So I felt an instant bond when I read a New York Times article about the 17-year-old British singer Archy Marshall—who recently changed his name from the juvenile “Zoo Kid,” to the majestic “King Krule.” My excitement was immediately followed by curiosity. Marshall’s breakout song “Out Getting Ribs” showcases his unusually, and unexpectedly, deep voice as well as his emotionally raw lyrics. What it doesn’t do, is explain his new name. At the time he was still going by Zoo Kid, but his latest single, “The Noose of Jah City”—part of his five-song EP that came out last week—isn’t much help either. While it’s typical for names to change as performers try to take on more adult personas (think Lil’ Bow Wow) this one resonated a bit more for me. Unfortunately, when I tried contacting him (I was hoping to write something for the magazine where I work) to see if I somehow inspired the name change—or if maybe he was a long-lost cousin—his representative strung me along, but ultimately stopped responding to my emails. (Maybe that’s where the cruelty comes from?)

Family lore has it that Krule is derived from a Polish word for royalty, though I haven’t been able to figure out the origin of this theory. (If that’s the case King Krule might even be a bit redundant.) When I worked at NPR a colleague joked that I was probably related to Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab fame, though even before my grandfather truncated our surname, his spelling is a bit different than ours. (The same goes for Sara Krulwich, a photographer for The New York Times, another person I’d love to be related to, if only for the theater tickets.) The only other “celebrity” my family has encountered with the name was a Marvel mutant (and savage) Krule, and who, as the name suggests, is totally evil. The thing is, no one who is currently at Marvel has any idea why it’s spelled that way—I was told that the proper spelling is “Crule” and the K was just a fluke. Of course at some point action figures were made with the “Krule” spelling—and yes, my family has quite a few of them lying around the house.

King Krule’s camp still hasn’t replied to my attempts to find out why Marshall went with the name and what he thinks it means (one friend suggested he may just be a bad speller). While Krule may be a unique name for a singer, using the homonym, cruel, in lyrics is commonplace. Though Marshall may have the spelling down, if we’re going with phonetics, you can’t really beat the chorus of my theme song of the moment: St. Vincent’s “Cruel.” If I ever become famous, that’s the song I want playing when I walk into a room.

I’ll start with my favorite (which chronologically is first anyway). It’s my favorite because I think it’s just a wonderful sentiment (It’s the reverse of schadenfreude!), but it is also the point at which I began to really enjoy the book. [All bolds are my own]

1. “Kiki laughed her big lovely laugh in the small store. People looked up from their specialty good and smiled abstractly, supporting the idea of pleasure even if they weren’t certain of the cause.” -162

2. Basically this entire page, but this passage in particular: “Jerome had wept: the tears you cry for someone whom you never met who made something beautiful that you loved.” -174

3. I think I am enamored with this passage because, on occasion, it describes me all to well: “She smiled in a knowing way about things she did not know” -231

4. Also a sentiment I share: “Radiant with relief, he turned to go. It was the perfect visit: well intended but with no one at home.” -293

5. The entire “tomato” passage on page 312 that reduces every college class to a sentence about a tomato (anyone who has studied liberal arts would do well to read it). A sampling: “It’s our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is ‘The tomato’s nature versus the tomato’s nurture’, and Jane Colman’s class is ‘To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory’” It continues and is equally entertaining especially the kicker – Howard’s (the main character) class is all about never saying “I like the tomato”

6. And this of course was something I could, on the one hand, relate to, but on the other hand, having been away for a year, not understand at all: “He felt the despondency universities had long inspired in him. He had grown up in them; he had known their book stacks and storage cupboards and quads and spires and science blocks and tennis courts and plaques and statues. He felt sorry for the people who found themselves trapped in such arid surroundings. Even as a small child he was absolutely clear that he never, ever enroll at one himself. In universities, people forget how to live. Even in the middle of a music library, they had forgotten what music was.” -407

Lately I find myself writing more in my journal. Bits and pieces that are more suited to journals or diaries. I’ve been keeping journals on and off for as long as I can remember (off mostly) but have been going pretty strong since my semester in Paris when I found it imperative that I start writing stuff down in English while French was buzzing all around me. Mind you — I loved the buzzing and miss it terribly now. When I got back from Paris I decided to start a blog, something I never thought I’d do because I considered myself to be a very private person. But with the nature of journalism changing and the ways in which social media was changing the world (at that time it still hadn’t aided any revolutions, but it was on its way) I decided I couldn’t hold out any longer. Turns out I loved it. I became a twitter fanatic. I now how a cooking blog as well and even a somewhat (though I guess not anymore) secret Tumblr.

While I rely on these platforms for different things, I still always found a place for my journal. While sometimes I was prone to oversharing on these platforms, other times I decided I wanted the comfort of my own private space. Lately the latter has been the case.

Over Passover, Jack and I went to the Morgan Library to see an exhibit I’ve been absolutely dying to see on diaries. It was only a tiny room but we spent around 40 minutes there. I was overwhelmed with inspiration and awe at the different types of diaries and the various creative approaches people took to expressing their thoughts. I thought about writing more about the exhibit here, but instead went to my journal as I found it fitting to write about it there. I only mention the exhibit here because as we were leaving I expressed to Jack my voyeuristic pleasure, yet uncomfortableness at having seen the exhibit. He was confused–don’t people write journals so other people can see them?

(editors note: apologies Jack if I’ve reinterpreted our conversation, this is how I remember it)

2. “I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on the rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so; it felt ridiculous to mount the elevated chairs in the shops and have someone keel before me. It wasn’t, as I often said to myself, the kind of relationship I wanted to have with another person.” (71)

3. “Normally, I would have been curious about the person in the seat next to mine, a curiosity that was almost always disappointed. I would soon afterward find myself eager to get the small talk done with and, the absence of mutual interests firmly established, to return to the book I was reading.” (87)

4. “To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.” (192)

5. “It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes, but it was also a choice, and I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing, because I was so essentially indecisive myself.” (198)

6. “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.” (243)

– Jonathan Lethem “The Fortress of Solitude” page 4 (I stopped reading around page 34 and decided to give up on the Jonathans for a bit longer)