OMM (On My Mind)
~ Week 4, February 2023 ~
::: Music Recommendations :::
The new Caroline Polachek album ‘Desire, I Want to Turn Into You’ is super interesting. It includes previous single ‘Bunny is a Rider’ and goes in a whole bunch of musical directions. I like pretty much all of the tracks and will be super interested to see which styles/directions Polacheck decides to focus on in her future music.
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Becky Tuch breaks the Literary Community.
This is front of mind right now.
I have so many questions.
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(Above was my initial response. Well, one of them. You can check out my initial comments on Becky’s substack post where I am clearly losing my shit.)
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Here is a little history about Becky Tuch and her entrepreneurial skills displayed over the years. (Thanks Chill Subs for being both providing services for the literary community and for being super chill!)
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Update:
Becky is getting a lot of blowback. I think her reporting was phenomenal. I’ve seen many saying that she should get an award for such impressive investigative journalism. On the other side, there are people associated with C&R Press, PANK, and other presses and lit mags who are pushing back with a focus on their personal experiences that, at least in their mind, have been positive.
There are, of course, two sides to every story. In the Twitterverse or elsewhere on social media, at least six sides.
Seriously though, and this is a serious matter, the situation is getting ugly. I personally have had a few relatively pointless attempts at conversation. Why pointless? Because we were clearly talked past one another.
This is an evolving story. I plan to address this in more than one way in the future.
One conversation will relate to Roles in the Literary Community. Another conversation will relate to concerns about bad actors and figuring out how to create a better literary community. More TBD.
To be clear, this isn’t about naming names. This isn’t about calling out Creators/Authors in the literary community for being duped by problematic (or nefarious) Editors/Publishers. It’s the bad editors and bad publishers who need to be called out. This is also not about Cancel Culture. Conflating cancelling with calling out people for lacking professionalism and taking advantage of writers is different. Some of these so-called publishers may be con artists. What is the point of cancelling a con artist even? *sigh*
Ok. There will be more on this soon.
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RIP Richard Belzer who was terrific on David Simon’s ‘Homicide: Life in the Streets’ in the 90s.
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Scrabble on steroids
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Sharing this as an ongoingly conflicted long-term vegetarian…
‘Anchovies and Sardines Are a Climate Solution in a Can’
Seems likely that the amount of cheese and dairy products I ingest are more problematic insofar as carbon footprint and yet of course there is also the ethical concern of fish. Here we arrive at the question of hierarchical order of animals and the so-called “food chain”
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We are using utensils all wrong…especially spoons.
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Stop wasting money (and waiting around) by not putting food in the oven until it has pre-heated to the so-called ideal temperature. Note: This may not be the case for baking which is, of course, the chemistry of the cooking world.
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This should even require AI. We can simply do this.
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Affordable …sure…but is the wine good?
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Consumer Price Inflation – (2000-2022)
Way more interesting than it might sound!
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Why it’s no fun being low on the road.
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Philly has a problem with heat. Areas lacking tree cover, or, really, lacking trees generally, are much hotter than other parts of the city with more trees and more green space. This is not new. What is new is that Philly is hiring a “city forester” to help fix the situation.
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Looks like the Earth has a metal core. Go figure. (paywall)
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More and more, we are learning that inflammation is a huge problem for both the body and the mind.
(paywall – Inflammation of the body may explain depression in the brain - The Washington Post)
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More evidence that Pablo Neruda was poisoned.
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Another success in the world of quantum computing. This is heady and science-y for sure. We all gotta admit it’s amazing that we’re gaining the capacity to use these technological advancements to do the amount of computing in seconds that previously wound have taken 1,000 years.
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