{"id":100053286,"date":"2023-02-03T13:30:22","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T13:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=100053286"},"modified":"2023-02-03T13:30:22","modified_gmt":"2023-02-03T13:30:22","slug":"friday-links-cover-songs-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=100053286","title":{"rendered":"Friday Links: Cover Songs Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Whoever does not avert their eyes from this false eclipse listens to a bloodstream in reverse.” – Eric Baus, “A Distant Address”<\/h2>

There\u2019s a Romantic view I take of apprenticeships. They\u2019re still around today, I know. But often I get wistful for a history I know doesn\u2019t actually exist and glom it onto contemporary life. A sepia-toned image of like me and a few other writers hanging around another established writer after college and working semi-professionally. Still getting mentored, though. Perhaps we are wearing aprons. I guess that\u2019s an MFA, but I\u2019m talking about something that you don\u2019t have to pay into and you don\u2019t have to move to some tiny college town in a red state. Anyway, this week\u2019s LINKS is all about learning from other artists, trying things outside your own comfort zone in the form of imitating those that came before you. <\/p>

What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week: <\/strong><\/p>

Here I present two books that I\u2019ve had for more than a decade, that have been with me on multiple bookshelves in four different apartments, that I\u2019ve read multiple times, and yet I still don\u2019t fully have a handle on them. They both blur genre, one a little more on the poetry side and one a little more on the fiction side but both firmly in the MULTIMODAL realm. Reading this time around did not <\/em>provide more clarity, did not necessarily inspire me to get up and write, but deeply affirmed why I keep them both on my bookshelf. I\u2019m talking about Newcomer Can\u2019t Swim <\/em>by Renee Gladman and Tuned Droves<\/em> by Eric Baus. <\/p>

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These are both surreal, or maybe more accurately in Gladman\u2019s case, irreal. Baus is a full-on haunted madhouse that plays with youth and body horror, the machine and the pastoral. The Pop Art out-of-3D-glasses-focus tendon hands seem very fitting for this book. Gladman\u2019s stories are a world tilted slightly off, recognizable but not fully knowable, there\u2019s unease about being Black and queer in predominately white hetero places. Both books are written in a style quite unlike what my voice has grown to be, neither make me go, \u201cdamn, I\u2019m jealous someone else wrote that instead of me.\u201d Both also serve as a reminder to me to keep pushing myself, to worry less when I think my writing\u2019s getting too weird, and to remember to stretch my brain a bit. I\u2019m grateful to both of them for how long I\u2019ve been struggling with them. <\/p>

LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>

  • This DOMi & JD BECK tribute to MF Doom absolutely rips. They are such fascinating musicians, the rare two-person band that sounds really good just the two of them: <\/p>