Immanentize the Empathy
This week’s #40 hits for 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992 and 1997 bring two acts I either forgot about or had not heard of – Hot and Donna Allen.
1977: Hot, “Angel In Your Arms”
1982: Kool & the Gang, “Get Down On It”
1987: Donna Allen, “Serious”
1992: Eddie Money, “I’ll Get By”
1997: The Prodigy, “Firestarter”
Early Satuday afternoon I drove to Garfield Park just south of downtown Grand Rapids, where I was interviewed as part of An Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids. I haven’t really been involved with the poetry community for a few years, thanks in no small part to the COVID pandemic, so this was a wonderful reintroduction to The Scene.
As part of the interview my interviewer Toni Bal asked me to read a poem. I brought “Back-Road Labyrinth,” which I wrote in 2018 or 2019. This was the first time I had read a poem in about three years, the previous being “36 Views of New Orleans” at The Drunken Retort in (I think) 2018. Now that I have read it, maybe it is time for me to send it out to be published.
I donated most of the print run of The 3288 Review to the project, from the Caffeinated Press archives which occupy three banker’s boxes in my office closet.
The new issue of The Paris Review was the only arrival this week. Poe is earning her keep as a book rest, atop her panda blanket as she watches the porch for squirrels and birds.
In reading news, I finished Patrick S. Tomlinson‘s Gate Crashers. It was a lot of fun, with engaging characters and an interesting plot. Gate Crashers was Tomlinson’s first book, and it is a little rough around the edges. He mentions in the author’s note that he wrote it in response to the ending of the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it shows in the sense of humor and turns of phrase. Then again, there are worse influences to wear on your sleeve than Douglas Adams.
I am currently reading I am the Brother of XX, written by Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy and translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff.
In writing news, I didn’t do much this week other than edit the poem I read for my interview. But I feel better than I have the past few weeks, so perhaps the changing of the month will bring renewed energy and I will be able to get back in the saddle.
So I had this idea a while back, that every now and then I would do a survey of the #1 songs in the weekly top 40 of bygone years. I thought it would be fun to make weekly posts, tracing the ebb and flow of music styles and tastes.
But when looking through lists of past hits, I noticed that songs which hit #1 tend to stay there for a while. They are well known, and while interesting as a source of nostalgia, such posts could quickly become repetitive, as the same songs stay in the #1 position for weeks at a time.
So rather than picking the top of the top, I decided to go with the bottom of the top. The songs at #40 on the weekly top 40 change wildly from week to week, and many were mere blips in pop culture, surfacing for a week then disappearing, never to be heard again.
These were the songs I often heard while milking cows on Sunday mornings for most of the 1980s. Casey Kasem or Rick Dees usually hit the top 10 well after morning milking was done, and I would be back at the house taking care of things which kept me out of range of a radio.
Now I am going to go back in time, and select song #40 of the weekly top 40, for the historical week which corresponds to the present week in the year 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, and 1997. Five years, five years apart, from 45 years ago to 25 years ago. That means I will be able to make 259 weekly posts like this before I repeat a week. And at that point, assuming the continued existence of me, the internet, blogging, etc., I will look at shifting things around. It will be a good problem to have.
This post series will mostly simply be links to music videos, but if a song comes up which brings a sense of nostalgia or deja vu, I might write something about that.
And with that, here are the songs, ordered by year, with links to artist information.
1977: The Andrea True Connection, “N.Y., You Got Me Dancing”
1982: Charlene, “I’ve Never Been to Me”
1987: Glass Tiger, “I Will Be There”
1992: Ozzy Ozbourne, “Mama, I’m Coming Home”
1997: No Mercy, “Where Do You Go”
Oh, what a week this was. For reasons not germane to this post, this past week was unproductive and exhausting in the extreme. Suffice to say that, even in the declining days of the pandemic, as the world slowly reawakens after a subjectively excessively long winter, the mundane world continues to exist.
Three new books arrived this past week, and it is indeed a stellar stack.
First up is Coyote and Crow, the core rule book for a new tabletop role-playing game which was funded through an immensely successful Kickstarter campaign. Like so many other Kickstarters over the past couple of years, there were delays and setbacks, but the final product is stunning!
Next up is This Is Us Losing Count, a collection of poems in translation from eight contemporary Russian poets. This anthology is part of the Calico series from the Center for the Art of Translation/Two Lines Press, one of the two publishers with whom I still have a subscription.
And finally we have Mister N, written by Lebanese author Najwá Barakāt and translated by Luke Leafgren. This book arrived from And Other Stories, the other publisher to whom I am still subscribed.
In reading news, I just finished They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib‘s collection of articles and essays about music and its intersection with race and culture. I picked this one up when Zyra and I visited City Lights Books in June 2018. I pulled it down from the shelf when I saw that Abrurraqib will be the guest lecturer for the March 2022 GVSU Arts Celebration hosted by Grand Valley State University.
And in writing news, there was no writing this past week. Too many distractions, disruptions, and sorrows.
* We recently celebrated Jack Kerouac‘s 100th birthday. Here are a few interesting links:
** Politics and Prose Live: Does Jack Kerouac Still Matter?
** Jack Kerouac reading poetry, accompanied by Steve Allen on piano, 1959.
* City Lights Books and PM Press hosted a weekend-long symposium celebrating the launch of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, which was recently published by PM Press. Links to the individual sessions follow:
** 0. Dangerous Visions: Keynote Session
** 1. Dangerous Visions: Imagining New Worlds – What activists can and have learnt from sci-fi
** 2. Dangerous Visions: Bursting Through the Boundaries – Queering SF
** 3. Dangerous Visions: Wild Seed – Reflecting on the work and impact of Octavia E. Butler
** 4. Dangerous Visions: Final Programmes and New Fixes – A conversation with Michael Moorcock
** 5. Dangerous Visions: The Forever War – Vietnam’s impact on Sci-Fi
** 6. Dangerous Visions: The Bridge of Lost Desire – A Conversation with Samuel Delany
** 7. Dangerous Visions: 10,000 Light Years From Home – On the work and impact of James Tiptree, Jr.
** 8. Dangerous Visions: False Dawns and Wandergrounds – Dystopia, Then and Now
* Speaking of dystopias, bad things are still happening in Ukraine.
** The Financial Times released an interactive presentation titled How Russia’s mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin’s war.
Two years after the office closed, I am back to working downtown two or three days a week. Being able to spend extended hours out of the house has improved my state of mind substantially, though the office, and indeed much of downtown right now, feels comparatively deserted.
This week’s new reading material comes courtesy of two Kickstarter campaigns.
First up is the latest issue of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, which always delivers excellent short fiction.
Next is War of Gods by Dyrk Ashton, in the limited edition hardcover, next to the box which fits the complete hardcover trilogy. I have been a fan of Dyrk’s work since I first met him at ConFusion back in…2016? He had just published the first volume of his Paternus trilogy. The completion of the hard-cover boxed set feels like the end of an era, and I have heard rumors that Ashton is working on something new. Based simply on that rumor, I am already looking forward to reading it.
In reading news, I am still working my way through Seth Dickinson’s The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. I am enjoying it, but wow, is this a long book. I also got an early start in working my way through all of my back issues of Poetry Magazine, starting with issue 207.1, publishing in October 2015. I have 40 more issues after this one, not counting whatever shows up as I work my way through the stack.
In writing news, not a lot to report for this past week. I have been too distracted by the goings-on in Ukraine to be able to focus on creating new work. Like living in a global pandemic, adjusting to the reality of living in World War III will take time, but eventually I will be able to tell stories around a trash fire which will be the only source of light and warmth in the plague-ridden nuclear winter which will surely be our new normal in the coming decade.
* Andrea Johnson, who is taking a break from her role as The Little Red Reviewer, has recently started a podcast called The Retrorockets Podcast, in which she talks with various authors and other creative folks about classic SFF. So far I have listened to her interview with Paul Weimer, wherein they discuss the works of Jack Vance.
* A town hall on The 1619 Project, on the Karen Hunter Show.
* Interesting Twitter accounts and threads for the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine (mostly harvested from Metafilter).
** Samuel Ramani on reasons Putin invaded Ukraine
In the past week I have returned to working a few days a week out of the downtown office which, while mundane on the face of it, is a Big Deal ™ for me for a few reasons. First, after two years I finally get to be outside of my house for more than errands and martial arts practice. Second, in select narrow, carefully managed settings, it is possible to return to something resembling a normal, not overly pandemic-ey routine. And third, Spring is just around the corner, and the city is waking up from a winter and a long hibernation, and that is a fine time of year to be outside, wandering around.
First up is Marlon James‘s new book Moon Witch, Spider King, which I picked up from local wunderkind bookstore Books and Mortar.
Next is the March 2022 issue of Poetry Magazine. I still plan to read through all of my back issues of this excellent journal in the month of April.
In reading news, I am well into Seth Dickinson’s The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, and so far it is every bit the equal to the previous two books in the series, and I am in awe of the way Dickinson portrays this motley cast of deeply damaged characters.
In writing, I didn’t accomplish much this past week, due to being distracted by the goings-on in Ukraine.
Here are some things I listened to and read over the past week.
* Three Metafilter threads chock-full of good sources of news and information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thread 1. Thread 2. Thread 3.
* I’ve been listening to the recordings of classes, lectures and performances from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University, which have been archived at the Internet Archive. Here are some highlights:
** “Honoring the Muse,” a reading which was part of a fundraiser for the Boulder County Safehouse shelter for battered women, recorded in June 2000. Part 1, Part 2.
** Amiri Baraka‘s class on revolution and art. Part 1. Part 2.
* Excellent panel on Critical Race Theory, with Kimberlé Crenshaw and Devon Carbado.
* Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kiese Laymon, and Michael Bolden in conversation about the 1619 project.
* The Possible Worlds Lecture with Kim Stanley Robinson.
Hi everyone. I missed last month’s IWSG post due to a combination of *multiple vague gestures at the state of the world*. I’m sure you can relate.
This month’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group question is:
Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?
Much of what I write is in response to calls for submission to anthologies and themed issues of various literary and genre fiction magazines. I seldom complete those stories in time to meet the deadline, but even when it is obvious that the work will take months longer than originally estimated, I try to keep to the original theme. Constraints, I have heard, breed innovation.
But when writing to a theme, particularly if it is a type of story I have not written before, I sometimes find myself asking the question, “Did I put that thing I wrote into the story because the story demands it, or because the constraints of the theme demand it?” This can be a difficult knot to untangle.
Here is an example:
A few years ago, World Weaver Press put out a call for new interpretations of the Baba Yaga myth, for their anthology Skull and Pestle. My degree is in Russian Studies, and I have been to Russia, and continue to read Russian literature (in translation only; my language skills are quite rusty), so this seemed like a perfect fit.
I set the story in a village of Russian Orthodox Old Believers in northern Minnesota, near the Canadian border. The writing went well, with (I thought) good characters, good dialog, and good pacing, but when it came time to include Baba Yaga, I found that I couldn’t quite fit her into the story in a way that felt convincing. I went back and re-wrote the first third of the story (which kept getting longer), and by the time I found a way to transplant Baba Yaga from the forests of western Russia to the plains of the American Midwest, the deadline had long passed, and the short story had become a novella.
The troublesome scene, which would have brought Baba Yaga into prominence, was an act of bigoted violence against the Old Believers which, while all too plausible, felt gratuitous. Yet I couldn’t find a way through to the final act without that scene or something like it. So I left the scene in and re-wrote almost everything before it. Having done that, I found I needed to go a completely different direction with the last part of the story, and that is why it is still not finished.
Skull and Pestle is available here, and is quite good. I think all of the stories in it are better than whatever final form my own story would have taken, had I completed it in time to meet the deadline.
On a side note, I want to thank all of the members of the IWSG for your support and encouragement as I round out my first year in this group. It has been difficult to stay motivated during the pandemic, and being part of this writing group has been a big help. In particular I want to thank Jean Davis for bringing the IWSG to my attention. You rock!
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and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.