“Flushed and ashamed, / the moon, put back / in the wrong sky, left.” – Diannely Antigua, “Strawberry Moon”
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with Diego Arias’s “Item 5981: Lithotrek Holdings” fragmenting all over our literary Nostromo. Go Mapingauri! We love you, Mapingauri!
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Two writers I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get to. Two writers I knew I would enjoy, be enriched by, have my brain shaken around by. Why’d it take so long? Well, one of these books I accidentally ordered to my old house and it took a while to get my hands on. Still! No excuses. I should’ve gotten to these a long time ago, though someone with healthy perspective might say that books come to you when it’s the right time for you to read that book. Was this week the right time for these books? Who can know the plans of the ancient gods slumbering beneath the permafrost, but this was was a good time reading these books. I’m talking, of course, about Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua and Outlaw Culture by bell hooks.
Outlaw Culture by bell hooks: bell hooks would probably appreciate it if I began this paragraph highlighting her emphasis on love. Self-love for Black people—“Black is beautiful” thoughts from Malcolm X, “teach the children there are Black heroes” practices from Ice Cube, the notion of “I choose to love” from Dr. King. Love is a verb, love is a choice, love is an abstraction—and hooks spends the book concretizing love. It’s this “making specific the Big Ideas” that gives her work resonance. And hey, angry-for-reasons-you’ve-never-considered-white people: the message is for you, too.
Sure, the prose can get theory-heavy—the essay “Columbus Gone But Not Forgotten” opens with a white man saying he likes her work but bristles at the term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Obviously, as hooks lays out, bristling at this phrase comes from a place of white people in the early 90s wanting post-Cold War USian hegemony to mean “the end of history” and “post-racial society” instead of facing what the US actually is (a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy). But me, a man in 2024 radicalized by Gulf War II, the 2008 crash, and the murder of Trayvon Martin? I agree we live in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I just think that’s a lot of damn syllables to roll out of my mouth.
All that said, this is imminently readable for a sociology book! Highly recommended if you, like me, feel constantly at odds with society and baffled/alienated by instances of unkindness. Also shoutout to Eve L. Ewing—I feel like following her on Twitter from 2011-whenever she logged off was a good intro to bell hooks.
Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua: if you’re familiar with this blog or The Line Break, maybe you’re sick of me talking about finding the center between “here is a line that communicates an easily understandable thought” and the poetic things—the music image metaphor, the pick up a subject and drop it, the re-arrange your thinking, the surprising metonymy, the verbing of nouns. But Diannely’s book walks the valley between those two mountains like it was born with hiking boots on. The sections are arranged as proem-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro, as solid a song structure as ever there was.
Interestingly, it’s “Songs of Babylon,” the first poem of the bridge, that seems like the representative poem here—the speaker evoking the Lord’s people in a strange land, declaring “If God were a scent, let Him be the Simple Green / diluted in the mop bucket, the Ajax / in the sink, or the men’s bathroom—how it always smelled,” the unfamiliar fears and ecstasies of growing up and those few years after growing up when you really haven’t figured shit out yet but feel like you’re supposed to have. This book is spiritually 22-25 years old, and honestly, who knows how much better I would’ve turned out if I’d read it then?
Of course, there’s not really such a thing as a “representative poem.” Read the whole damn book, it rules—do you know how impossible it was to settle on one epigraph?
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? How about Pile’s Audiotree set from 2017? It’s real good!
Kelly Hayes at Truthout on Aaron Bushnell. Read this to get some perspective from a real organizer, someone who thinks a lot about this stuff professionally. Because I do recognize there’s a lot of [insert thing you find grating about the ol’ shipwrecked sailor] in my piece.
The great on what Aaron actually did in the Air Force. Very, very worth reading. Especially if you—like me—don’t know much about the military, but suspect the power imbalance is the same as it is everywhere else.
Like The Line Break, we’re abruptly shifting to basketball! One of my favorite 90s basketball players—my personal second-favorite Knick of all-time behind Earl Monroe—is Latrell Sprewell.
Speaking of different eras of basketball, here’s over at with the best way to compare players across eras: time travel movie tropes! Remember when I said I think cross-era comparisons are interesting but no one does them right? Dré does cross-era comparisons right.
Great interview with Amorak Huey in Mid-American Review, featuring some real money quotes: “There’s something about the use of quotation marks that changes the poem’s relationship to truth; the quote marks are a kind of promise that what’s inside them is what a person (perhaps an imaginary one) actually said, though certainly a poem has no obligation to keep that promise,” and “find your people and hold onto them. Make cool shit with your friends. Share your work with people who are excited about what you’re doing. Don’t think of it in any kind of mercenary or reciprocal sense—what can I get out of this—but because you value the kind of connection, the kind of relationships that art makes possible.” Hell yeah dude.
What’re you still doing here? Go out and make cool shit with your friends! Value connection, the kind of relationships that art makes possible!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Remember to love yourself, even when someone is screaming in your face because their Crunchwrap Supreme spilled out of its tortilla. That wasn’t your fault. You’re aces in my book. You deserve a raise.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris