“…clearly, the powers that be have a lot to answer for since they failed to foresee that their bizarre social experiment would create a legion of orphans and untold legacies of displacement, all in the name of family values.” – Claire Bateman, “Stretchies”
There’s a baby in my house (my own, fortunately) and my eight-year-old is still sick, that’s the intro you’re getting this week. Trust me, though, when I say that the book I read is super good.
We also managed to get a Lazy & Entitled Podcast out! Brendan and I talk about the horror movies we’ve been watching this October. Then, Brendan sits down with the ComicsToYourCouch guys, Nick and Kaleb, to talk independent publishing in Chicago!
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What I’ve Been Reading This Week
Gotta be honest, I didn’t realize October had five Fridays. What a happy realization! Also, how well this book paired with Beastly and Monster Portraits! Of course, doing baby prep stuff, I didn’t have time to pick another book of poems to accompany this one. Shame, it would’ve paired really well with a Zachary Schomburg book—which is among the highest compliments I can give a book. It’s a book of flash fiction, a book that is wholly unique, a book that could only be published on FC2. Read this next to The Book Of Kane And Margaret or The Houseboat Veronica—they make sense as pressmates. I’m talking, of course, about The Pillow Museum by Claire Bateman.
The Pillow Museum by Claire Bateman: these are fables without being fairy tales. They’re stories that deal with the slippery parts of consciousness—sleep, the space between sleeping and dreaming, memory—without being trippy. Dream logic, not psychedelic or stoner logic. Some of them are speculative, with technologies built around sleeping and dreaming and memory, but even the stories without that element are influenced by consciousness.
These stories hide themselves from you a little bit, though. This is an FC2 book, there’s going to be a touch more opacity than Schomburg or Link, a touch more density than Bender or Sobol. Bring flash fiction really serves them well—when there is a narrative, it ties up quickly and pleasantly the way flash fiction does. When it’s a touch more opaque, you can kind of read it like a poem, appreciating the language. Images and themes recur in ways that tie the collection together. On re-read, I’ll have to try to explore that a little more. This book definitely deserves closer reading than I was able to give it as my daughter was being born.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? I’ve never listened to The Toadies before, and I’m having a lot of fun teaching this song to a student right now.
- You can lose your job if you get on social media and (correctly) observe that Charlie Kirk was being extremely racists towards Black people at the exact moment when a white right-winger shot not-so-young Charlie right in the neck, depriving TPUSA of its founder and freeing Erika Kirk from a marriage she clearly wanted out of. It is against that background that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump have decided that it’s time to start livestreaming state executions, and a bunch of right wingers on the internet have declared that “celebrating the death of your enemies is right and good.” None of that paragraph feels good. Here’s a statement from Rev. Jihyun Oh and the Presbyterian Church (USA) about how livestreamed executions are a moral stain. Shoutout to my mom for sending this to me. [probably meaningless update: I saw a headline Thursday that said Trump is walking this back over the backlash. Color me skeptical. I am betting we get livestreamed executions before this admin is over. If not, Reverend Oh’s statement is still relevant reading].
- Speaking of church, here’s Casey Taylor at Weed Church talking about conservative fearmongering over “the smell of weed everywhere.” I always hear “it smells like weed everywhere” in the most nasally, whiny Tucker Carlson voice.
- Wonderful piece from Felix Kent in Defector about eccentric sentences and how influence works. There are certain bands that absolutely still influence me, but I have trouble listening to them because I’m embarrassed by who I was when I was into them. Haven’t super had that happen with literature, but I’m sure it will.
- I’m personally too afraid of bedbugs, which I got in my first apartment out of college, to do this. That said, we found some great furniture in the alley when we first moved off campus. ‘I found it in the alley!’ by Alec Karam and Kirk Williamson in Chicago Reader
- Loved this interview Kelly M. Hayes did on Organizing My Thoughts with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on the intersection of politics, activism, and a cosmology of wonder. I love any space-talk that doesn’t reek of neo-colonialism. This is also a kinda of inverse of the second blog I ever wrote for the shipwrecked sailor blog, or maybe “inverse” is the wrong word, or maybe, like neutrinos, we are fluctuating between different levels at all times.
What’re you still doing here? Wondering what I’m listening to in my personal life? Well, if it’s not Los Mirlos, right now, it’s jazz piano. New Okonski EP, new mouse on the keys EP. Here’s a song that makes everyone in my family happy.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Hey, I’m not sleeping these days, either. Stay strong, homies.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris