I’m listening to Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich’s curatorial hour as I write this curatorial column. Ben Loory shared a June Mix, which inspired me to eat a chocolate donut for lunch. The next day, I went on a gluten-free diet and then binged on The Bins. Here are three you might enjoy: Cheese, Meat, Soup.
W. S. Dipiero’s Out of Notebooks is beautiful. Here’s an excerpt:
Back in Marfa and its high-desert West Texas heat. Winds today at 30+ mph. I’m accustomed to the sea wind in San Francisco—it’s frontal, it comes at you. A windstorm here comes for you. It’s a woman’s voice halooing right outside the door late tonight, trying to slither into the house and harmonize with the Figaro I’m listening to. It shimmies, it turns corners, it bullroars, in this otherwise silent place. How can you not believe that the wind carries the voices of the dead, long interred but now singing again for us to come to them and their sweet fine nothingness.
Lindsey Kugler’s essay If You Write About Me I’ll Sue You begins:
He wants to show you his office, then his desk, then his bedroom, then his neatly organized papers, then his college thesis, then his degree in history, then his dick.
“Just don’t write about me,” he says.
Dale Smith’s Giving Everything: On Diane di Prima is an in-depth look at a woman writer who participated in the male-dominated Beatnik generation.
Men made claims to power based on new Cold War living and work conditions that rewarded masculine posturing in newly refashioned and romantic figures: the cowboy, the rebel, the bohemian, and the drifter. Adjacent to these outsider stereotypes, di Prima sought new kinds of gendered experiences through her art and social relationships. It can be easy to take for granted di Prima’s determination to bring a woman’s voice into a mostly male-dominated subculture.
A director of a creative writing program is interested in having me speak about community to her students, so now is probably a good time to read Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks.
Father’s Day is tomorrow, which is an emotionally charged day for me, and Dear Sugar’s column The Empty Bowl is soothing.
