media diary: october '23

 

Media Diary:

October 2023

Books:

• The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead by Eleni Sikelianos
• Touch by Henri Cole
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Blizzard: Poems by Henri Cole
• Blackbird and Wolf: Poems by Henri Cole
• Enchantment by Daphne Merkin
• Paula by Isabel Allende*
• Gravity and Center by Henri Cole
• Arsonville by David Blair*

Poems:

• "a force is a push or a pull (5.8 million puerto ricans in america)" by Giovannai Rosa
• "Decolonialish Self-Portrait" by Sara Borjas
• "You, Emblazoned" by Cass Donish
• "The Opposite of Abandonment" by Alexis Aceves Garcia
• "Samhain" by Annie Finch
• "Injury Room" by Katie Ford
• "Where it Begins" by Erica Jong

Albums/Playlists/Artists:

Here is the link to my October bangers.

I also really love my daylists/afternoon playlists/evening mixes that're curated for me by Spotify.

Here's the link to my November songs!

• Red Rum Club. I saw them when they opened for Wombats back in Sept. Their singles "Black Cat" and "Undertaker" are ridiculously good. Liverpool sextet with a killer trumpetist; Arctic Monkeys-adjacent, but a cleaner sound. 
• Yacht rock. 70s/80s genre dominated by Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, Ambrosia, Steely Dan, etc. 
• QCNH by Quaker City Night Hawks.
• The Wall by Pink Floyd; Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd. Listened to these a lot in middle school; timeless. 
• Ways by Aneesa Strings. 
• Bad Self Portraits by Lake Street Drive. Modern blues/jazz.
• Street Angel by Stevie Nicks
• The 1975 by the 1975
• I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One by Yo La Tengo
• Folksongs and Ballads by Tia Blake
• The Age of Consent by Bronski Beat
• Split by Lush
• Flesh Balloon by Pale Saints
• I Met God by Valley Boy
• Violator by Depeche Mode
• Viva Hate by Morrissey
• Come Clean by Puddle of Mudd
• More Songs about Buildings and Food (Deluxe) by Talking Heads <3
• Tango in the Night (Deluxe) & Heroes are Hard to Find by Fleetwood Mac

Basically just: 

Not my TikTok account; this is a screenshot posted to Pinterest

Movies/TV/Podcasts:

• Sold a Story. Fun fact: there are many ways to teach reading, and some of them are very detrimental (but very popular and widely used in schools across the country!). Whole-language is the worst way to teach reading, but it's everywhere. This method has kids memorize words, but not actually read them (guessing what the word might be rather than using phonics to sound it out). I've been listening to SaS on my way back from work or when I do laundry. It's nerdy. 
• Love is Blind. 

Essays, Art, Obsessions and Other Digital Things:

• Saturn Devouring His Son painting by Francisco Goya (see below)

• Pencil buns! I shove two pencils through a messy top bun before teaching and it confuses the life out of my students! I love it. It's cute and ruffly and weird. Poetic. 

• Anais Nin on emotional excess:

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

• This Simone de Beauvoir quote, which my freshman-year New York City in Film professor gave me. He gave the class quotes he felt best fit "us" based on what he'd learned about us over the semester. I think about it once a week. Frightfully accurate. Prophetic.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

• Henri Cole's interview with the Paris Review (which I can't access all of, because I am not a subscriber. RIP).

• These images of Patti Smith and Frida Kahlo. It's an inside joke with my loved ones that I "look like Patti Smith" or am "looking Patti Smith-ish" when my bangs are in need of a trim. She was/is the ultimate 70s NYC cool girl. Her music has been the soundtrack of my past two years. And, obviously, Frida has been one of my heroes since I was 14. I love reading her diaries and I love, love her art.

   

• rose lyddon's Substack. She's doing her DPhil in Theology and posts essays on weird niche religious things, like angels and penance and the intersection between politics/salvation/confession. As most of you know, I was a 12th-century French nun in another life, and my Plan Z is to become an Irish nun (if this whole poetry/teaching/editing/writing thing doesn't pan out, I'm devoting myself to religious mysticism or whatever). Anyway, here is an essay on martyrdom and apocalypse!

• This interview with Richard Siken, which was published in Adroit Issue 40. 

• Cephalophores. Or, saints that are often depicted carrying their own heads. The burden of divinity, the restraint of martyrdom. Or something. 

• Black cats; orange cats. Was talking to a man recently (don't worry, it ended.) about what sort of animal I'd be, if I were an animal. I said either a black cat or a deer. He said a black cat was more accurate. I am often orange-cat-esque around my closest friends.

• Hoarding used copies of Beauvoir and Sartre. 

• Jean-Francois Fourtou's "Tiny and Gigantic People" exhibit. Something something, the domestic as a dreamspace/nightmare, blah blah. Or whatever.

• This specific poster, for no reason:

I wrote a flurry of essays this month. I've been challenging the narrative I've assigned myself as an artist, which is that if I am not writing poetry, I can no longer call myself a poet. In reality, being a poet is simply a way of moving through the world. It's an adaptation of what Ama Codjoe said in her November 2nd reading with Terrance Hayes and Nicole Sealey at the NYPL: being a poet is not just about the page. It's about how you look at things, what you're drawn to, what you love, etc. 

October was a month of ending cycles. Purging. Gathering. Replacing. Questioning. I traveled to UNH to visit an MFA workshop; I was solicited for a review at a lit mag. I hit the town. I slept. I wrote. I am happy to say I'm here: each day, I keep myself from dying. Each day, I promise myself I'll live.