my couch, the time machine
I've had this pdf zine on my desktop for awhile and now I can't remember where I first heard about it—but it's delightful. From Adjunct Press, the "the epic poem on our lives housed within the structures of retail economy," Mall is Lost by Holly Raymond. There’s a lot going on in its 63 pages—in turns, baroque, nostalgic, playful, fantastic, and cutting—all these things but also surprisingly cohesive. I was dazzled. Download a pdf and keep in on your desktop. Leave it there a while and open it up once you have forgotten it was me who told you about it — work this good found online is always best when there is some mystery around its origins.
It is so good, I went and ordered the rest of the chapbooks in the Retail Labor series, including the translated poems of Xu Lizhi, a Chinese poet who died by suicide while working at Foxconn. (more on the particular relevance of his work to the Wisconsin-based indie publisher here.)
Here's another random delightful project I found online: Poems for Idle Workers, a BBC radio piece by the sound artist and poet Holly Pester, which, "presents a new set of experimental eclogues that take place in a contemporary work-space, where two lowly office workers find themselves united yet divided, trying to find a connection in the stolen moments of not-working. But is there ever really such a moment?"
I was sick and wiped out last Wednesday, a day I spent almost entirely on the couch. I had just enough energy to click on Netflix, and then clicked on the first thing it recommended to me which was Rachel Getting Married. Then, all my energy revived because I was cringing so hard. This movie bottled all the chaotic energy of white people in 2008, and because it's Jonathan Demme—the film is super immersive and I felt like I was living through it. I went to that damn wedding! I did not even want to but somehow I made my way back to 2008. I can't even tell if it's a good movie or not, only that my reactions were strong (Especially when I noticed—Oh no, nooo—all those white bridesmaids were wearing...saris. Nooo!) It was a blast from a near past that I could do without. Later, I checked out music from about that time. Most of it does not hold up, but Bat for Lashes' Daniel and Okkervil River's Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe, were nice to revisit. I don't write about music much here because my taste locked into the same several bands when I was in my early twenties. There are only so many ways to say I was blown away by Loveless or Spiderland once more. But there is something kind of nice about being predictable in this way. If I have the good fortune of a world still standing, and my own eyesight and mental aptitude to drive when I'm a senior citizen—and since self-driving cars will still not be available then ha ha—I'll probably still be playing, I don't know, Terrible Lie, alone in my car.
Thanks for reading.