Friday Links: Catching Up Edition

“he will struggle / with demons. He prays but / could continue forever with” – Maya Williams, “A Facebook Message From My Stepmother”

Look, my reading declines in the summer. I’m at beaches and playgrounds too much. But! To live is to scroll your phone. If there’s an article that looks interesting, I save a tab. Then every week—sometimes weeks later—I empty my tabs onto you loyal readers and your previously clean inboxes.

What I’ve Been Reading This Week:

It’s a little hard to put a Content Warning on a blog when the main image has The Most Famous Sinner and The Most Cardinal Sin blaring directly from the cover image, but Maya Williams’s debut collection of poetry has no patience for anyone who can’t take a band-aid getting ripped off.

This collection has the rawness and vulnerability that you’d expect from the brazen title, and it resists the exclamation point-riddled cliches that sentences like this usually end in, such as “but there’s a real heart to these poems!” or “but secretly it’s hopeful!” What this book does is really confront the reader with these raw feelings, with these no-good-answer-questions about the world and its violences, with this stripped-down look at the character of Judas and what he means. When Maya was on The Line Break a couple months back, they said a strength of their writing was “crispness,” and it’s true. Often, that crispness lends itself to effectively brusque questions.

One more thing I love about this book: there’s a multiple of voices here, without the poems explicitly announcing themselves as having multiple voices. I mean, contrapuntals are contrapuntals, but it’s more than just that. It gave me Sonia Sanchez vibes a little bit. Part of me wonders if the multitude of voices is a byproduct of Christianity—I know when I prayed regularly, it sometimes felt like I had a running dialogue with God in my head. Maybe some people would call it Superego, but I don’t care for Freud. Anyway, without the poems telling me they were doing it, it felt like the poems had a multitude of speakers, which is very cool.

LINKS!

• Remember how earlier I said “to live is to scroll your phone?” That’s bogus. Do not take that to heart. I mean—finish reading this column and text 10 friends about it—but seriously, get off your phone. It’s summer. Don’t want to get off your phone? Reminisce about what life was like before phones with Dan Kois in Slate.

• Really happy to learn early Chicago rappers were clued in to The Vampire Lestat being bisexual. There’s that and more in Leor Galil’s Chicago Reader writeup of He Who Walks Three Ways and Chicago’s very queer late 80s/early 90s hip-hop scene. Another detail I liked was Duro Wicks playing videotapes during open mic sets. Some of the most fun shows have video playing behind the band. Also shoutout to when The Boiler Room used to play skate videos on their fishbowl TVs.

• I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but please check out the digital chapbook Little Crimes by Brooke Kolcow, who is also the Deputy Editor and Snack Mechanic of . What little I’ve read of B’s work, I’ve enjoyed, and what’s a common refrain on this blog? We love art made outside of capitalism! Excited to dive into this, and please go purchase a copy for yourself.

• Never a bad idea to link off to Blood Knife, especially for this piece from Connor Wroe Southard championing human writing over AI. I may be more anti-ChatGPT than even Connor’s “John Henry” scenario at the end, but the point of “the ‘better’ of the machine and the ‘better’ of the human author [might not] exist on the same axis.” The machines will always be measured against how well they can be us, which is frankly real loser shit from the machines.

• We wrap up with another Chicago Reader piece, a collection of interviews with trans elders. As Culture Editor Taryn Allen notes in the intro, “it’s rare to encounter trans elders…but beyond ignorance, cruelty, and hateful legislation, trans people can have futures.”

  

Have a great weekend, if you work in the service industry may your tips be abundant, and let’s all catch up on some reading, yeah?

Sorry you got an email,

Chris