Qiu Xiaolong (裘小龙, /ˈ) is a poet, literary translator, crime novelist, critic and academic living in St. Louis. Born in Shanghai, he is author of nine books in his Inspector Chen series of detective novels, the latest of which is Shanghai Redemption.
Costco is the best place I know where I can enjoy other families and especially their children, now that I do not have a child in my own home who routinely brings other children into my life. At all costs, one must avoid appearing to pay any unwanted attention to any child.
The handlers of the competing frogs were not seasoned adults with complex strategies for teaching a frog to jump from a dead sit upon a prompt. The frog handlers were children. Their contribution to training their frogs appeared to be getting their frogs to the competition alive.
Diversity, inclusion, and the pursuit of equity may be on the run in the 2020s, but I look around this campus, this city, and this country, and I can see that a lot of different kinds of people are still here. I am still here. We are still here. What now?
The 50th anniversary of ‘Jaws’ will trigger the return of sub-rational fears of swimming in the ocean. For me, I am left thinking about a private lunch I shared with Roy Scheider, who played the film’s police chief, and wanting to commit these memories of the great actor to the public record.
I thought I would take this slow moment to tell a baseball story—at a time when the names of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and (the most perishable of these names) Scott Brosius are not yet lost to common memory.
While watching Peck of Dirt, I was thinking about the inscrutable, somewhat self-defeating, but ultimately lovable and inspiring character of the St. Louis rock music scene.
I felt transported and in a kind of dream long before I found a place where I thought I might rest my head long enough to fall asleep, until I was shifted again by what seemed to be the constantly drifting bags of laundry. Sleep would not come right away, a defining experience of life at sea. Added to the queasy motion of the ocean, the heat, and the noise, was a fearsome apparition that Walt had warned me about.
Though St. Louis cannot claim the April 5 debut of “R.E.M. Explored” as the church in Athens can for the band itself, this performance featured a new sequence of the program that has become standard in subsequent concerts, not to mention the only time Mills’s compositions have been re-imagined by Marsh and Mallamud’s orchestrations and performed by a symphony orchestra on the iconic date of R.E.M.’s nativity.
Before the president of the United States publicly imagined the Gaza Strip as a hip Middle Eastern Riviera, I only ever told this story to mock myself at parties. It was one of my bits. It turns out I am a prophet, I would declare.
The guys in Gaza must be nearing 60 like my bandmates and I. I wonder if they stayed in our country after they were free to return to theirs without booking a steady gig in a gulag. I wonder what they make of Vladimir Putin having an ally in the White House or a short-timer like Pete Hegseth having oversight of the mightiest military on Earth.
I have taken a vow of silence about the new presidential administration, but I wanted to record this memory for others who might want to think about the distance we have come in forty years and what it might mean.
Given David Holthouse’s quest in ‘Sasquatch,’ he himself is the subject of one of my old, scarcely believable memories. This memory is not potent enough to send me on an investigation worthy of a documentary series, but the coincidence spurs me at least to commit it to writing.