Friday Links: I Got Another Poem Published Edition
"It's fit and proper for you to know your sports. / What greater glory attends a man, while he's alive," - Homer, 'The Odyssey'
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
One day, I’ll act like I’ve been there before (I have). But it’s still just so thrilling to get a poem published! Moist Poetry Journal and their multimedia superstar editor Han VanderHart were kind enough to publish my poem, “warm February watching nature documentaries.” Because it’s National Poetry Month, there’s even a writing prompt in there!
What I’ve Been Reading This Week: tipped my hat on these earlier, and I’m not so sure either author is going to be reading this blog, so let’s skip the professional wrestling buildup into. These books rule, and pair very well with what I read last week. I’m talking, of course, about The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles and 99 Stories of God by Joy Williams.
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, Books 1-11: let’s get something out of the way first: in Book 8, “A Day For Songs and Contests,” Odysseus carves a piece of meat and has it taken to Demodocus, the blind singer/poet who has been entertaining everyone all day and night, saying, “From all who walk the earth our bards deserve / esteem and awe, for the Muse herself has taught them paths of song. She loves the breed of harpers.”
What the hell was the point of the Renaissance if we didn’t structure “Western Civilization” around giving musician/poets tons of money and huge chunks of roasted boar as a basic income?
Anyway, 16 years or whatever since I first read this poem, and guess what? It still rips. Gone is the monotonous bloody warring of The Iliad, replaced with frame narratives, flashback recounting, raw goat milk-drinking Cyclops and the perils of libertarian society, multiple stories of Agamemnon’s death (hell yeah guy sucks), plenty of sailing and dashing ships on the rocks, and perhaps most important: stanza breaks. This poem breathes a little bit, and not only because every other line isn’t Chekov’s Gunning the trenches of World War I.
Real quick: I gotta mention how much I love the Telemachy. Why? I’ve been asking myself that for 16 years. Besides the “what a wild move, not having Odysseus show up in The Odyssey for until book five” shock value, it’s such a great thought to show how a person is missed when they leave. We see the hole someone’s absence creates in so many people’s lives. It’s also legitimately thrilling to see Telemachus’s growth into a self-assured man committed to honoring his dad and protecting his mom. At one point, he crews up with another young homie and they decide it’s time for them to be Guys Being Dudes and it rocks. No joke, I got the same kind of excited reading the Telemachy as I did when the Animorphs would have to save the world but lie to their parents about where they were going. Yet every time I try to explain all of this to my kid when he’s watching the doctor episode of Bluey, I am told “you’re blocking the TV.”
99 Stories of God by Joy Williams: we’re genre-bending again this week. I hadn’t read this before, but thought it would pair well with Short Talks. These are—and again, this is my Potter Stewart showing—these are more stories than poems. They are stories that excite me in the same way as poems, though. These stories are fables, fairy tales, cautionary tales, jokes, religious, blasphemous, at once Old Timey and Radically New—they’re great!
One thing I sometimes have with whole collections of flash fiction is I sometimes start to get existential. “Who can remember all these stories,” I ask. “Back-to-back-to-back like this, do they really pack the same punch? Does anything anywhere mean anything at all?” These aren’t as bleak of thoughts as they sound—Bob and I have talked on the podcast before about how sometimes the back third of a poetry manuscript can start to bleed together if you’re not careful. Around the time Chloe’s Collective Gravities came out, we had a Twitter back-and-forth comparing the best story collections to multi-course meals. You know how you want a metric ton of the noodles, but only some of the bacon-wrapped dates? Or you take a portion of steamed seasonal veggies that you feel will be good for you, because you need something good for you after those 40-50 pieces of cocktail shrimp? Might just be me. Anyway, my usual hang-ups did not flare while reading this book. The only time I resented it was Thursday, when I was on like story #75, and I thought “damnit, I don’t want to rush through these last 24.” What I’m trying to tell you is this: 99 Stories of God is the Lindt Lindor truffles of story collections. The best way to read this book is three stories a day for 33 days.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? This is probably only interesting to the proverbial “me & Neal” of this blog, but I think I found someone who’s as big of a CHON freak as me. YouTuber Tman has a whole video about why Chon is his favorite band, and he also collected every live performance of a track from Homey into one super video. Like I said, probably only interesting to me, but when Nathan hit those tsunami drums on the into to “Sleepy Tea,” it was on.
My beloved
has his first post up! If this is what his Substack is going to be, you want to subscribe. He’s taking us behind the brain that wrote the book—one of the greatest uses of blogging. By the time Utopians In Love comes out, the Bobstack is gonna be like the 1997 NBA Championship DVD—behind-the-scenes of greatness, and probably a surprising Utah cameo.WILD cover story from Kerry Cardoza in Chicago Reader about Michael Johnston, the trust fund guy who owns Schubas, Lincoln Hall, and Audiotree—which you might recognize as “a huge chunk of Chicago’s music scene”—being a pretty repulsive voyeur who films people without their consent! Kerry Cardoza gets a huge amount of credit for reporting this story out after the initial news of Johnston’s behavior came out in 2020 (which I somehow missed). Idk y’all, I personally have never had a $20,000 monthly allowance coming out of just one of my trusts, and if I did? I’d probably be the guy behind a bunch of music venues and a music discovery company. You know what I wouldn’t do? All the stuff described in the Blink 182 classic “Voyeur.” Nor would I fire all the women around me (on International Women’s Day no less) for speaking up. Wealth rots your soul, dudes. Anyway, read all the way to the kicker if you’re one of those losers worried about “cancel culture” or “if #MeToo has gone too far” (and then either fix your heart or quit reading this blog).
Jantay “I’m A Crypto Guy” Porter has been banned for life from the NBA for betting against himself and his team. Good. I am for sports gambling being legal, but the same way alcohol, tobacco, and weed are legal. Certainly not in favor of gambling taking over the culture and being advertised in our faces the way it is. The Distraction nails it: gambling is gross, skeevy, creepy uncle behavior. Loser shit. You should be as proud of your sports gambling as you are of your dandruff shampoo or ED medicine. You know what’s interesting? Apparently, you can use a credit card on sports gambling apps. Gambling and phone apps are known addictive triggers. You know what’s not addictive? Marijuana. You know where you can’t use a credit card? Dispensaries. I swear the United States is just begging its citizens to get high and tell people to “follow the money, man.”
There’s a lot of text this week so let’s take a minute to celebrate The Giant Boban, winner of the people’s chicken. Jason Concepcion and Shea Serrano pointed out that this is a great way to hide point shaving, but Boban only played a bad guy in John Wick 3. In real life, he gets people chicken at the end of the regular season.
“Stone Age Wall Found At Bottom of Baltic Sea ‘May Be Europe’s Oldest Megastructure’” by Ian Sample in The Guardian well yeah, I’m gonna click that. It’s ancient epics month and I’m not gonna talk about the oldest megastructure in the Baltic Sea? Come on. I take the claim that this is a hunting structure at face value—I am not an archaeologist nor a scholar of ancient European history—but I’d be curious to see if that claim holds up. We love thinking all hunter-gatherers did was hunt and gather. They did (still do) like, lots of other stuff. Maybe some asshole was trying to claim property rights on the beach. You don’t know.
What’re you still doing here? That Tman guy makes his own music, too. Here’s his single “Cool Sun,” off his upcoming album Cool Sun. Yes, this person listens to Chon, NO, this is not my burner YouTube account.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Do not shit-talk Poseidon before your Sunday double shift. And yes, that person at the end of the bar at close on Friday? Whether they look man woman or non-binary, they are in fact Calypso, and she will keep you prisoner in her one-bedroom apartment for seven years.
I know. Inflation affects everyone, even the deathless gods and the nymphs of the sea. The rent is too damn high.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris