055: A Wriggling Grunion in Your Slipstream
First, Tha NEWS.
First, if you’re a person reading this that is somehow unaware that I have a Patreon, I’m gonna plug that real quick. I am currently halfway through discussing the playlist I made for inspiration while writing THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT. There’s 52 tracks overall, covering everything from Strapping Young Lad to Karlheinz Stockausen to KMFDM to Dead Kennedys. You can check it out here. It’s the only place these posts will be.
Next, I have the copies of TFE ready to mail out to the winners of the giveaway a few weeks ago! Finally! They’ll be heading out sometime this afternoon (ideally.) Thanks so much to youse who signed up for this here newsletter and will be getting free books soon! Also, in the event you’ve missed it, down in HUSTLE is a link to a pdf copy of my chapbook A Void and Cloudless Sky. Just for being here!
That goes for the rest of you who aren’t new! Go grab it!
Finally, it has been hot has hell balls a crotch Tom Hiddleston a metal-bottomed slide out there lately, and windy, too. We’ve had several days of Red Flag Fire Days, which is weird, because it’s the middle of May. It’s finally supposed to break tomorrow, back down to normal seasonal temperatures, with rain. It’s been great planting weather (if you’re a no-till operation like the fam up here, otherwise all your topsoil gets blown away), but so ungodly hot. Even the snakes are like “hsssssssssssssssss!”
Second, INTERLUDE.
Third, CONSUMPTION.
This is an entry of one this week: Disability Isn’t Sexy by Erin Lynn Marsh. My friend Libby (she of the newsletter) sent it to me—along with some other lovely things—and I sat down and read it this morning, and it sits in an interesting place among, I guess, the “discourse” in my head. While there is a physical dimension to my own disability array (migraine), I don’t experience visible disability that many people do, and so it interests me to hear the experience of folks who do have that combination of desire, self-loathing, stigma, and shame relating to their bodies.
The direct references to disability in the book are based in the speaker’s hips most prominently, which are a sexualized area of the body to begin with, and so the juxtaposition of the imagery of scarring and mobility (what specifically is the cause of the disability is never mentioned) with the various forms of intimacy and sensuality that still exist within the speaker’s world creates and interesting emotional push and pull—to reference Donald Hall, it “expresses human ambivalence.”
What is interesting to me is that this book came into my life in about the same time as a book by one of our podcast guest, Notes from a Queer Cripple by Andrew Gurza. Andrew spends a lot of his time advocating for the sexiness of disabled people. (In fact, he is credited for popularizing the hashtag #DisabledPeopleAreSexy and his own podcast is titled Disability After Dark.) The intersection of sex and disability is, indeed, something that is very relevant to my interests.
The book itself is lovely, if a little short. The glints of… joy(?) in the book are subtle, and the outright sensual parts are sort of presented as a sort of grotesquerie. Its feels like it occupies a space similar to the concept of JG Ballard’s Crash, of finding the erotic in the reviled. (Crash is one of those polarizing works, Roger Ebert called the Cronenberg-directed film version “pornographic in form, but not in effect.” Disability Isn’t Sexy is not the opposite of that, exactly, but it is certainly less clinical and more… human? Humane? I dunno.) I enjoyed it.
It’s available on Amazon if you’d like a copy.
Fourth, HUSTLE.
The new hotness is THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT, which you can get here. It’s a serial poem based in Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard, 20th Century cyberpunk, Jack Spicer, and, well, me.
confessions from a drainage ditch was released in late 2023 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.
There’s my chapbook, A Void and Cloudless Sky. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here. If you want a hard copy, it’s available 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.
A scant few weeks left before I head back Chicago way. I still have a few projects left to do, so this may be the last newsletter until I get down there. (Not that I believe any of you will necessarily miss it so much—at least when I get newsletters I feel that too many too close together is just uninteresting unless you’re someone way cooler than me and have way better content than I.) Just off the top of my head there’s the beginning of the garden here, at least a few more lawn mowings, acquiring my birthright family heirloom motorcycle, possibly getting a concrete step ready to move, packing, and even some actual writing-related things. Busy busy.
Remember: it won’t always be like this. Life moves in cycles of boom and bust, and has since even before humanity invented agriculture. There is variation in everything. You don’t have to rush, or push, or worry about making the first move. Eventually it all settles out. The world is on fire (literally in many places), but you occupy a very small part of it. Your influence is small on the grand scheme of things, but we make our universes around ourselves. We may be subject to the whims of autocratic shitheads, and decades of ignoring science, and now, apparently, measles, but you can take the steps you need to in your sphere.
You can still be angry while loving your friends. You can still be sad while watching Game Changer and laughing at Brennan. You can be thankful when your plans get canceled. You can hug someone even if you feel like dying. It’s okay.
You contain multitudes, babe.