“Whoever does not avert their eyes from this false eclipse listens to a bloodstream in reverse.” – Eric Baus, “A Distant Address”
There’s a Romantic view I take of apprenticeships. They’re still around today, I know. But often I get wistful for a history I know doesn’t actually exist and glom it onto contemporary life. A sepia-toned image of like me and a few other writers hanging around another established writer after college and working semi-professionally. Still getting mentored, though. Perhaps we are wearing aprons. I guess that’s an MFA, but I’m talking about something that you don’t have to pay into and you don’t have to move to some tiny college town in a red state. Anyway, this week’s LINKS is all about learning from other artists, trying things outside your own comfort zone in the form of imitating those that came before you.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Here I present two books that I’ve had for more than a decade, that have been with me on multiple bookshelves in four different apartments, that I’ve read multiple times, and yet I still don’t fully have a handle on them. They both blur genre, one a little more on the poetry side and one a little more on the fiction side but both firmly in the MULTIMODAL realm. Reading this time around did not provide more clarity, did not necessarily inspire me to get up and write, but deeply affirmed why I keep them both on my bookshelf. I’m talking about Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman and Tuned Droves by Eric Baus.
These are both surreal, or maybe more accurately in Gladman’s case, irreal. Baus is a full-on haunted madhouse that plays with youth and body horror, the machine and the pastoral. The Pop Art out-of-3D-glasses-focus tendon hands seem very fitting for this book. Gladman’s stories are a world tilted slightly off, recognizable but not fully knowable, there’s unease about being Black and queer in predominately white hetero places. Both books are written in a style quite unlike what my voice has grown to be, neither make me go, “damn, I’m jealous someone else wrote that instead of me.” Both also serve as a reminder to me to keep pushing myself, to worry less when I think my writing’s getting too weird, and to remember to stretch my brain a bit. I’m grateful to both of them for how long I’ve been struggling with them.
LINKS!
This DOMi & JD BECK tribute to MF Doom absolutely rips. They are such fascinating musicians, the rare two-person band that sounds really good just the two of them:
Polyphia absolutely inspires the best fan covers. Here’s Moyun doing “Playing God” on a 43-string polyphonic zither:
Alex Melton’s YouTube covers are a hell of a lot of fun. He images an artists’ song as written by a different artist, but then there’s a third layer of his own vocal/musical strengths/weaknesses changing up this second, imagined cover of a song. And just for my mom and dad, here’s Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” as it would be written by Blink 182 as covered by Alex Melton.
Skye (formerly of Morcheeba) covering “Feel Good Inc.” by the Gorillaz is so so sick, just honey butter voice and production, it’s somehow more stoned than the Gorillaz version:
Let’s keep that same vibe going and celebrate Cat Power, huh? Yeah, let’s celebrate Cat Power absolutely putting Sinatra in a blender:
Okay one more Alex Melton, just because he is STEEPED in that special blend of poppunk/emo/popcountry that you can only get by growing up in the home of SEC Football in the years after Enema of the State:
Sorry you got an email,
Chris