Friday Links: When You're Out Of Ideas Read Something Else Edition
"You came here tonight to steal a story, a story you don't have any right to. Why?" - Richard Van Camp, "Scariest. Story. Ever."
Anthologies are great. Love an anthology. Especially when my kid was a baby baby, and I didn’t really have time/desire to do real reading, it was nice to pick up an anthology and read a few pieces, then return to it later. How, though, to do an anthology for this blog? Especially when said anthology is 95% full of writers you’ve never heard of? When I read New Poets of Native Nations, I took the “read a few and skip around” approach, but it didn’t feel right this time. This time, armed with a hearty LET’S GOOOOOO, I went cover-to-cover.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
An anthology I’ve been excited about for a long time. An anthology of horror short stories—excuse me, dark fiction. An anthology that seemed rad enough to go cover-to-cover on. I’m talking, of course, about Never Whistle At Night, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
These stories surprise, they frighten, they get the blood moving and the brain thinking. That’s an NPR-ass way to start a review, but how else to highlight such a diverse collection? 20 years after Dave Chappelle (before his untimely death in 2010) said “[Indigenous People] are not all dead, alright,” we have this collection of writers from all over the North American continent, Pueblo and Comanche and Dene and Hidastsa and Standing Rock Sioux and Penobscot and others, telling some of the most exciting stories being told right now. Horror demigod
recently said “I hear people say ‘Wow, horror is having a moment right now!’ and also ‘Horror is more diverse than ever right now’ and I truly hope they see the correlation.” This book is proof positive. There are monsters, ghosts, witches, shapeshifters, stories-within-stories, Get Out-style white people, and personal demons. Each story is pretty easily read in one sitting—sometimes because your eyes are scanning as quickly as possible, wondering, after being primed by Stephen Graham Jones’s excellent into to expect anything, where the tale is going.Sometimes people lament living in the times we do. I get why—war, covid, AI, Donald Trump—but I like the 2020s. An anthology like this doesn’t happen in 1990, 2000, 2010. When Indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz in the 60s and 70s, talking about “we’re still here,” they had bigger ideas than a short story anthology published by a Penguin Random House. But I’m a believer in the soft power of cultural visibility, and I feel incredibly lucky that I got to read these stories. I can’t recommend this anthology highly enough. Morgan Talty is there, as are a few writers who I’ve got scheduled to read in the coming weeks. I’ve got a long TBR list after reading htis book.
Sometimes I’ll hear critics of horror—hell, critics of any genre, this happens a lot in music—say that there are no new stories to tell. That everything has been done before and we’re just remixing. This is close-minded and incestuous criticism. And I’m not saying “white people go buy this book and rip off Indigenous writers.” What I am saying is that it’s impossible to run out of good art to experience.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Should we check in with Dead Pioneers again? It’s been a few months.
Quick news up top—I have two poems in Moist Poetry Journal today! Please go read “WINDY MORNING KAYAKING PRATT BEACH” and “THE TREES MY DUDES THE TREES.” You’ll never guess what they’re about.
WBNA ticket prices are going up, but as Maitreyi Anantharaman at Defector writes, they didn’t have to. Two things that need to happen across the board in sports: 1) ticket prices need to go down and 2) know-it-all talk radio hosts and Men On The Internet need to stop explaining economics to WNBA fans. A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “The WNBA, partially owned by a bigger company, doesn't actually have to obey the laws of supply and demand…The league could be a loss leader, an affordable introduction to professional basketball for people who might not otherwise have the chance or means to see a game. WNBA games could break the rules in other ways…As long as they had a good time. // So forgive me for feeling a little sad, even if I understand the math. My WNBA fandom doesn’t exist without the league’s affordability. Those memories begin at camp days on summer afternoons, my friends and I…Getting to first encounter the sport like that—just women’s basketball as an entertainment product, shorn of any weird baggage— now seems like a miracle.”
Black divers are uncovering shipwrecks related to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and mentoring a new generation of underwater archaeologists of color, Omnia Saed at The Guardian writes. The main organization behind these efforts, Diving With a Purpose, has uncovered 20 slave ship shipwrecks since 2005, and even a lost Tuskegee Airmen P-39. Not only that, they help plant new coral in overheated waters. The piece profiles five divers, aged 24-79, each with a different story and motivation. Very worth a read.
Four dams have been removed from the Klamath River, and the Yurok tribe who has fished there for centuries hopes the salmon population is coming back, Lucy Sherriff reports in BBC. Way back in 2002, there was a massive salmon die-off, and since, then the Yurok have been mounting a multi-generational campaign to get the dams removed. Says Yurok elder Willard Carlson, “I remember as a kid we'd have other people from nearby tribes making fun of our river. 'Oh, you're Yurok, your river is dirty.' For us, the dams were a monument to the [coloniser] people who conquered us.” A lot of work remains to be done to restore the land, but this is huge. Human activity might be rendering the planet uninhabitable, but we can reverse course.
Fresh on the heels of Labor Day—a holiday the US deliberately put at the opposite end of the summer from May Day to discourage USian workers from feeling too much solidarity with their international counterparts—let’s look at some labor history, yeah? I’m posting this interview in In These Times between Natascha Elena Uhlmann and Isaac Silver too late for you to go to Silver’s exhibit at the In These Times office, but it sounds like a really cool exhibit and a goo way to reflect on the history and present of Labor organizing through buttons, or as Silver refers to them: “…specific items that would tell the story of a significant strike or organizing campaign…” and mass producible, “…cheap, easily wearable identifier that people could put on their clothing, and that had really important ramifications for the labor movement.”
Another exhibit it’s too late to go to, another Defector article, but I really liked Rachelle Hampton’s write up of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” I hadn’t heard of Laura Wheeler Waring’s work before and am glad for the introduction. Not to mention the revelation that the Met’s first Harlem Renaissance exhibit featured zero paintings or sculptures by Black American artists. The work correcting institutional racism is long, dudes. Yet Hampton says that what’s radical—maybe refreshing is a better word—about Waring is her expression of beauty for beauty’s sake. A pull quote: “So little of black art is about leisure—our pleasure is always political, our rest radical. Waring’s work can’t be separated from that context: Some of her earliest work was producing covers for The Crisis, a publication edited by writer and activist W.E.B. DuBois...Still, I'm moved by the lack of urgency in Girl in Pink Dress. There’s a sweet serenity in her expression that reminds me of the space that opens up beneath my ribcage when I see a beautiful landscape, real or fictive. It's a tribute to beauty for the sake of it, a sort of beauty that doesn’t need to be explained or litigated. It just is, obviously, undeniably so.”
What’re you still doing here? The world is full of stories. An endless supply of stories. There is always a book by a writer from another culture that you haven’t read. There are always horizons to expand. Why let your world stay small when there is so much to experience and celebrate?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. I don’t think you’re going to get boils on your body and give birth to a rattlesnake. Nor do I think Kustaka are stalking the party you’re catering. Nor, in fact, do I think the guys you were arguing with at the bar last night are werewolves.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris