006: Martian Time-Slip

Second, NAMECHAT

Naming is power, don’t we all know.
Naming this ant makes it special,
naming that ant specialer still.
Naming is invoking, the invocation
            of power.

(Taken from my poem "Hypersigil," available in Caliban #28.) Often, the tendency for trans people to pick new names is something that gets made fun of, both inside and outside the community. But most folks I know that do so put a ton of effort into their new name. That's not to disparage the people who grab fun names for the hell of it; gender is a performance and we all inhabit ourselves for however long we want.) But I wanted to specifically talk about my chosen middle name, Persephone.

I have always hated my given middle name of Donald. Mostly because it literally doesn't mean anything. It's a familial name, but it's effectively a repetition of my given first name. But the other reason is because it's awful because it's associated with either Donald Duck or Donald Trump and lemme tell you neither of those are good when you're a kid. Plus it's just overwhelmingly masculine and I... am not.

So I went with Persephone specifically based on the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone. In the myth, Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, who represent the sky/thunder and the harvest, respectively. With Hades (her uncle) "abducting" and "tricking" Persephone into the underworld (quotes because there's some debate over how much agency Persephone had in her fate), she became the queen of the underworld. As Zeus and Demeter's daughter, though, she was also tied to the sky, storms, and agriculture, and and so she spends half the year in the underworld with her husband Hades and half in the overworld, emerging in the spring for planting. She is therefore a symbol of hope and rebirth, as well as the fusion of the duality of life and death. The pomegranate, associated with her, is a large pod that contains multitudes of seeds within, a symbol of complexity, fecundity, and some eroticism.

Anyway. Persephone. I thought it fit me a little better. Does it flow very well? I dunno. Ricki Persephone is pretty good, but keeping the Cummings part does make it a little awkward, and it still doesn't remove the constant need for grown adults to make fun of that name. But there are still some parts of my past I'm willing to continue associating with. So whatever. Ricki Persephone Cummings. That's me, and it's actually meaningful beyond the familial.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Picked up some new (to me) Queen on vinyl at the record store, both A Night at the Opera and Hot Space. Y'all there is so much space on "Bohemian Raphsody". The version I'm used to from Classic Queen is splattery garbage in comparison. People love to bag on vinyl nerds, but there are truly some stark contrasts out there.
- Also got the new Tomahawk. Hence the comment in COMPILATION today.
- And, finally, I got the new St. Vincent. I still love it, and on probably the twelfth listen I started listening to it on its own merits instead of trying to pick apart influences. There are a couple places that it's really hard to do that, notably "Live in the Dream" and "My Baby Wants a Baby" which are both clearly rebuilds of "Us and Them" and "My Baby Takes the Morning Train", respectively. But Annie's guitar playing is singular enough that even when she's trying to emulate David Gilmour she can only sound like herself.
- I've had my eye on The Art of the Occult for months and I finally picked it up in as a throw-in on a different purchase. So far I've only flipped through it, but it looks to be everything people say about it.

Fourth, PROMOTION.
This is the part where I talk about my book, A Void and Cloudless Sky, which you can order here. The book itself is up for sale on Amazon and BN.com now, too! I have no idea if they're actually printed yet, but they're up there! Almost everyone receiving this newsletter has preordered a copy... would you like an Advance Reader Copy .pdf? All I'm asking for in return is a review on one or both of those sites and/or Goodreads. That's it!

And as usual, if you'd like to support this whole endeavor more directly, you can check out my Patreon, where I post poetry, notes to poems, the occasional essay, and whatnot. At upper tiers I even write poems FOR YOU!

Finally, THE OUTRO.
Something I fell out of love with and then somehow back in love with over time has been car culture. It's one of many shades-of-grey subjects for me, as I absolutely loathe the American version of car culture, as an all-encompassing entity that swallows up any other mode of transportation an warps cities and society itself around it. But from an engineering and design aspect, I love cars, especially as something to occupy time and hands. I hate it them as infrastructure--I hate driving long distances, which is all anything west of the Mississippi is--but I love them as objects. I think this interest was mostly rekindled with reading The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash in grad school. I mean, I don't think I want to fuck my car. I'm just really interested in them again.

...I don't think I want to fuck my car.