Saturday Night/Sunday Warning S2E5: "Do you like Tom Verlaine? Is it going to rain today?"*
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days (which is free) + extra content for paid subscribers. Read on for the free bit before the paywall arrives to stand awkwardly shifting from foot to foot explaining that it’s not to blame…
*This week’s title is a twist/lift from ‘Death And The Maiden’ by The Verlaines.
5 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. PROSE POEM
The New Weather by Anne Carson1 for the London Review of Books
The poet Anne Carlson writing an acrostic prose poem about Iceland and the weather produces a beautifully cold and atmospheric experience. Of course, I love it:
Eked-out sunrise. You write this down in your notebook, wondering if eked is a word. Pink as a rinsed dishrag, you add, then cross it out. It’s about 11 a.m. Temperature 15 degrees F feels like 5. Visibility poor. You look west to see if the Snaefellsjökull glacier is present today. Sometimes it can be seen from a fjörd away, vast and luminous and 700,000 years old.
Not today. Today you drive two hours through yellow and brown hills as big as countries. You write down emptiness. Fewness. Starkness. You see now and then a farm folded tinily into its mountainside, or a huddle of horses. A landscape in monosyllables. No snow. No wind.
Emphasis needs to be placed, if possible, on how odd this is. No snow. No wind.
2. ALBUM
Angel Numbers — Hamish Hawk
Apple Music | Spotify | Vinyl
Sounding like some lost luxurious 80s pop auteur’s album, Angel Numbers has lyrics that you want to turn over in your hands and inspect them carefully coupled with Hawk’s intriguing voice, which has the power to sell them.
3. TRIBUTE
He Was Tom Verlaine by Patti Smith for The New Yorker
I doubt a better opening has been written this week (or perhaps this year):
He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of “Marquee Moon” were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment.
4. PODCAST
We’re Not So Different by Luke Waters and Dr Eleanor Janega
Many awful no-good history podcasts by total shitheads — hello, Dominic Sandbrook — get a lot of press attention. This isn’t one of them. We’re Not So Different, which hit its 100th (free) episode this week, is a show that “[discusses] the ways that our lives and society are not that different to those of people in the past”. You’ll learn a lot about medieval misconceptions and people from history who are regularly ignored.
5. NEWSLETTER
Luke Winkie’s occasional newsletter, On Posting, offers an interesting perspective on the media and his January 30th post ‘Professional Writer?’ can teach you a lot about the reality of writing (and not writing) for a living in 2023:
My 2022 was full of incidents like this — finished drafts, paired with consummated invoices, that were nonetheless orphaned by the unknowable forces of “restructuring” beyond the veil. An Atlantic story was abandoned for over a year as it awaited pending top-edits that simply never arrived. I sent in a New York Times editorial and followed up, over and over again, until Gmail kicked back a deactivated address. There was a BuzzFeed story that landed with a thud on the desk of an inheriting editor, after the person I initially pitched departed the company. (A kill fee was swiftly issued.)
And there are scores more thousand-word-or-so takes — the lifeblood of my bank account — that languished in the ether until all of their paramount timeliness eroded into dust. Again, I was paid for all of this stuff, even as the product itself slowly fossilized in the bedrock of my Google Docs, and I’m not really bothered by the desertion. After nine years of freelancing, I've learned that in order to be a professional writer, you will occasionally be writing for exactly nobody.
Beyond the paywall: This week’s list of newsletters that nearly got written, a micro-essay, the weekly playlist, and a special bonus recommendation…
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