Posted on

Culture Consumption: January 2019

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games. 🙂 I’ll be posting my favorite reads and movies of the year in the next week or two.

Books

 

I finished three fantastic poetry collections this month. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a justifiably lauded collection of poetry and essays. The collection offers an unflinching look at the everyday realities of racism in America, with the second person narration drawing the reader directly into the experience. The blend of writing styles and art make for a powerful and necessary read.

My Body Is a Poem I Can’t Stop Writing by Kelly Lorraine Andrews is a beautiful little chapbook published by Pork Belly Press. These poems explore the physicality of existing in a body, with a blend of mortality and eroticism.

Ivy Johnson’s Born Again dives into the ecstatic expression of religious experience. With its confessional style, it gives power to the female voice, rending open that which would be hidden behind closed doors. Check out my interview with Johnson on the New Books in Poetry podcast.

I also completed Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. It was a fantastic read, so I wrote a bit of a post about why I loved the story and characters.

Continue reading “Culture Consumption: January 2019”

Posted on

Wolves of the Calla – Reading The Dark Tower, Part V

Here are Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of my journey through Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series.

Wolves of the Calla by Stephen KingPart IV is focused on book five, Wolves of the Calla, and as with all of these posts, there will be so many spoilers.

When I first started reading this series as a teenager, I tore through each of the books, eager to get to the end, only to come to an abrupt halt when I discovered the fifth book had not been written yet. It took Stephen King six years after finishing Wizard and Glass to finish and publish The Wolves of the Calla. During that time, I had lost the thread of the narrative. I always intended to finish reading the series, but it settled comfortably into the back burner and stayed there — until now.

Wolves of the Calla is the first book in the series that’s new to me, and that newness might be why it took me ten months to get around to reading it. Lately, I’ve been having a hard time coming back to stories (TV shows especially), finding myself simultaneously caught between wanting to know the ending to the story and at the same time not wanting to know what happened to the characters. Reading books one to four was comfortable, stepping into the fifth book was a risk, the witness of terrible things, or worse, disappointment in the story or characters.

I shouldn’t have been so worried.

Continue reading “Wolves of the Calla – Reading The Dark Tower, Part V”

Posted on

A Discussion of Memes to Movement with An Xiao Mina

Wednesday night, I headed up to The Bindery, a lovely bookstore and author reading space in San Francisco, where An Xiao Mina discussed her newly published book, Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, with Robin Sloan.

Lively and entertaining, the discussion considered whether cats or goats are lords of the meme world (depends where you’re at), the ways Chinese citizens use memes to work around the country’s internet restrictions, decoding memes and the importance of translation for a deeper understanding of culture, and how spreading misinformation isn’t that different from digital marketing. I’m excited for the chance to read this book and to dive more deeply into memes and the power they have in the world.

Memes to Movements-An Xiao Mina

.

Newsletter | Twitter | Instagram

Posted on

Short Film: How to Be Alone (2010)

Short films (usually defined as films 40 minutes or less) can be powerful, delivering an impactful story in a short timeframe, with every scene, every moment carrying weight. As a fan of the short film form, I want to highlight some examples of the medium that I love and hopefully bring more attention to the creators. I’ll be sharing narrative shorts in a multitude of genres: horror, action, comedy, romance, animation, and so on. Other shorts (like the one I’m presenting today) may be in the form of poems in which the visual medium of films complements and uplifts the language. And as I discover more of them, I may throw in some short docs and video essays that I find Bpartculularly compelling.

How to Be Alone

Directed By: Andrea Dorfman
Written By: Tanya Davis

What It’s About: A poetic contemplation on the value of solitude.

Why I Like It: Uplifting and beautiful, this short presents a poem that an instructional style that narrates the potential of solitude as a state to seek, rather than avoid. The imagery, music, editing, and animation come together with the words (sometimes scrawled across the screen) to express the full, soothing impact of the piece. Every time I watch How to Be Alone, I find myself calmed. It’s lovely.

Newsletter | Twitter | Instagram

Posted on

New Books in Poetry: Born Again by Ivy Johnson

Ivy Johnson-Born Again

A new episode of New Books in Poetry is up, in which I speak with poet and performance artist Ivy Johnson about her book, Born Again.

The poetry and prose in Ivy Johnson’s Born Again (The Operating System, 2018) beautifully dives into the ecstatic expression of religious experience. With its confessional style, this collection gives power to the female voice, rending open that which would be hidden behind closed doors. The work blends sensuality and spirituality, merging the grounded reality of existing a physical body in the world with a sense of worship, prayer, and spell casting.

“I submerge my hands in ink and smear them across the wall
I cover my body in rich purple paint and rub against white paper
I place a sticker of the Virgin Mary on my bedroom window next to the fire escape
She hurts with the glow of blue frost
I race down the stairs to make snow angels in the dog-piss
Fill the silhouette of my body with marigolds”

— from “Take a Moment to Gather Yourself”

You can listen to the episode here.

I’m still in the process of figuring out how to be a good interview podcast host, how to shuck off my own nervousness and dig up confidence enough to feel strong in these interviews. But whatever limitations I believe I have at this moment, they are more than surpassed by the intelligence and insight of my guests so far.

Newsletter | Twitter | Instagram