Keith Knight: If you eat at that local ethnic restaurant down the street, you should be embracing the idea of teaching the history of Black people in your school system.
Benedict Nguyễn: Nobody’s in full control of their own narrative, especially not our trans sports niche celebrities.
Knight: So they let us stay at their place, which was really nice.
Nguyễn: But I always saw it as a polyphonic, multivalent text whose delights would be both random treats hidden within the cacophony, but also the cacophony in its aggregate.
Knight: Which I don’t understand. And that is going to be as valid 20 years from now as it was a couple of years ago.
•••
Nguyễn: It was the same week copyedits were due for the book.
Knight: I think it’s hard for a lot of people to come to terms with that.
Nguyễn: Ambiguous! And that really got the ball rolling—I’m not sorry.
Knight: You see the prices just shooting up.
Nguyễn: Don’t worry, babe, I claimed the equivalent handles.
•••
Knight: I think we all hated the Lakers, but we definitely weren’t pulling for the Celtics.
Nguyễn: In one match, one character is reminded of the profound beauty felt in the physical sensation of playing the game.
Knight: And I’ll tell you, he was like seriously a boss mob character. Cigar chomping, big hat rim.
Nguyễn: But even those latter sections are conveyed through the slight removal of a third-person narrator with her own periodic snarkiness towards them.
Knight: We moved to Bryant Street, just across the street from the Newland Street projects, during the Blizzard of ‘78—we pulled a lot of boxes on sleds.