Cotton Xenomorph\u2019s \u201cCryptids and Climate Change\u201d issue continues\u2014check out these two poems from Tim Lynch<\/a><\/em>.<\/p> Music journalism has always been a little foreign to me. Sure, I wrote about the Jazzmaster one time<\/a> and did this very \u201cspeak to the youths\u201d listicle<\/a>, but I often feel like I don\u2019t know how to do music journalism. Even these recent \u201calbums I loved in high school pieces\u201d don\u2019t feel like music journalism, they feel more like times at band practice when Smags and I go back and forth about who had better taste as a teenager. \u201cYou can\u2019t deny Limp Bizkit\u2019s musicality,\u201d he\u2019d say. \u201cThe secret to the Chili Peppers is pretending Kiedis isn\u2019t there,\u201d I\u2019d retort.<\/p> Lately, in the spirit of better understanding my city and those who came before me, I\u2019ve been digging through archives, mostly from the Chicago Reader<\/em>. It\u2019s fun! There\u2019s no big project I\u2019m doing this for, just learning. <\/p> What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week: <\/strong>two books I kinda took swings on, buying simply because I saw them and thought, \u201cyeah, I\u2019ll take a flier on this.\u201d One I found at AWP this year, one has been sitting on my shelves for longer than my son\u2019s been around. Both were a treat! Not, like, fun beach reads or whatever. All I\u2019m saying is I gambled on these anonymous-to-me writers and it paid off. <\/p> Rashomon and Other Stories <\/strong><\/em>by Ry\u016bnosuke Akutagawa: <\/strong>found this gem at my old bookstore job and picked it up because 1) we sold books by the weight and this is like 100 pages and 2) I saw Rashomon<\/em> in an intro to film class like everyone else. Interestingly, it\u2019s the lead story, \u201cIn A Grove,\u201d that follows the plot of the movie, although without re-watching the movie to fact-check, it seems like the frame narrative for the film is based on the story. <\/p> This book is good! If you haven\u2019t read anything from early 20th century Japan and want to, this isn\u2019t a bad place to start. Not that I know anything<\/em> about Japanese literature, despite this post-Sh\u014dgun <\/em>wave of interest. Akutagawa reminds me a bit of other short story writers concerned with the various absurdities and inequities of the early 20th century\u2014Kafka, maybe a little O\u2019Connor, James M. Cain if he wrote fairy tales. These stories are about greed, desire turned rancid, power imbalances, and socioeconomic hypocrisies. If you see this a used bookstore, try it out. <\/p>![\"The](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/03b492ff-c64a-4e67-9461-3fe2f45c029c.heic\")
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