I just ordered this book.

Michael Erik Dyson said this about it:

“Thelonious Monk,” by Robin D. G. Kelley, the biography of a musical genius written by a certified polymath. Kelley is a world-famous historian who reads and writes across several disciplines as he cooks his family gourmet meals, does doting daddy duty, grades pitiful undergraduate papers, directs the dissertations of an army of emerging scholars across the nation and plays a mean jazz piano, all while cranking out groundbreaking books. Truly disgusting, um, I’m sorry, I meant demoralizing, yet somehow inspiring.”

Sounds good to me. The rest of his NYTBR By the Book interview is here.

He also speaks incredibly highly of Martha Nussbaum (someone I too admire):

“I know Nussbaum is highly regarded, but if she were a man, she’d take her rightful place as one of the greatest philosophers and thinkers in the last half-century. She’s impossibly erudite, remarkably prolific, effortlessly fluid in an astonishing array of subjects, and a lovely, lucid writer.”

I have to remember these online versions of the By The Book interviews are always the expanded version.

Here’s a poem I like from the current issue of Poetry Magazine: Photo of a Girl 1992: Gremlins by Faylita Hicks

Enough.

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