Derek Neal lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he teaches English to international students as part of the English Language Development program at McMaster University. Prior to this he lived in Italy, France, and Montreal, where he also taught English in various capacities. He holds a B.A. in both English and French from the University of Vermont and wrote his honors thesis on Albert Camus (Grace, Play, and the Body in the Writings of Albert Camus). His other writing is available on Substack: https://derekneal.substack.com/ Email: drock1237 [at] gmail.com
by Derek Neal I read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, in one day. I started reading it on my iPad at around 7:30 am as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping coffee and eating a piece of cake that my partner had made. Later, I continued the novel during my lunch break as I…
by Derek Neal What if you took Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” concept and transposed it to the vast expanse of the African desert? You would get something like Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), which shows that the room a man locks himself in doesn’t need to be literal—a prison can be made anywhere.…
by Derek Neal Lea Ypi’s first memoir, Free, began with a scene of her hugging a headless statue of Stalin in Durrës, Albania as a child. The image was effective in showing the young Ypi’s devotion to communism, which was important as the book dealt with her disorientation upon its fall and the realization that…
by Derek Neal A few weeks ago my dad was telling me about a man named Chalk-Eye. This man, whom my father had never met but had heard stories about from his own father, was a local legend in the small coal town of Williamson, West Virginia. You might see Chalk-Eye, my dad said, in…
by Derek Neal My first experience with the shared bikes that are now ubiquitous in cities around the world was in Nice, France in 2013. We were out late one night early in the semester, I and the other foreign exchange students, wondering how to get back to our dorm from the city center. It…
by Derek Neal I had meant to read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, but in a process I don’t understand, all the e-books were in use at the library; I borrowed his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), instead. I’d never read Lerner, this despite having written a long essay defending autofiction in The…
by Derek Neal I find myself increasingly unable to read anything resembling AI text, that is, anything seemingly preformed, readymade, or mass produced, like an IKEA chair; but even as I write this, I think to myself—why an IKEA chair? Why does this object, or rather, this unit of language—IKEA chair—come to me unbidden? “IKEA”…
by Derek Neal Allopathy and homeopathy are two contrasting theories of medicine. Allo, meaning other, and homo, meaning same, indicate how suffering (pathos) is cured in these two approaches. Modern medicine, speaking generally, is based on the principle of allopathy, meaning that sickness is counteracted by healing and therapeutic treatments; homeopathy, often considered alternative medicine…
by Derek Neal Three weeks later and I’m almost fully healed. My ribs still hurt when I lie down to sleep and when I rise in the morning, but sitting and walking are fine. In another week I’ll be able to return to the gym and attempt some light weightlifting, a welcome resumption of my…
by Derek Neal The town had only one grocery store, and Steve wondered where the locals did their shopping. Certainly not here, but perhaps in a supermarket outside of town, one that required a car. Along with Julia, he picked up some Italian cheese, prosciutto, grapes, and a bottle of local wine, and they made…
by Derek Neal If one on the goals of art is to wake us up, to remind us what it is to be alive, one of the main ways of doing this is by bringing us as close to death as possible. This is why suicide is such a fruitful and, paradoxically, invigorating artistic subject.…
by Derek Neal The mornings have become dark. These weeks are always strange, the end of October, just before the clock falls back and the mornings brighten again. For now I get ready in a sort of hinterland; it’s not night, but it’s not day either. The sky is a sheet of gray. I back…
by Derek Neal Kazuo Ishiguro often talks about a scene from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that has influenced his writing. In an interview on the occasion of his Nobel Prize in 2017, he mentions how “the narrator hides from the reader and hides from herself in the Charlotte Brontë books,” and how he also writes…
by Derek Neal I started reading Leif Weatherby’s new book, Language Machines, because I was familiar with his writing in magazines such as The Point and The Baffler. For The Point, he’d written a fascinating account of Aaron Rodgers’ two seasons with the New York Jets, a story that didn’t just deal with sports, but…
by Derek Neal Read Part 1 here. In The File on H, Ismail Kadare shows his appreciation of epic poetry and attempts to incorporate aspects of orality so that the form of the novel reflects its content. The plot is relatively simple: two Harvard scholars (modelled on Parry and Lord) travel to Albania to record…
by Derek Neal The File on H is a novel written in 1981 by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. When a reader finishes the Vintage Classics edition, they turn the page to find a “Translator’s Note” mentioning a five-minute meeting between Kadare and Albert Lord, the researcher and scholar responsible, along with Milman Parry, for…
by Derek Neal I first started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology in a bookstore. I read the first page and found myself unable to stop, like a person running on a treadmill at high speed. Finally I jumped off and caught my breath. Fosse’s book, which is a collection of seven novels published as a single…
by Derek Neal The writer is the enemy in Robert Altman’s 1992 film, The Player. The person movie studios can’t do without, because they need scripts to make movies, but whom they also can’t stand, because writers are insufferable and insist upon unreasonable things, like being paid for their work and not having their stories…
by Derek Neal Some weeks ago I made a note to myself on my phone: Describe the artistic encounter—the aesthetic experience, its effect on the reader I made this note because I wanted to try something different in my writing. In most of my essays, without ever articulating this idea to myself, I’ve attempted to…
by Derek Neal Close-Up, a 1990 Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is one of the rare films where the viewing experience is enhanced by knowing certain details beforehand. The movie opens with a scene in a taxi. A journalist is in the front seat while two armed military police officers sit in the back.…