David Foster Wallace—a measure of authenticity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRVNTtyqmQA
Tavares Strachan, ‘Encyclopedia of Invisibility’
A striking installation from one of my favorite contemporary artists:
https://isolatedlabs.com/installations/sfmoma-2019/
“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”—Carl Sandburg
I was saddened to learn to day that The White Review, which I consider one of the best literary and arts publications in the UK, will be indefinitely suspending publication due to a lack of funding.
https://www.thewhitereview.org/
Article discussing how those who decide our military spending, often against the advice even of the Pentagon, stand to profit from their own decisions:
https://truthout.org/articles/meet-the-congress-members-trading-defense-stocks-while-shaping-military-policy/
There’s enough clean energy underway in the US to meet most of our energy needs—but we still aren’t seeing substantial progress on our clean energy goals. That’s because our energy grid and transmission system need serious updating.
Grid-enhancing technologies could double our clean energy capacity and cut 90 million tons of carbon emissions per year — the equivalent of taking 20 million gasoline-powered cars off the road —all while creating more than 300,000 jobs.My top 30 musical artists
Maybe tomorrow it will be different. But for today, this is the list. Maybe there’s someone you don’t know, or haven’t listened to in a while:
Beethoven
Miles Davis
Ali Farka Touré
James Brown
Louis Armstrong
Robert Johnson
Fela Kuti
Tom Waits
Björk
Bach
The Minutemen
Aphex Twin
Blind Willie Mctell
The Pixies
John Lee Hooker
Velvet Underground
Charles Mingus
Tortoise
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Muddy Waters
Charlie Parker
Fugazi
Duke Ellington
Nina Simone
Jimi Hendrix
Townes Van Zandt
The Stooges
Bob Dylan
Elliot Smith
T. S. Monk
“so many faces
line the body, or are lined up inside the body, waiting.”
—Cole Swenson, “Knuckles'“
The US spends more on its military than it does on education, housing, labor, veterans, transportations, and food and agriculture combined.
About half the military budget goes to corporate contractors, who have been shown to regularly practice price gouging.
I am now at the end of my fourth week of school. With the school load I am taking, as well as trying to maintain my own writing practice to a degree, it has been difficult to devote as much time to this notebook as I would like. I feel like this space has helped me develop my own prose writing, and allowed me to explore some of the many subjects I am fascinated by. It has also been the first space in which I’ve shared some of my thoughts in a public way that isn’t on some social media platform.
Hopefully, in the near future, I can devote more time to writing here.
The Invention of Streetlights
BY COLE SWENSEN
noctes illustratas
(the night has houses)
and the shadow of the fabulous
broken into handfuls—these
can be placed at regular intervals,
candles
walking down the streets at times eclipsed by trees.
Around 2 billion people in the world are without access to clean, safe drinking water, and approximately 3.6 billion—or 46% of the world’s population—lack adequate sanitation services, according to a United Nations report published earlier this year.
After Being Told That Saying “Writing Saved My Life” Is A Cliché
I have been told and have read that it is a cliché to say that writing saved your life. I have also read and heard multiple times that as a writer, you choose to write for others, or to write for yourself. Why share anything that’s written for yourself alone? It is, as I’ve heard, merely ‘masturbation’.
Well, this will offend the Puritan impulse of such statements, but people can certainly derive a lot of pleasure out of watching other people masturbate, if that’s really what it is. And how can any writing be only that, when it takes place in the shared space of language? Can I not write for both myself and others? Can writing for others not be writing for myself? By writing to myself, can I not help others?
For many years of my life, I did not share my work with anyone. Not because I was indulging in some sort of masturbatory act, but because I had internalized the idea that no one would be interested in what I wrote. No one I knew read poetry. In fact, most people I knew scorned the idea of poetry. Yet I kept writing. Why?
Because writing gave me something to live for when I did not want to live. It allowed me to find beauty in acts of trauma that had occurred to me. It was a way to explore the world, not just my own experience. Malign such writing as self-therapy, if you must. But don’t negate all writing that doesn’t serve a utilitarian purpose.
If a poem seems puzzling, if the language is strange, if the structure of the lines is challenging, do not presume the writer is writing for themselves alone. They may think in a different way than you do; they may have far different experiences than you do; they may have a different linguistic inheritance; they may be desperately trying to communicate to others something that others have never heard expressed before.
Reading mythology when I was a boy was nearly as essential to me in becoming a poet as the discovery and reading of poetry. Myths throughout history were nearly always originally written down as poetry. A myth can be seen as a poem by an entire people. These myths constantly support and inform my work.
From my own experience, fair representation doesn’t seem necessary to a populace that feels the political system has never actually represented them. And it is difficult for people in that position to feel that lack of necessity isn’t by design. Trump came along and confirmed that feeling for many people. Never mind that he was one of the coastal elite he talked about. Or at least an ostracized member of the coastal elite. He exploited the knowledge of the exploited that they were being exploited. This is what allowed a con-artist and a bully with no political experience but a bit of celebrity mystique to beat Clinton—a flawed candidate, yes, but objectively speaking probably one of the most qualified presidential candidates in recent American history. Something I find even scarier than Trump as president is that he won’t be the last person to successfully follow this model.
Butterfly Nebula, by Laura Hogan
This is an email from the poet Laura Hogan, a member of the first poetry group I was ever able to join, announcing the publication of her new book, which won the Backwaters Prize in poetry:
Dear friends,
At the beginning of the pandemic, I started writing poems that intersected with science—biology, astronomy, physics, in, for example, sea creatures and butterflies and stars—and then of course, being me, I suppose, the poems started intersecting with identity, the human condition, and questions of faith. That turned into my new collection Butterfly Nebula, which won the Backwaters Prize in poetry last year and will be published by the Backwaters Press, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, on October 1st, although it appears that the book is already shipping. I have received copies and the book is beautiful!
You can order the book through University of Nebraska Press, Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore. I’ll be reading poems from the book in several venues this fall, and if you’re in the Los Angeles area please come out to the book launch at Chevalier’s Books on October 6th at 6 pm, where I’ll be reading with poets Donna Spruijt-Metz, Vandana Khanna, and Chloe Martinez—I would be so happy to see you there! I’ll also read poems at the UCLA Planetarium the evening of October 4th at 8 pm, and after the reading we’ll have a telescope viewing. Or on November 9th please come out to the Village Well in Culver City, where I’ll read with poet Kate Bolton Bonnici. More information about these events, plus other upcoming events, can be found here.
If you know of people who would be interested in reviewing Butterfly Nebula or teaching it in a class, please feel free to send them my way or to the press for review copies.
I want to thank each one of you for the support you have given me over the years—each one of you has, in your own way, helped and encouraged me along this journey, and I am so grateful.
Wishing you a wonderful fall, and I hope to see you soon!
Warmly,
Laura
Laura Reece Hogan
Bread and butter
Though I worked as a cook for many years in various restaurants around the country, studying and preparing and eating a number of different cuisines, no other food is as satisfying to me as a piece of sourdough bread, still warm from the oven, topped with freshly-made, cultured butter and a sprinkle of crunchy finishing salt. First there's the experience of the aroma, yeasty and malty, which reminds me of the bread my mother and grandmother made for our family when I was a child. Whether I cut a thick slice or tear off a chunk with my hands, I listen to the crackle of the caramelized crust. I spread the cultured butter, which is fuller in flavor, and more acidic, than the usual store-bought American butter. I sprinkle Maldon salt over the top, breaking up the large salt crystals slightly as I do so, but not so much that I won't feel every crunch as I eat. Then I get to taste the sourness and savoriness that only comes with slowly-fermented dough, the sweetness of the melting butter, the crust as it shatters, the moist and warm interior, and the salt bringing forward every flavor and making me salivate even more. Since I have some training as a baker, as I eat I'm also able to appreciate how much skill and labor is required to make a great loaf of bread. I've cooked thousands of different dishes, some of them quite complicated. But none are as satisfying to me as a simple piece of warm sourdough with butter and salt.
The academic essay is modeled on the idea of an argument. I wish it was modeled on the idea of an invitation.
This is one of the most stunning novels I’ve ever read. I was lucky to have found it on the street recently in Berkeley. In my opinion it belongs next to One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Magic Mountain and whatever other great novels of the 20th century you might name.
Not all novels can operate well at the level of the sentence. Okri is a poet as well as a fiction writer, and that is clear from the first paragraph. I actually do not think there are more than a dozen sentences in this 500-page book that are without interest in themselves. Reading the novel feels like experiencing one long fever dream. It is that intense. Please check it out.
Yesterday I was notified that my work will be included in THE SAN FRANCISCO HAIKU ANTHOLOGY: The Next Thirty Years. I realized that this will be the fourth anthology my haiku will be printed in. When I started submitting work several years ago, I would never have expected that. It is wonderful to have my work be accepted by writers and editors I admire.