James Parker

Our politics are broken; our world is melting; the next catastrophe looms. Enter James Parker, who for years now has been writing odes of appreciation on subjects from the seemingly minor (“Ode to Naps”) to the unexpected (“Ode to Giving People Money”) to the seemingly minor, unexpected, and hyperspecific (“Ode to Running in Movies”). Finally collecting Parker’s beloved and much-lauded odes in one place, this volume demonstrates the profound power of the form. Each ode is an exercise in gratitude. Each celebrates the permanent susceptibility of everyday humdrum life to dazzling saturations of divine light: the squirrel in the street, the crying baby, the misplaced cup of tea. Parker’s odes are songs of praise, but with a decent amount of complaining in there, too: a human ratio of moans. Varied in length but unified in tone, mostly in prose, sometimes toppling into verse, the odes range across music, movies, literature, psychology, and beyond, all through the lens of Parker’s personal history. Gathered together, they form an accidental how-to guide to honoring your own experience―and to finding your own odes.

Odes to Being Alive

Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes

Parmin

The Germans, I'm told, have a single enormous word for the experience of stepping off the curb and being narrowly missed by a speeding bicycle. And another one for the sensation of finding a seat in a packed subway car and realizing, at the same moment, that the person sit- ting next to you is vibrantly insane. We need words like these in English.

But at its most proverbial, the Semradism is simply common sense, cubed. "If you have to tell some- one something, it's already too late." Chew on that for a while.

Writing, words, should pause here. To write about his sound, the actual noise-in-your-body of Jimi Hen- drix? Well now. There's a theme to beggar your lexicon and freeze you at the frontiers of sense. Still, what's writing for, if not to ling itself at the unwritable?

Have you run out of patience? I don't mean just for now, relative to what's going on. I mean permanently. As in: it's all gone. Has that happened to you yet? It will. Because patience, one discovers, is not a virtue but a quantity. Like oil in the car or milk in the fridge. Not limitless and oceanic, but quite finite. I ran out years ago. AIII have now is stamina. I can endure. Radiant with suppressed exasperation, I can hang in there.

Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes quotes

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