The First Podcast

A conversation with Richard and Laurie about starting the stack

Hello, readers,

Richard and I recorded a conversation. It’s just us talking. There isn’t music yet. A podcast should have music. This is also an experiment in offering paid subscribers an extra benefit, so there is a paywall to listen. If you have been teetering on the edge of supporting the stack with a paid subscription, perhaps this will tip you over. Monthly subscriptions are $5 and annual subscriptions are $50. I love and appreciate your support in whatever way it’s offered.

In case you didn’t see the previous post, I have some good news to share. Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening (Dottir Press) is on the long list for the PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY. If you would like to order the book from Dottir Press and receive free postage, write the code LAURIE at payout. https://www.dottirpress.com/streaming-now

I want to recommend Anne Enright’s stunningly beautiful piece in the London Review of Books, January 5, 2023. It’s about the pleasure of rereading an author and thinking about what you need from books now. Her subject is Toni Morrison. Here she quotes from The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison describing the liquid of girlness you never want to leave for the harness and cage of Woman: "We were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars."

Later Enright quotes Morrison in a piece she wrote in 1971 for the New York Times in response to the prompt, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib.” “Morrison pointed out that the category of 'the Black Woman' includes many different kinds of people: militant young girls, middle-aged socialites, ‘those wispy girl junkies who have always been older than water, those beautiful Muslim women with their bound hair and flawless skin’. The rhapsodic mode is there to evoke empathy, but also to disturb what she called 'lump thinking', the horror we have 'of dealing with people one by one, each as she appears'."

And from Ange Mlinko’s review of Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency in the London Review of Books, 3 November 2022 these two bits I want to share because they feel strongly resonant to me about how we live now.

Frank O'Hara in a letter referring to his poem "For James Dean": "If one is going to start being embarrassed by one's work, I don't know where it would stop, or rather it would stop."

John Ashberry on O'Hara's death in 1966: "Too hip for the squares and too square for the hips' is a category of oblivion which increasingly threatens any artist who dares to take his own way, . . . And how could it be otherwise in a supremely tribal civilisation [sic] like ours, where even artists feel compelled to band together in marauding packs, where the loyalty-oath mentality has pervaded outer Bohemia . . .."

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