serena + quiet storm 📻 + waiting to exhale

c'mon baby — do the loco motion

I’m on Amtrak right now, in one of their “roomettes.” The space is closet-like (but with a huge wndow) and it’s mine for eleven glorious hours. There are two soft-ish chairs, and bunk above me could click solidly into place, Murphy-bed-style, after an attendant yanks it from where it’s folded toward the ceiling. The sleep I’ve had on Amtrak bunks is up there with the best rest I’ve ever had. That includes falling asleep, with sunblock on, by a lapping and clean body of water. That includes the sleep that arrives like a shove after a long jag of weeping. I wish I could climb up in that bunk tonight (there are li’l stairs), but I can’t afford to fall into a Sleeping Beauty slumber. So I’ll stay on this cozy reclined seat, sipping icy ginger ale with a straw.

I love Amtrak and also talk about it here:

I’m headed to the Midwest, and received some luscious food recommendations from

A Girl Named Rob

. I really want to try Batuqui, a Brazilian restaurant housed in a restored Victorian home. I’d like to lose myself in warm queso minas drizzled with honey. I want to dive into a deep bowl of mariscada — squid, crabmeat, shrimp, and sweet plantain cooked in coconut milk and olive oil. The idea of mariscada has me thinking of San Francisco cioppino (with King crab legs), and Louisiana seafood gumbo (with jumbo and rock and tiny shrimp) and how both of those places and their seafood stews are in my blood and my soul. So even though I’ll be busy with work stuff on this trip, I see Batuqui like a beacon in the distance.

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The things I am working on now include a certain year-end obituary/appreciation. So I’ve been listening to a lot of R&B from the 1980s. I have not been listening much to the amazing Black pop hits from that era (scroll down here to see a bunch of those No. 1 hits). What’s got me by the throat right now is the wildly emo stuff that found its home on Black radio stations and at Black wedding receptions. The songs that were blasted through bad earphones after a bad breakup. I know I wasn’t the only one who was listening to the Quiet Storm radio format — because it was so successful. This 2020 oral history of Quiet Storm from Essence is really good (it’s from Ericka Blount Danois).

And speaking of Essence, I wrote about Serena Williams for them — just came out.

The full story is here.

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Sending belated happy birthday wishes to the author Terry McMillan (October 19). I wrote a short appreciation about McMillan for my publisher’s site last year:

For me? It’s Terry McMillian. It’s her bravery and ambition and her faith in the stories of Black women. Knowing and necessary, Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel, Waiting to Exhale, ‘proved’ to a narrow-minded culture industry that not only did Black people read but that Black women read so much and so deeply they launched era-defining trends like McMillan’s storytelling did with the 1995 film version of Waiting to Exhale. Exhale made back near its entire budget over opening weekend and served as inspiration for an all-Black woman soundtrack that in 2022 remains one of the most successful of all time. We haven’t even started talking about Mama (1987), or How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), or how Terry McMillan’s books gave me the courage to keep placing one sentence after another.

[Penguin Random House asked Black authors to share their favorite books by Black authors — ones they return to again and again. It’s really good, and you can read all of it here.]

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More later!

In music,

Danyel