“I couldn’t picture anything coming out of my mouth without bats flying from between my teeth and getting in her hair.” – Lucy Corin, ‘Everyday Psycho Killers’
It is somehow the end of March. Hope you survived the Ides! The person who is traditionally not supposed to did.
We got a new Lazy & Entitled Podcast for you, talking about mashing up forms. We discuss novels in verse, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, toe, and more. Then, of course, a reading from Studs Terkel. Brendan once again scored the hell outta this one, the music is just phenomenal. Apple | Spotty | SoundCloud
What I’ve Been Reading This Week
Two books that I was super excited for. One a re-read, one an AWP 2024 purchase. Two of the better-titled books you’ll ever see. And yet, two books that didn’t quite sing to me. I always wonder if this is a personal failing, like maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind or something. Maybe I didn’t read closely enough, generously enough. Sometimes, though, it’s just like that. As always with this blog, take my recommendation for what you will. I’m talking, of course, about 100 Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and Everyday Psycho Killers by Lucy Corin.
100 Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses by Lucy Corin: structurally, a very cool book. We get three longer short stories, then ~100 pages of flash fiction. Everything is, loosely, an apocalypse of some sort. These stories are opaque, very language-driven stories, and they wander and meander from thing to thing and then add up to something greater than the sum of the parts. In theory, anyway. If it sounds like I’m describing how poems work, you’re not quite wrong. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t feel like I had enough “center” to hold onto. Even if the apocalyptic instruction from the title. It was not unlike listening to real out there prog rock or free jazz—usually I am down for this type of stuff, but this book just didn’t do it for me.
Everyday Psycho Killers by Lucy Corin: a novel, or a linked collection of stories? Again, I really dig the structural ambiguity. It’s almost a Bildungsroman, as it features the narrator navigating a childhood full of the kind monsters you find northern Florida. Not the fun kind, though—the racist and misogynistic and queerphobic kind. This isn’t normally the kind of thing that would turn me off from a book, but I felt like it was sort of a catalog of casually awful things without an answer to “and why are we reading all this.” R-words and n-words are tossed around casually (mostly by characters). I’m not one to throw away a book because of a few verboten words, and I definitely remember How People Talked In 2004, but I didn’t really feel like the book was guiding me to some new understanding via a path of slurs. Look, maybe these books would be more interesting to you. It’s possible I had a shitty couple weeks *beyond the page* and thus couldn’t get into these. But idk dude. Wasn’t for me.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Let’s close out Women’s History Month with my favorite Chaka Khan & Rufus song.
- This week in ICE: those fuckers took over airports! I saw video of them taking someone off a plane last night. ICE Agents Working At O’Hare Airport Monday As Feds Seek To Shorten Long Security Lines by Mack Liederman, ICE Killed A Man Outside Chicago Last Year. Little Has Been Done To Investigate by Molly DeVore, and Chicago’s ‘Abolish ICE’ Snowplow Is Ready To Hit The Streets by Quinn Myers in Block Club, ICE Agents Deployed To Nation’s Swamped Airports To Stand Around And Do Nothing by Barry Petchesky in Defector, and LETTER: Chicago, we must end pretextual stops by Olatunji Oboi Reed and Lisa Sharon Harper in The Triibe
- Lake Tahoe isn’t sure where its power is going to come from next year, thanks to the high demands of data centers. I am telling you, AI is not even sustainable in the short term. Marlena Carollo in Cal Matters has the story.
- AI was used to promote Middle East evacuation flights that did not actually exist, Foeke Postma writes in Bellingcat
- AI is so unpopular that Microsoft is rolling back Copilot bullshit on Windows, Sarah Perez reports in Tech Crunch
- Let’s get to some art. The excellent Elena Zhang has poetry in The Shore. Bob put me on to these incredible Tom Snarsky poems in Post Pop. Art is so much better than AI, dudes.
What’re you still doing here? You’re right, we do have to listen to Talking Heads this week. I guess there’s a new video for this song? Anyway, shoutout Tina Weymouth.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. At least one of your customers is probably an everyday psycho killer. Most of them aren’t, though, and those of us who aren’t have to take care of each other.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris