Whom I’m Reading Like My Life Depends on It
How to “Replace Your Soul” if It Comes to That - a parable from the war
The Confession of a False Soul
I’m in a Saturday storybook listening group. Every weekend, my friend Sage Lee holds a private Zoom gathering where he performs an hour of poems and prose for us, selected with Sage’s uncanny poise and timing.
He reads to us in his beautiful voice. We are bathed, our minds anointed. If you’re enchanted with the idea, write me and I’ll invite you sometime. But yes! It’s esoteric.
The last couple weeks Sage introduced us to a surrealist author I fell in love with, Ilarie Veronca, a Romanian Jew who lived in Europe between 1903-1946 — a most poignant series of dates, as I’m sure you understand.
I am reading aloud today, from his 1942 novel, Confessions of a False Soul,1 in my audio excerpt above.
The Journalists I Read Every Day
I change my Substack recommendations regularly— always fresh biscuits.
My past criteria was, “Find the little geniuses that hardly anyone knows about.”
You don’t need me to tell you about the existence of “Heather, Our Lady of the Letters,” or the “Delphic Oracle of Sarah Kendzior.”
Or do you?
It occurred to me this week, that I often discover famous writing where I am “the last to know,” yet I am grateful to finally get on board. I bet some of you are the same. It’s worth naming the legends for being legendary.2
Another of my curmudgeonly mistakes: I am skittish of writer “celebrities,” I cringe from their too-big reputation— only to discover that, mea culpa, they are indeed very special.
So! This month and this month only, I’ll recommend a few people I read every day, along with their significant audience, whom I relish in all their notoriety. Thank god they’re popular! We may support them to fight another day, perchance to dream.
Politics & News
Sarah Kendzior is an seer, yes, a reluctant Cassandra, but she’s also our Walt Whitman.
Sarah recently took her daughter to college, and discovered a small Amish Iowa town where the composer Dvorak lived and found profound inspiration, far from Europe. There is nothing like discovering the MidWest with Sarah:
In the late 19th century . . . When his friend Josef Kovařík invited him to Iowa, saying it reminded him of Bohemia, Dvořák hopped the train. He spent the summer of 1893 strolling along the Turkey River, listening to birds, incorporating their songs into his. He became fascinated with Black American spirituals and Native American instruments. Dvořák was Czech, but his music was becoming American in that best of ways, where folk cultures collide. When he finished “String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Opus 96”, he dubbed it “The American Quartet.”
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson.
On the day of the Utah Podcaster assassination, when the US press could think of nothing else, Richardson reported Kirk’s shooting as the secondary story to Russia’s armed drone attack on Poland; and Netanyahu’s opening a new front on Qatar. That was the right priority. Richardson is the history queen of keeping your eyes on the ball.
People say if you go on the Cox Reading Diet, you will know more than most Americans, and save yourself the social media trash. They are right.
Judith Levine, Today in Fascism - I remember last year when Judith consulted with me about the cogs and wheels of starting a Stack newsletter. Judith is my inspiration; I was honored to help. (She’s a co-founder of the National Writers’ Union and First Amendment feminist of the first water).
When she said, “I’m calling my newsletter, Today in Fascism,” I thought, “Oh brother! Isn’t that a little over-the-top? Everyone will think she’s a hyperbolic crank!”
HAHAHA. I have never been more wrong.
Ken Klippenstein is one of the mainstream investigative journalists who rapidly found out he would be muzzled and stymied if he waited around for permission to claw into territory the conventional press was ignoring. His latest piece on the identity of Tyler Robinson, and how the story is a Dog Day Afternoon-style tragedy, laced with the sadness of ex-Mormons— is a perfect example of how Ken will listen and find out from sources the rest of the press is the last to know.
Default.blog, Katherine Dee, editor.
Were you a fan of Boing Boing in its heyday, or the earliest years of WIRED when Steve Silberman was a frequent contributor? Are you a WELL member? This is our cuppa. Science and tech writing, from people who write like poets and think like artists.
Scott Dworkin, The Dworkin Report. I tried to resist Scott; I really did. A indefatigable left podcaster, who pops up every day with the “good news”?
My inner grinch said, FUCK OFF, SCOTT, THERE IS NO GOOD NEWS.
But you know what? Dworkin makes all the difference. His perception isn’t wrong, his news gathering is prodigious, his outspoken persistence gets under my skin. I cannot lie in my bed of nihilism with Scott at my side!
The Leisure Hours
If you are a clotheshorse, if you have an eye for design, you have no idea how lucky we are to have Kim France writing Girls of a Certain Age on the Stack. She used to edit my favorite fashion magazine, but now she’s here and so personal, revealing, of-the-moment. I love her recent stories about her mother, one of the most stylish jewelry designers of the mid-century, who brought the New York avant-garde to Texas.
Audrey Hepburn, captured from my TV screen Cocktails with Suderman: Peter Suderman is driving me insane because I already subscribe to one mixology historian, (Diffords) and now I am succumbing to my second. I don’t know why I find the history of drink such a sticky rabbit hole, but for me, it’s a way into my home-science-lab, as well as a historical lens so much bigger than a beverage.
My friend and longtime colleague Rachel Kramer Bussell, came up with a brilliant idea for Stack reading: Open Secrets. She publishes confessions, dicey ones, about situations right under our nose that everyone is afraid to talk about.
Stunning example: “An Extremely Close Encounter with a Gay Catholic Celibate.”
Like many, I discovered Yotam Ottolenghi through his cookbooks, and I pre-supposed— geez, you are really finding out what a crank I am— that his Stack would be a celeb-puffy spin-off.
Well, shut my mouth. YO is a beautiful, attentive writer. His international embrace, the people’s culture of food, is a tonic to the weary and hungry heart.
Shall we turn it to Eleven? Emily Nunn’s Department of Salad brings my veggie scheme to its full fruition. She is the antidote to people like me who once thought Salad Must Be A Racket to torture small children. Her writing, photography, and inspiration is indefatigable. All I can say is: YUM.
Two Critics Who Left for Ghost
I’m very curious about my fellow film and TV critics who’ve recently moved from Substack to Ghost. Yes, I do indeed follow these two everywhere: Ty Burr was the Boston Globe’s mainstay critic for decades, and the same is true of Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone. They have superb taste, uncommon insights. Come let us adore them:
Alan Sepinwall, What’s Alan Watching?
Take two Tylenol and call me in the dawn of the Rapture
In Case You Missed It
The 5th and Final Anniversary of the Timothy Leary Memorial
I made memorable friends the year my lover worked for the Probation Department. Jon got a teaching gig in their diversion program for teenage boys, “the last chance before Juvie hard-time.” It was 2001. He was their art teacher. The Probation Department put together a little school of teachers, probation officers, social workers, court and police staff, the boys’ families— all in one building, an abandoned suite of church offices. It was a righteous effort to track young men out of an incarcerated destiny.
(I am also looking for a copy of the original French edition, if any of you can help me. Neither the French nor the English are in PDF or the Internet Archive, more’s the pity).
Guess who is the unexpurgated Kafka’s Diaries newest fangirl? The uncensored translation is magnificent. Open any page; it’s like the I Ching.
Although I read Dr. Richardson on the regular, few are the instances when I hit the same wavelength as she. A week after the Podcaster Incident I turned to my partner and asked "Is it just me, or are the newspapers of record of the United States spending entirely too much time on the shooting of a media personality?" When Richardson turned her priorities to which events were really important on the planet I was quite pleased.
After hearing your reading of the Veronca excerpt (a discovery for me), well, I have to give myself some time to let it sink in completely---not only in terms for Veronca's life in wartime France but in my life as well.
"Today in Fascism" immediately got my attention. Y'know, you're overloading my backlogged "to be read" list. I'm tryin' to write a novel oveh heah! (Actually, it's almost complete)
I hope you're not perturbed with me because that recent e-mail reply was more than a rebellion-fiery. I'm one of those pesky passionate Sagittarians, after all.
Jeeeezziz Susie! An embarrassment of riches! A treasure trove of diamonds in the cut!! I am now very busy — for a while!