Discover Top Posts Tagged with #showiness

My workout playlist is literally nothing but broadway show tunes and 'N Sync. It's easy to tell I'm a 90s gay.

#Broadway #showiness #'nsync #workout #fitness #gay

kay continued

“I see me striding through shadow and light. I buy a bottle of fizzy pop from a kiosk and sit down in the shade to drink it. I see me asking the bright women about the stuff, spread on the mats. Coffee? Beans? They pour through my fingers hot from the sun. I see me arranging my pillow hands and laying my weary head on them. I see my fingers feeding a suggestion of food into my mouth. I’ve got a Swahili phrase book. I don’t know about the water. We’ve got bottled water in the minibus but I don’t know about the water out there. Only that it is red, and people are shifting it, in plastic water containers, distances, on bikes, on heads, on donkeys with little traps. So many colours of water container. Children are what I see, war parties of them with spears, in shot-through dresses and straining shorts. Terrifying. My heart booms.” A little long to quote (sorry) but in a book so reliant on style -- really, on a particular voice that changes throughout, carefully calibrated to age and situation -- worth the long excerpt to show how she (Kay, also Louise, the character) works. And this is a showy paragraph, starting with the narrator’s perspective outside of herself, which makes sense by this point -- that she would stand outside herself, see herself acting. Short sentences, simple actions, that then collapse under pressure (dislocation, lack of language, thirst) into a single present-tense self. Who can then come up with the long, rolling description of the ways water moves. All of which is intentional and also smooth, effortless, a tiny little bit showy; this is how Kay writes all the way through, without letting up, which makes for an immersive, virtuoso, exhausting read.

#i j kay #mountains of the moon #showiness #exhaustion