040: The Penultimate Cruellest Month
AN EMAIL IN SEVERAL PARTS, LIKE THE BODY OF AN INSECT
First, Tha NEWS.
What a year, eh? Lemon, it's March.
Two months already? Well, technically two months and a day, since we got an extra one in there. Happy leap year? If that's a thing worth celebrating.
Not a lot of celebrating here, to be honest, hence my wondering. This winter has been weirdly depressed, though I have been moving forward through the various things I mentioned last time. But the weather, the world, the inexorable march of life and death... it's been a lot.
I got word that my graduate alma mater Columbia College Chicago will be including some of THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT in an issue of their journal Allium this year. That will be rad.
I've spent some time digging at the library at various ancient tomes For Dummies books and it looks like my initial plan of using Microsoft Access for my big poem database is the right way to go. A couple weeks ago I got that started and then another bout of Playing Too Much Gran Turismo hit me again and so I've been playing too much Gran Turismo instead of doing anything work related. I mean, that's not entirely true. I've been doing podcast work. But that's on a much longer timeline most weeks, and so the work itself is sporadic but intense, which leaves a lot of time to not do other things.
I've managed to stay relatively up-to-date with my Bullet Journal, without getting too far out of practice. Usually I don't go more than a week, which is better than I was managing last year. I also cleaned out my LAMY pen, which managed to get a massive clog at some point, so the actual experience of just picking up my pen and writing is a lot easier than it was for a long while there. I've gone back to a very good ink (Carbon Black) that doesn't turn into shit when I use a highlighter on it (unlike the Diamine Oxblood which I actually prefer as a color) so I have more flexibility in marking and status-type things I have available to me in the ol' BuJo.
As far as THE FAILURE EXPERIENT is concerned, I turned a huge corner on it conceptually, discovering that what I had though was the end of the whole project is actually the end of one section, roughly analagous to the end of the second act. Or, like, the inverse of Stephen King killing half the characters in the middle of The Stand. (Spoilers for a book that came out several years before I was born.) So while I don't have a specific end for it yet, I have a direction, which is more than I had coming into the year.
I've also been thinking about the audiobook version of confessions from a drainage ditch, which I promised to a friend. I think that will be my main project over the summer. I need to go back and look at Amazon's requirements, and look up some industry best practices, but at the same time I'm probably going to be recording in a closet or something. Which is, believe it or not, Industry Standard for a whooooooooooole lot of voiceover artists. I'm not sure exactly when I'll be launching that, but I'm hoping August-ish.
And finally, unrelated to anything (but a little related to CONSUMPTION), we got another new (to us) CD/DVD player. Our previous thrift store find was having problems with shutting down due to thermal protection and we discovered that the power section of the electronics was just... bad. Real bad. So we got another one from the same thrift store, like the good goblins we are. This one seems to stay cool and sounds good, by which I mean it seems to accurately read and transmit 1s and 0s to the stereo, which in turn actually sounds good.
So yeah, the march toward re-buying a physical media collection continues unabated. If you happen to come across any IKEA GNEDBY or BENNO media storage towers, lemme know. (I'm serious.)
Second, INTERLUDE.
Thanks | Death says for being the embodiment | of my every fantasy
~ Yarrow Yes Woods, DEATH AND
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Music-wise, we've picked up a lot lately: the first four albums by Garth Brooks on CD (country used to be pretty good, and Garth Brooks is a genuinely good dude, believe it or not), the soundtrack album to The Matrix (explicit version!), Greatest Hits from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Clint Black, and Tom Petty's Wildflowers. Vinyl pick-ups include three Kylesa albums which replace CDs we lost in a flood a while back (along with my original copies of the Tom Petty), a studio recording of Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera, and the record and the rest by boygenius.
- Finished reading my friend and mentor Tony Trigilio's Craft: A Memoir, which includes several stories I've never heard and a few I have, relating to why we make poetry, how it comes about, and finding inspiration in other, non-poetic places. Great little book.
- Currently working though my beautiful friend Yarrow's book DEATH AND, which is a work that is so fresh and interesting I genuinely don't know how to read it most of the time. Her work is always so inspirational to me (in a palpable, generative way) and has always been a catalyst to my own explorations of the page and its possibilities. I don't think it's a coincidence that I got this and THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT took a hard turn around the same time. (Not on a causal level, but a metaphysical one. Something in the air, so to speak.)
- Gran Turismo 7. So much. Too much. But you know what? The engine whine? It's very soothing.
- Hey, don't look now but there's a new St. Vincent song out.
Fourth, HUSTLE.
First and foremost is my most recent book, confessions from a drainage ditch, which was released on Sept 1st through Amazon, and is available in ebook and paperback formats. If you haven't picked it up, it's a great introduction to my more concrete and mainstream work.
If you're looking for something weirder, you can check out A Void and Cloudless Sky, a chapbook, which is also available from Amazon, as well as most other retailers. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here.
If you're liking this whole project and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. There are lots of little benefits you can get there, from poems written to your specifications to subscriber-only limited-edition chapbooks.
Finally, THE OUTRO.
Fiero stuff? Fiero stuff. In attempting to fix the radiator fan, I discoverd an entire support bracket has rusted away, and so I need to find one of those. This weekend I'll probably be replacing a brake line that had rusted in half that I also managed to round off the fittings, so I was waiting for new ones to arrive, and they have, so hopefully that will be the end of the brake work I have to do. That'll be one step closer to getting it on the road. You know, after tires, the aforementioned bracket, a headlight repair, a gear selector repair, A/C... uh... It'll be fine. It'll be fine! I don't know if anyone but me cares about this stuff, but gosh darn it, I do. Soon. Soooooon.
I think that's about it, even though I feel like I've forgotten something I was gonna say. Ah well. Related to rearranging my workspace? I dunno. Anyway, that's everthing up to date, I think, that's relevant to the email. Have a good one?
Oh, don't tell anyone, but I have a date tonight.