OMM (On My Mind) – March 2024 - #4
~ a curated selection of discoveries ~
::: The Open :::
Dear Reader,
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Thank you for reading and for your time.
With Gratitude,
Mark
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::: Personal Notes :::
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I’m continuing to run workshops.
One workshop per week may become the new normal.
Be on the lookout for this week’s schedule.
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I have a few poems forthcoming in Red Wolf Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Right Hand Pointing.
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Throwback:
Recordings of me reading some of my favorite poems made during a difficult time.
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::: Podcasts :::
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‘What Makes Propaganda Effective?’ (Fresh Air)
Highly recommend.
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::: Music :::
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What makes an album The GOAT? (The Pudding)
Looking at flaws in the unscientific methods of “Best Albums” lists.
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“Global music revenue hit $28.6B in 2023, a 10% rise from 2022 and the highest sales figure since 1999, unadjusted for inflation” (Billboard)
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I’m still lowkey obsessed with the new Bleachers album. So good.
I’d taken a little break from Bleachers and mostly listened to Jack Antonoff’s skills as a producer on other musician’s tracks.
If you haven’t listened – I love Jack’s ‘Strange Desire’ album but I also love ‘Terrible Thrills, Vol. 2’ where he enlisted women vocalists to sing on remixed versions of all the tracks. Highly recommend.
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Thoughts on the new Waxahatchee album? Pitchfork gave it 8.8/10. Not sure that’s completely earned but on first listen it seems pretty good.
‘Fire’ and ‘Lilacs’ and ‘Oxbow’ are personal favs off their 2020 album ‘Saint Cloud’
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The new JAMC album is… weird. And seems pretty terrible, frankly. I don’t know what I was expecting.
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Have you listened to the new Four Tet album? I hear it’s good…
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::: The Literary Community & Beyond :::
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Erika Dreifus’ important and thorough discussion of the literary community’s response to the ongoing situation in Gaza and rising antisemitism.
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With a focus on PEN America, Erika Dreifus addresses the difficulty of running a large organization in fraught times.
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PEN America’s letter released on March 20, 2024 is, indeed, well-articulated and even-handed.
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Gallup has collected research on “The Emotional Cost of Underemployment”. Some findings include that the emotional cost disproportionately affects women negatively.
There’s a stark reminder that Americans report their satisfaction with their personal lives is at a record low.
Globally, millions and millions of people do not feel well-supported or cared for.
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Did Bill Shakes have a sister??
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Seth Godin on dealing with Imposter Syndrome
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Tresha Faye Haefner & her team are running very interesting sounding workshops!
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I’m VERY excited about Ona Gritz’s new memoir — “Everywhere I Look”
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SUPER INTERESTING discussion on Becky Tuch’s substack LitMagNews – ‘If you publish something and revise it, can you submit it again as a new work?’
I hope you’ll take a read +consider my perspective in the comments.
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A conversation with Michael Ondaatje about his first collection of poetry in 25 years
My note here is to call attention to the fact that you can always return to poetry.
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'It's Time for Publishers to Tell the Truth About Posthumously Published Books' (Rebecca Schinsky, Today in Books)
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::: Health & Wellness :::
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‘8-hour time-restricted eating linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death’ (American Heart Association)
This is deeply troubling as… I had read very positive information about this restriction previously and he lowkey prided myself in achieving the 14-hour window (overnight) on a relatively frequent basis… for some time.
This is partly a “don’t believe everything you read” cautionary tale… as well as “everything in moderation”. In fairness to myself, I was keeping in mind the “moderation” aspect of this 14-hour window “fast” and, in turn, intentionally limited how often I allowed myself in terms of days in a row.
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‘Driving at ridiculous speeds should be physically impossible’ (Vox)
Cars are dangerous. People are not good drivers. It's not necessarily someone's fault. Humans are not hardwired to drive cars. Adaptation and evolution are far from the same.
There are very few situations in which drastically speeding is essential. The override may be needed for short bursts when passing at high speeds. But, if we were all driving reasonably, then this would rarely be needed.
We all think of the "rushing to the hospital scenario" or related. The amount of time saved by speeding in only significant are extremely unsafe speeds. There are almost always going to be better ways to handle an emergency.
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‘A protein found in human sweat may protect against Lyme disease’ (MIT News)
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‘Ketamine is in the spotlight thanks to Elon Musk — but is it the right treatment for depression?’ (Nature)
“Because it’s long out of patent, there’s little commercial interest in developing new versions of ketamine. Some companies are trying to package it into more convenient oral lozenges, but that’s a challenging formulation.”
“As is true for many psychiatric medicines, scientists aren’t sure how ketamine works at the molecular level in the brain to lift depression. Its benefits seem to come from triggering what psychiatrists call a dissociative state.”
“We think of ketamine and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as quote-unquote big guns that we save for more severe cases,” he adds. (Because of its potency as an anti-depressant, when ketamine first emerged some psychiatrists referred to the drug as “liquid ECT”).
“Never take it alone or where you can be vulnerable. Not near water, as [Matthew] Perry did, or outside on a cold night admiring the stars.”
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‘Nearly 8 in 10 AAPI adults in the US think abortion should be legal, an AP-NORC poll finds’ (AP News)
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::: Small Explorations & Deep Dives :::
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The state of journalism is… not good
It’s been this way for a while… and it’s gotten worse
There’s an overlap with the literary community when it comes to deplatforming material without being called to do so. Trade pubs and major news outlets are for-profit endeavors so it’s not a surprise that they are afraid to lose advertisers and subscribers. But journalists have a writer’s version of The Hippocratic Oath. I’m being serious. The news is bigger than individuals or corporate entities.
William Carlos Williams wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” (Asphodel, That Greeny Flower) WCW is hazarding that poetry is truly important to the lives of everyday people— but the unsaid, grander implication is that the news itself is of immense importance.
(Semafor)
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‘Willfully uninformed’ (Seth Godin)
What we choose to research in the age of instant information.
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‘Snakes: The new, high-protein superfood’
Not snake oil!
Hey, if we’re going to fatten up Big Ag… let’s make it as sustainable as possible.
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The Threat of Authoritarian Leaders like Viktor Orbán
“In a different interview, Garcia-Navarro noted, Roberts had called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.””
“In the U.S. that ideology has since 1981 moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.”
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On Children & Memory (Science)
“It’s possible that suppressing memories allows the brain to put more computing power toward figuring out how the world works while giving the hippocampus time to develop, says child psychologist Tracy Riggins at the University of Maryland. That trade-off might make sense for helpless babies because they can offload some memory-related tasks to caregivers, such as how to navigate or where to find a toy.”
Interesting to think about in the framework of Sherlock Holmes’ “Memory Palace”…
What matters in the mind of a child is different from what matters in the mind of an adult.
While I child might associate a room with a specific toy for “up to 6 months”, an adult might trigger memory based on situations and conversations.
The outshot remarks in the article are thought-provoking. Young minds are, of course, developing. The lack of context, understanding of (soon to be forced, coercive) societal norms, lived experience, the duration of experience, vast numbers of memories and associations that intersect, the firing and misfiring of neurons and whatever else contributes to memory recall that, half-recalled, yields flawed memory reconstructions over time (and immediately).
Human memory is about storytelling. Given that, our understanding of the world and the way the world mirrors us back to ourselves informs our understanding of ourselves, those around us, our place in society and the universe.
Circling back… the developing child mind is taking in vast amounts of sensory inputs for the first time. The brain itself is stuck in Plato’s Cave. Our experiences of the world develop our brain’s understanding as a perception machine.
Trauma, we know, is a disturbing gamechanger—especially when it comes to young minds. As few as three instances of significant traumatic event during early childhood development can completely alter the trajectory of a child’s life. Personal conversations with others informs me that those who tend to remember early childhood (before the age of 4) is indicative that something very bad has happened. I personally have only a single blurred memory from age 5. I have almost no clear memories from elementary school. Early childhood amnesia is considered fairly normal if a child has had minimal traumatic instances occur during those years.
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‘THE VICUÑAS AND THE $9,000 SWEATER’ (Bloomberg)
“Newly shorn vicuñas after the 2023 chaccu. If these animals are caught again this year, they will be released—vicuñas can be sheared only every other year.”
“To capture vicuñas, Peruvians partake in a ritual called the chaccu, a Quechua word that’s been used by Spanish chroniclers since the 16th century to describe how Incas would catch, shear and release the animals. The basics of the chaccu have barely changed since.”
“Adult vicuñas weigh up to 110 pounds (50 kilograms), and holding them is a two-person job. People like Sosaya walked into the cage and grabbed vicuñas, laying them on their sides and restricting their legs. Other people held the animals’ necks. Vicuñas are afraid of humans and will often kick and bite. Sosaya and his group took shots of a local liquor called cañazo before going in. Grabbing vicuñas is a task not often done sober.”
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This isn’t really news but India continues to suffer from terrible air quality.
‘The world’s 100 worst polluted cities are in Asia — and 83 of them are in just one country’ (CNN)
As someone with asthma… I have long worried what happens if this starts to become a problem, well, everywhere.
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I don’t love happiness as a gauge for the complexity of the human experience. That being said, it’s a fairly understandable concept across people from different backgrounds so there’s so logic in using it as a metric.
With regards to the situation in the U.S., notably—
“The report highlights an interesting phenomenon for the two most developed economies in the region, the U.S., (23rd) and Canada (15th), where the old are significantly more happy than the young, a pattern seen in Nordic Europe as well.”
There are many places in the world where people report being unhappy… and it doesn’t take a survey to consider the many reasons why that is the case.
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Sharing this mostly because I think the Nissan Kicks is a cute vehicle and I desired owning one for a time.
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What’s the least tragic news you’ve heard recently?
Maybe this for the win?
“The average bonus on Wall Street in 2023 was $176,500, down 2% from 2022.” (AP News)
That is one tiny violin.
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““Ukraine has never resorted to the use of terrorist methods,” he posted on X. “Everything in this war will be decided only on the battlefield.” – Ukrainian President V. Zelenskyy
This is a respectable and appropriate response.
Considering the conflicts in the world presently, I constantly think about how the U.S. would respond… My answer always comes back to a sense that American leadership can be vicious. Not always, but we know we have been known to historically **not** implement proportional responses under certain circumstances… as we see fit.
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Lots of important info in this piece by Heather Cox Richardson. I highly encourage reading the day’s post in full.
“In today’s America, the right wing seems to be echoing its antebellum predecessors. It is attacking women’s rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; immigration; LGBTQ+ rights and so on. At the same time, it continues to push an economic system that has moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 10% since 1981 while exploding the annual budget deficit and the national debt."
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Rental SOTU
‘Ten economic facts about rental housing’ (Brookings)
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::: News of the Weird :::
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‘Star Wars: Millennium Falcon 50p coin unveiled by Royal Mint’ (BBC)
Kinda cool, yeah, but also makes fiat currency seem even more fake…
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‘The Kraken: Revo Foods Releases the World’s First Vegan Octopus’ (green queen)
As a vegetarian, why am I calling this out as weird? Well, put simply, I don’t think we badly needed this product and I doubt it’s going to convert the audience that eats octopus as part of their traditional cultural diet.
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Always interesting roadmap for reading.