“It’s Midwinter Day today a day / To cause the sun to stand still as it will anyway” – Bernadette Mayer, ‘Midwinter Day’
First, a note on Nazis: there’s no room for them on Substack, or anywhere. Substack execs with their techno-libertarian bullshit about free speech are intolerable to me. Nazis don’t get free speech, this is not a court of law. Get the Nazis off the platform.
If you’re reading this, my kid’s already started a two-week winter break. Pray for yr boy, by which I mean me, not the five-year-old. Mostly kidding, of course, I love this time of year. It’s the next four months you gotta watch out for.
Still, I’m taking next week off, and the first week of January will be light. Hope any kind of break/holiday season you may or may not be getting is full of warmth, love, family, friends, and food—or whichever combination of those things makes your heart sing.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
Listen, I had a scheduled plan. Finish Noirvember with Motherless Brooklyn, transition into this book, then take it easy for December. Well. Life got in the way of that, and this ended up being my last scheduled book of the year. It’s 500 pages. A week before “vacation.” Reader, I couldn’t read all the way through it. I’m talking, of course, about The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.
The fault of not finishing this book is about 70-30 Chris-Jon. As alluded above, I’m more or less checked out. It’s been a busy year. On top of all that, though, this book feels a touch too well-wrought for its subject matter. There’s a sense of “if I can tell the story of a white boy and a Black boy becoming friends in Brooklyn in a literary mode that liberal, New York Times-reading white people will respect, I might solve racism! At the very least, I’d vote for Obama a third time. If I could.” Form is not matching content, I want this book to take more risks. Nothing feels risked.
Perhaps that is not fair to Jonathan Lethem, who I found exciting last week. This week, I understand why he was lumped in with The Literary Jonathans. I will probably try this book again someday. I acknowledge a lot of things about literary culture I like owe a debt to this book. It just wasn’t for me this week.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately (Take Two):
It’s the solstice! Let’s read Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer! I’ve never read Mayer before and I called this book “Midwinter’s Day” on social media a whole bunch because that’s what my brain is like today!
This book rips. Being a House Husband, domestic poetry is really speaking to me lately. Every time she mentioned her kids I turned into the Leonardo DiCaprio gif leaping out of his recliner. “That’s me! I’m a poet! With a kid!” One time she mentioned Anslem Berrigan at age two and I was “I have one of his books on my shelf!”
I might do this every year. Maybe we’ll turn it into an event somehow next year. This book is really dense, kinda not easy to read in a day unless you plan to read it in a day, and I was kinda planning on spending today playing Civilization 6, because if you remember from earlier, my five-year-old’s home for the next two weeks, which is sort of like a bowling ball coated in Flubber (except if Flubber did all the cocaine Robin Williams did in the 80s) is going to be inside my townhouse full-time for two weeks. You ever read this blog and think “that dude’s brain is way too all over the place?” What if your imaginings of my brain had legs and liked jumping off couches?
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? How about LA LOM covering Fito Olivares’s “Juana La Cubana?” Fun cumbia arrangement, and the intimacy of the instruments combined with the technicolor camera and off-white shirts makes it feel like LA LOM is just some dudes jamming after work. Most US bars don’t know it, but they’re missing a corner where dudes can jam after work. Irish pubs are great at this.
From a while back, at about the new tax wage law. I do not like “If TK politician was a true progressive…” language, in fact I hate it so much I might have to write about it soon. BUT I appreciated Michael’s look at the law and its effects. I’m a recent subscriber to and am enjoying his Substack, go check it if you like Chicago food. Food in general, really.
Thrasher partnered with San Fransisco Parks & Rec to design UN Plaza—a skate plaza skaters used to get kicked out of, now going legit. Times are changing for the better. Street skaters breathe life into cities, the same way buskers and food carts do. I’ve been saying this publicly since 2020, unless you count me yelling “SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME” at my band’s shows from 2002-2006. Skateboarding is not a crime, in fact, it is something to be encouraged. Shoutout to the skate crews and work crews who built UN Plaza.
Kelsey McKinney at Defector on photo albums—this one made me appreciate archivists. We do not appreciate archivists enough. over at got at this with his look at website erasure killing our memories. We do not do enough archiving work in our own lives, relying on servers owned by people who do not care about us. A pull quote from Kelsey: “…instead of blindly shooting photos all the time, you have to focus, and the focusing is what has made me think a little bit more critically about what I’m preserving, and the methods I’m using to try and do so.”
The Trace is doing a collection of essays and reported stories driven by gun violence survivors in Chicago. I found Marlon English’s essay on surviving getting shot, choosing empathy, and turning toward community work (organizing in Rogers Park, becoming production manager at the Stein Learning Gardens at Saint Sabina) particularly moving. Read all the way to the kicker.
From a while back, here’s one of the better Writers About Unions out there, , writing at In These Times about the ambition the labor movement should have in this moment. Shawn Fain’s time as UAW president has already been both inspiring and yielded real results. May 2024 be another good year for labor.
I’ll be writing about this more later, but a bonus sixth link because you can’t talk about workers without talking about solidarity. And since the U.S. Government won’t listen to calls for ceasefire, mutual aid and proclaiming solidarity is about all we can do. Check out the Palestine Solidarity issue of FIYAH over the break, and then I’ll write more about it in January.
Oh and bonus holiday seventh link because it’s new The Line Break week! No guests, and for the first time in the show’s history, no poem reading. Just Bob and I talking influences. Apple | Spotify
What’re you still doing here? Go start winter break! And since it’s the last one of these for the year, GO READ VINE!
If you’re in the service industry, thank you. I know you probably don’t get a break. May you clean up in tips these next couple weeks. Crucially, may you get some time with friends, family, loved ones, whomever. You deserve good things.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris