Friday Links: Still Not The Blog's Birthday Edition
"...and I guessed that someone might even be selling tickets to see shipwrecked sailor." - Gabriel García Márquez, 'The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor'
But first, your weekly Vine: Thursday Chapter 45: “What Jeff Knew.” Today is Chapter 46: “Justice Part Three.” The “Justice” trilogy is our attempt to rip off True Detective Season One, if that entices you to read. Listen to the podcast here, and don’t forget to sign up for the Vine newsletter!
The blog’s birthday coming right after Halloween is such a fitting time to do some reflection. Spooky season’s over, Noirvember (a new thing I’m doing this year but pretending has been a long tradition) is starting, and in between, yr man the Shipwrecked Sailor celebrates some friends and favorites.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week
You know, in the first year, I came up with various unofficial gimmicks for this blog. The What I’ve Been Reading This Week/Links delineation didn’t exist at first. Neither did the faux-suspense I do in the first paragraph, keeping y’all right on the edge of your seats until revealing what you already knew from the thumbnail. It’s silly, but one thing I’ve learned about myself from doing this blog is that I am a fundamentally silly person. So this week, we are reflecting on inspiration, and we are celebrating our friends (their presses, anyway, I am not lucky enough to personally know any of the authors this week). This week, I read The Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez and the three inaugural chapbooks from my beloved Bob’s Garden Party Collective: The Failure of Photography by Leah Mueller, have you ever dreamed of flamingos? by Mónica Teresa Ortiz, and Meditations from My Childhood Bedroom by Christa Vander Wyst.
Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez: already talked about this Wednesday, so I’ll keep it short here. This is admittedly a book for Gabo Sickos (copyright), I’m not going to be like “you have to read this.” It does have, however, adventure on the high seas, shark fights, and a good perspective to keep when you’re having a shitty day at work. I will say here I unequivocally admire Luis Alejandro Velasco and his need to come clean with his story. Especially since there was so little in it for him. It takes bravery to stand up to authoritarians, it takes real courage to stand up to authoritarians when continuing to live a lie means you’re rich.
a quick note on Garden Party Collective: I don’t remember when I first pitched The Line Break to Bob, but I do remember I was looking for an excuse to talk about poems. Us committing to that podcast led me to meet the Cotton Xenomorph folks, led me to meet Christopher and Laura and Lyd and Stephen over at Garden Party Collective, led me to feel like I’d have at least a few readers if I started this blog. Doing things is almost always better than not doing things. The fact that they’re doing this press—and with such an emphasis on community!—is inspiring and exciting. So, it feels appropriate to celebrate my friends while celebrating the blog birthday.
The Failure of Photography by Leah Mueller: what better place for lonesome melancholy than desert west of North America, where every rock is red and every coffee cup yellow? Where drunk cowboys can sense your impending death and give you hugs? Leah Mueller’s chapbook, dedicated to her late husband, are as melancholy and elegiac as you’d expect this sort of collection to be, but with a determination to “explain…why I don’t want to always live alone. Why I still love sex and food and music. Why entire days go by without me shedding a tear.”
have you ever dreamed of flamingos? by Mónica Teresa Ortiz: I’ve been reading lots of poems about climate change lately thanks to the “Crpytids and Climate Change” issue I’m guest-editing for CX, and what I found very refreshing about Mónica Teresa Ortiz’s chapbook is how concerned with the whole of nature’s history. The fact that the land on this continent had names before all the 711s, the fact that flamingos can’t be found in the Gulf of Mexico unless they escaped from the zoo before they could have their wings clipped, the fact that there was a time before Covid-19 “became a glitch in the fabric of our lives”—a lot that has been lost is inventoried here. This chapbook also reminded me of how the 1919 flu pandemic was basically forgotten, and books like this one, with its frank and honest discussion of the pandemic sucking, feel more and more urgent.
Meditations from My Childhood Bedroom by Christa Vander Wyst: I’m going to be honest, childhood poems have a huge bar to clear for me. Call it trauma from editing the undergrad lit mag, idk. But the poems here take enough twists and turns, go enough surprising places, that I found myself enjoying this chapbook.
LINKS!
Something to listen to? Why not watch my favorite band, Chon, play on a rooftop?
Great look from Neil McRobert in The Guardian at the horror fiction boom that’s happening right now, with specific focus on Black horror and Jordan Peele’s new Out There Screaming anthology as well as South American horror, specifically Agustina Bazterrica, Samanta Schweblin, and Mariana Enríquez. The money quote for me? “‘We read King and Lovecraft and Poe and Jackson and the gothic,’ Enríquez [says], ‘but we work with our reality.’” That’s what Brendan and I tried to do with Vine.
Drought is exposing ancient Amazon River rock carvings in Brazil, reports Suamy Beydoun in Reuters. Setting aside the fact that I do not wish for drought in Brazil, I do not wish for river beds to dry up—it is exciting that researchers will learn more about these carvings. I am a sucker for ancient knowledge, especially humans’ desire to make art.
Did you know Dracula was a union leader and anti-fascist? Here’s a great profile of Bela Lugosi from Mike Kuhlenbeck over at Workers World, see if you can read it and not go around saying “Nazism must be wiped out everywhere” for the next week.
More Dracula content, you say? Well. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new introduction to Dracula, on Bram Stoker’s addition of virality to vampire mythology and the resulting descendants of Dracula, is marvelously comprehensive. It’s an excellent brief on vampire history, and plus: if you think my typos are bad, Lit Hub’s calling the author “Silvia Garcia-Moreno.”
if only ‘writing for the internet’ was unionized and websites could afford copyeditors Finally for this week, my former Cracked.com compadre Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is back in Tokyo Weekender, talking about fun for the whole family in the Nagasaki Prefecture. It is now a goal of mine to kayak to Kaneda Castle.
What’re you still doing here? Go read Vine! The 80s is absolutely nuts in Vine!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Pray to the spirit of Bela “Dracula” Lugosi, seek his advice for unionizing your workplace.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris