov - which story, I am unsure, but there seems to be an 'intertextual exercise' motif here.

remembered what I was going to say about 'Wings' -

I didn't really get - or believe! - the motivation esp of the central woman, right up to her final dealings with the house

although I realize that 'the mystery of motivation', 'the ambiguity of people's desires' is the Jamesian schtick she is referring to.

I've only just seen this 2009 review of LM, by a notable writer on climate breakdown. Well informed and worthwhile I think.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lives-lorrie-moore/

“I feel like I’ve got five years to live,” says Agnes, in “Agnes of Iowa,” having made a brief go of things in New York. “So I’m moving back to Iowa so that it’ll feel like fifty.”

That is so good.