Friday Links: What Kind Of Man Do You Want To Be Edition?
"Last night a man was yelling in the parking lot as I walked to my car. / I don't know what he said, but it sounded like my name," - Diannely Antigua, "A Hundred And Then None"
There’s something that’s been happening in the last few presidential election cycles: I keep seeing very good and very bad examples of how to be man. Already, I’m self-conscious about becoming one of those bitter old men who complain about everything (a Republican speciality, but also strong amongst the left). Ted Cruz let Donald Trump call his wife ugly and accuse his dad of killing JFK, and it was right around the time I was getting married—it hit hard. Trump is Trump—the “grab em by the pussy” tape wasn’t so much news to me as confirmation of suspicions. Jance Vance talks about women like they’re resource allocations in Medieval: Total War.
On the other hand, Barack Obama seems like the one president who never cheats on his wife. Bernie Sanders finds time on the campaign trail to play with his grandkids. Tim Walz seems genuinely stoked to sign a free lunch bill into law, seems genuinely happy to be around kids. Doug Emhoff seems like a pretty good dad, especially since his ex-wife keeps coming out and being like “HE’S A GREAT CO-PARENT AND KAMALA AND I ARE FRIENDS.”
Forget ideology for a second—I’m very far to the left of all those dudes except Bernie—it’s good to have these models for halfway decent manhood mainstreamed. We cannot let the children think Trump and Ben Shapiro and Andrew Tate and Kanye West are aspirational figures. Those jagoffs know nothing about waking their kids up and telling them to pray and giving them tools to walk through life like day by day, teaching them morals integrity discipline. Nothing.
Is it manly to read poetry? My answer would be “who the hell cares,” followed by quoting the tagline for one of this weeks’ authors’ podcast: poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Oh man. It’s poetry week and I kinda got ahead of my reading schedule, so I had some extra reading time! Plus I had a seven-hour flight delay in the Birmingham airport where my son behaved perfectly, so I had lots of extra reading time!
Promises of Gold by José Olivarez: I read this book again because I was touching up some poems this week, and wanted to be near the book that inspired me the most. It still rips the second time around. Relatedly, the sky is dope.
Unmonstrous by John Allen Taylor: the delightful, relentlessly positive Stephen Furlong, aka the Bob Ryan Of Poetry, bought this book for me at AWP. An incredibly kind gift, and a book I thoroughly enjoyed. There’s a ton of stuff I love in here—self-doubt, trying to improve, elegies for mallards and hermit crabs. Taylor’s a poet I’m definitely going to check out more.
Good Monster by Diannely Antigua: starting this book with “Someday I’ll Stop Killing Diannely Antigua” is like starting To Pimp A Butterfly with “Wesley’s Theory.” What a move. This book is beautifully sad, I mean Diannely really makes symphonies out of sadness, and there’s an incredible bravery to the face down some of this personal trauma and make beautiful art objects out of it. There’s formal complexity, too—pantuoms and sestinas and sonnets—without ever feeling like a Book Full Of Writing Exercises. She’s just a goddamn good poet, homies.
Dear Memphis by Rachel Edelman: another AWP pickup, courtesy of River River Books, whom I believe is having a sale right now. I have a strange relationship to Memphis, in that I’m from Tennessee, but Memphis was the same distance away as Atlanta, so we’d go to Atlanta for concerts/school field trips/whatever. Consequently, I’m not super familiar with Memphis, and I’m certainly not familiar with the Jewish experience of Memphis. That’s the great thing about poetry, though, as
and I have talked about on The Line Break—you get these incredibly thoughtful windows into lives that let you know the world is bigger than you could imagine. These poems exist in the “colliding geographies and intimate economies of the American South,” per the back of the book, and that feels right. There’s diaspora here, there’s speaker-returns-to-hometown stuff, there’s alternating lushness and spareness. This is maybe not the highest level of criticism, but I liked how most of the poems were short, but some of them would be like eight pages. Not enough people writing eight-page poems lately.LINKS!
There’s a new Solipse single, and you should listen to it! You should also go see them on Tuesday at Sleeping Village. Buy tickets here. I unfortunately cannot be there, and I’m super bummed about it. So if you’re in Chicago, go for me.
Let’s talk about Tim Walz. He’s got decency radiating off of him, from his “I served in the National Guard for 20 years for the right reasons” to his “my retirement plan is a public schoolteacher’s pension” stock holdings to his “I’m just a high school geography teacher who wants the kids to be educated enough on how genocides happen that maybe we won’t have any anymore” attitudes. What seals the deal for me is this: in 1999, right in the middle of don’t ask don’t tell, Tim Walz sponsored the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. In Walz’s words and in former student Jacob Reitan’s words, it was precisely because Walz was the straight/married/football coach/soldier that it made the most sense to ask him to sponsor. Still, it takes first being a fundamentally decent person to take that step, to be a safe enough person for marginalized students to trust, and the moral courage to step up when called. Tim Walz = Good Guy. Here’s Samantha Allen at them with more.
Of course, the right can’t stand for a fundamentally good and decent white man to exist. The party of spineless Marco Rubio and coward Josh Hawley and cheating-while-his-wife-dies-of-cancer Newt Gingrich needs everyone to be as odious as them. As such, Fox News washout and not-talented-enough-for-mainstream-TV ghoul Meghan Kelly tried to get the nickname “Tampon Tim” to stick, thanks to a law that, while not forcing schools to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms (right wingers are always wrong or lying about everything), does use gender-neutral language while making it a requirement that school children from grades 4-12 are provided menstrual products as needed. Over at Assigned, Evan Urquhart points out this is an opportunity to normalize the experiences of trans boys and non-binary children. Why can’t there be tampons in boys’ bathrooms? Trans boys use those bathrooms, and should feel safe. Also, what exactly are these right winger losers worried will happen if a straight boy/man sees a box of menstrual products? What precisely is the bad thing that’s gonna happen if a 10-year-old straight, cis boy sees a box of tampons?
Writing too many words this week! My goodness. This stuff gets me riled up. Not as riled up as the right, whom David Roth has exactly the right read on over at Defector, talking about men on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That’s a gift link, but here’s a pull quote anyway: “A politics whose most fundamental idea is Make Progress Stop Happening would inevitably find itself fetishizing the torment of having to live in a world in which other people, who are not even you, are somehow supposed to matter just as much.”
Switching gears into more gross gender stuff, the right’s weird obsession with being wrong about Imane Kehlif was—how many times can I use “odious” in one column?—it was depressing. The right has this need for everyone to look and be one way, and it seems exhausting as much as it is mean and unsavory. Lauren Theisen at Defector has the word on Imane Kehlif: “Invisible genetic material was never really the focal point of debate, but rather the desire to punish women who don't fit traditional male ideals of femininity.”
Over at
, writes the “disgusted at Jance Vance and his perverted notions of family” column I would write if I wasn’t spending these Wednesdays leading up to the album release doing music blogs. Here are some money quotes, but read the whole thing, Casey’s great: “I’ve wanted to have kids my whole life. In no way did I ever think of that desire through a socio-political lens. I did not think about what having children said about me, or whether having children was a “conservative” or “progressive” notion. Are you out of your fucking mind?” and “…the reason that I hate politicization of family in discourse is the way it creates the illusion of solidarity. I have very little in common with other parents aside from the fact that I want my kids to have good schools where they are safe, and would like the cars to drive slower in my neighborhood. I have nothing in common with fathers who think like JD Vance or the people who write articles about the birth rate or what women should be doing with their time.”
What’re you still doing here? Want a preview of Solipse live?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Don’t let the Jance Vances of the world push you around, ruining the vibes in your section by talking loudly about “the purpose of postmenopausal females” and “the advantages of an Indian wife.” Spill coffee on those jagoffs.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
something, something, something. was going to say something, but clicked the concert you linked.... thanks for the new band.