November Links Roundup: DILFs, Zombies, and Lot’s Wife

The theme this month is that there is no theme.

My fellow midlife transitioner, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, has written an excellent new book with the waggish title of DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Penguin Random House, 2025) Part memoir-in-essays and part cultural criticism, DILF covers the fraught but inseparable relationship between transmasculine people and feminist movements. A prominent feminist cultural critic before his transition, Doyle found that his experience was erased or his credentials questioned in spaces he had once fought for, even while he remained subject to patriarchal oppression as a gender minority. The book weaves personal anecdotes with important reassessments of Second Wave thinkers, recovering a complex historical record that reveals the gender essentialism of contemporary TERFs as a deviation from the movement. Read an interview with him at Assigned Media, “Jude Doyle on Manhood After Patriarchy”:

I think that if we view feminism as the struggle of gender-marginalized people for bodily autonomy, rather than just calling these things “women’s issues,” then we make room for all trans people within feminism. We can state that the right to change sex is a bodily autonomy struggle. It is regulated in the same ways that things like abortion have historically been regulated. It is opposed by the same people. They really strongly want to link us to our reproductive anatomy and say that that defines us. That this is the only thing we can ever be, and that our lives essentially need to be run by it. Taking it to a bodily autonomy front leaves room for all trans people to participate, particularly transmasculine people.

I think it would also help tremendously if we recognize that sexual violence is routinely wielded against anyone who steps out of line within patriarchy. We have a really essentialized view of who a victim is and who a perpetrator is, and really often that leaves sexual violence survivors who aren’t young cis women out of the picture. It’s intensely harmful, when you look at the sheer rate of sexual violence in the trans community.

This essay on his blog, “DILF Redux: TERFs, Transmascs, and Two Steve Feminism,” is a good sample of the book’s arguments and his reasons for writing it.

Do I want to be seen as just another guy? Sometimes. Maybe. It would be a start. Does it make sense, sociologically, to interpret me as “a guy” in a way that implies a cis life history, dominance within patriarchy, or even just being seen and treated as a man on a daily basis? Not really. Yet most people who do this think they are affirming my gender — or, at least, they tell themselves they are.

There are two things I want to impart here, at the beginning of what threatens to be a long essay: First, your experience of gendered oppression is not necessarily about who you are. It’s about what people think you are, or what people have been primed to see when they look at you. Second: What cis people tell themselves they are doing, in regard to a trans person’s gender, is often very different than what they’ve done.

Award-winning poet and social media sage Richard Siken was recently the featured poet at Only Poems, with an interview and excerpts from his new collection of prose poems, I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken explains why he switched to this poetic form after suffering a stroke: “The line break is part of the lyric gesture. You can’t sing without a body. I didn’t have a body, not a reliable one.”

Around Halloween, Harvard Magazine’s website featured a 1986 article from its archives, “The Secrets of Haiti’s Living Dead”. It profiled anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis’ investigation of the science behind the zombie legend. He did in fact find a compound that, mixed with other ingredients, would slow a person’s metabolism enough that they appeared dead and were buried, later to be dug up and forced to work for the enemy who had poisoned them. But science alone didn’t explain the zombie phenomenon. The “resurrected” poison victims accepted their enslavement because of their shared social beliefs.

Davis was certain he had solved the mystery. But far from being the end of his investigation, identifying the poison was, in fact, its starting point. “The drug alone didn’t make zombies,” he explains. “Japanese victims of puffer-fish poisoning don’t become zombies, they become poison victims. All the drug could do was set someone up for a whole series of psychological pressures that would be rooted in the culture. I wanted to know why zombification was going on,” he says…

…Davis’s investigations uncovered the importance of the secret societies. These groups trace their origins to the bands of escaped slaves that organized the revolt against the French in the late eighteenth century. Open to both men and women, the societies control specific territories of the country. Their meetings take place at night, and in many rural parts of Haiti the drums and wild celebrations that characterize the gatherings can be heard for miles.

Davis believes the secret societies are responsible for policing their communities, and the threat of zombification is one way they maintain order. Says Davis, “Zombification has a material basis. but it also has a societal logic.” To the uninitiated, the practice may appear a random criminal activity, but in rural vodoun society, it is exactly the opposite—a sanction imposed by recognized authorities, a form of capital punishment. For rural Haitians. zombification is an even more severe punishment than death, because it deprives the subject of his most valued possessions: his free will and independence.

For other spooky news from my alma mater, check out this Harvard Magazine article on an exhibit of Edward Gorey’s drawings that ran at Houghton Library, the college’s rare books archive.

But for real-life horrors, it’s hard to beat the zombifying experience of a customer service phone call to a large corporation, as Ron Currie Jr. depicts in his short story “Conversations with Various Time Warner Cable Technical Support Reps, 8 p.m. to 3 a.m.” at MonkeyBicycle.

Me: I’m trying to figure out why I can’t get the HD broadcast of the basketball game.

TWCG: Let me check that for you.

Me: Thanks.

TWCG: …

Me: …

TWCG: I see here that you don’t have a set-top box.

Me: No.

TWCG: Well, to access those channels, you need the box.

Me: Even though those channels are included in the service I’m already paying for, and my television is perfectly capable of processing an HD signal on its own.

TWCG: You need to have the box to access those channels.

Me: Let me guess—you charge more for the box.

TWCG: Yes. It’s ten dollars a month.

Me: I have to say, it really bothers me that you’re pretending this is some kind of hardware issue. I mean, I already get the HD broadcasts of the major networks just fine. It’s not like my TV is a Trinitron, man.

TWCG: But the channels you’re trying to access require a set-top box.

Me: You can keep repeating the same thing if you like, but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

It only gets worse from there. Need something to read while you’re on hold? I highly recommend Currie’s mystery novel The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne.

On a more upbeat note, programmer and social scientist Dave Guarino at Asterisk Mag explains “How to Make a Great Government Website” based on his redesign of California’s portal for accessing SNAP benefits. Many people who are entitled to government benefits don’t receive them, because of cumbersome and poorly designed application processes.

There are two other two big barriers I want to mention because I think they’re particularly relevant right now. First is the required interview. Most of the time it’s a phone call. Often they’ll call from a blocked number. They’ll send you a notice of when your interview is scheduled for, but this notice will sometimes arrive after the actual date of the interview. Most state agencies are really slammed right now for a bunch of reasons, including Medicaid unwinding. And many of the people assisting on Medicaid are the same workers who process SNAP applications. If you missed your phone interview, you have to call to reschedule it. But in many states, you can’t get through, or you have to call over and over and over again. For a lot of people, if they don’t catch that first interview call, they’re screwed and they’re not going to be approved.

The last one we mentioned was documents. This is a big reason why people get denied. You have to submit all the pay stubs for the prior 30 days. If you only submit one pay stub and it doesn’t cover the whole period, you’re gonna get denied. If you don’t submit ID for all the household members, you’re going to get denied. Then there’s all these complicated edge cases: “I’m homeless. How do I prove residency in this county and state?”

So there are three big categories of barriers. The application barrier, the interview barrier, and the document barrier. And that’s what we spent most of our time iterating on and building a system that could slowly learn about those barriers and then intervene against them.

Western Massachusetts publisher Perugia Press has been launching women poets’ careers since 1997. “Lot’s Wife,” an excerpt from their new release Apostasies by Holli Carrell, encapsulates her book’s feminist critique of Mormonism and all religion that sacrifices women’s and children’s welfare. “I don’t believe she looked back/in longing for a home that was never hers,” Carrell writes; “who honors the terms of a tyrant god?”

Novelist and political commentator A.R. Moxon (The Revisionaries) wrote a hard-hitting piece about the emptiness of bipartisan comity towards fascists, on his blog The Reframe: “Eventually You’re Going to Have to Stand for Something”. His immediate inspiration is NY Times pundit Ezra Klein’s suggestion that the late Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics the right way”.

I cannot get over the degree to which Klein’s response is emblematic of the politically empowered white liberal response to this age of autocratic fascist abuse and violence, in his predictable rightward instinct and in his seemingly impenetrable assumption that, even though he admits he has no idea what the solution to our present situation might be, he is still just the person to deliver a solution. And Klein is not just any talk-guy; like [Ben] Shapiro’s influence in Republican spheres, Klein has the attention of Democratic politicians.

The nature of Klein’s quote (above) is an admonishment. Because of the nature of Klein’s audience, and because of the nature of the criticism to which Klein is responding, it’s not an admonishment to the Bens Shapiro or Charlies Kirk or other authoritarian supremacists of the political world. Rather, it’s an admonishment to people who are opposed to this authoritarian supremacist movement, for not being willing enough in his view to live with authoritarian supremacists.

This is the grain of sand at the center of the pearl of my ire, because “we are going to have to live here with each other” is the exact premise that Republicans do not agree with any of us about, and while Klein in his remarks pays lip service to some of the recent proofs of this clear fact, in his analysis of what to do about it, he excises this reality entirely. In his mind, he and Kirk were just two guys, both trying to change the country for what they thought was good. It’s a bond. Never mind that what Kirk thought was good was the American military in the streets of Chicago, and mass kidnapping in service of a white ethnostate, and the end of bodily autonomy for women and queer people, and so forth. In the Klein world, moral clarity about abuse is polarizing, and polarization, not abuse, is the problem to solve.

We are going to have to live here with each other. Not an option if you are trans, as long as supremacists (or those who would capitulate to them in the name of winning) are still permitted to wield the levers of power. Not an option if you are an immigrant. Not an option if you are pregnant with a complication. Not an option if you are sick, or out of work. Not an option if you are homeless. And eventually not an option if you are in opposition in any way to the dictator president and his coterie of supremacists, or if you just happen to fall afoul of somebody with a grudge and a trigger finger and not much to lose. Not even an option if you are Charlie Kirk, it turns out. The bullet that ripped into him was an act of violence against us all—specifically, an act of violence that springs out of a world of inevitable gun massacres that people like Charlie Kirk have insisted upon as a core tenet of their individual freedom to enact political violence.

We have not forgotten the Palestinian genocide over here. I’m glad the remaining hostages have been returned. Not surprised Israel isn’t keeping up its end of the deal.

We attended a friend’s shiva for her mother last month where one of the service leaders cited activist rabbi Arthur Waskow, who had just passed away at age 92. Read about him in this Jewish Telegraphic Agency obituary:

Starting with his creation in 1969 of the “Freedom Seder,” a version of the Passover Haggadah that introduced contemporary liberation struggles into the ancient story of the Israelite escape from Egyptian bondage, Waskow became one of the leading voices bringing Jewish spiritual wisdom to bear on the progressive political agenda.

Waskow disseminated these ideas as the founder of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, initially to address the threat of nuclear weapons through a Jewish lens. Over time, the organization came to focus on other concerns, including Middle East peace, interfaith relations and climate change.

In 1993, Waskow co-founded, with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and others, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a flagship for the Jewish Renewal movement. Waskow was said to have coined the term “Jewish Renewal” — a movement grounded in “Judaism’s prophetic and mystical traditions” — in an issue of Menorah, a magazine for social justice and ritual issues he launched in 1979.

Not having heard of Waskow before, I was equal parts curious and anxious to research whether he supported equal rights for Palestinians–a point on which progressive Jews often founder. Indeed he did, as evidenced by this bold essay, “There Is No ‘Jewish’ State,” which can be found on the website of the Shalom Center, an organization he founded in 1983 to fight the nuclear arms race. The article is not dated, but the text references the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, so it’s very recent.

Sure, there is a State that is ruled by Jews; but they have done their best to rid themselves of most of what were for the last three thousand years the compassionate parts of Jewish identity…

…[It is n]ot, I would say, a Jewish version of democracy. Perhaps not even a biblical version of democracy — which defined people who were non-Israelite residents of the ancient states of Israel and Judah not simply as foreigners but for many purposes with all the rights of full citizens.

That was not the case when the modern State of Israel was born, despite a Declaration of Independence that claimed equality to all religious communities, sexes, and other residents. For at the beginning, the “Arab” or “Palestinian” communities of the state were governed by military law. And after a war in which the state of Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan River, Gaza, and a few strips of the Golan in the north — almost all populated by Palestinians — there were various degrees of military control imposed sometimes by annexation, mostly by occupation…

what I have described is rooted in my assumption that Jewish values and Jewish identity have been deeply inflected by the Torah and its protections for the actual Land or Earth and for “resident aliens,” by the Prophets; and by two thousand years of rabbinic rulings for justice and compassion. My assumption includes the evidence that democracy has been deeply wished-for by most of the world’s Jewish communities and by the world that voted in the United Nations to sponsor a state made mostly of Jews.

So the Declaration of Independence had to affirm democracy not only for Jews but for all its inhabitants. But most of the Jewish communities of the State of Israel have had very little commitment to the idea that everyone who was governed by those Jews who sit in government offices and comprise “the State” is entitled to an equal voice in shaping that government and its policies.

That is why I say there is no Jewish State. The founding document of the Zionist movement calls for the creation of “Die Judenstaat.” That means the state of the Jews, but it does not mean a Jewish state, embodying the values and the long-shaped identity seeking democracy and expressing compassion.

May we heed his words.

October Links Roundup: Act Like It Matters

Spooky season is upon us, somewhat redundantly when every day is terrifying. Pumpkin spice dictatorship, anyone? I’ll take mine to go.

Your boi was interviewed on the queer storytelling site I’m From Driftwood, an archive of short videos by LGBTQ folks talking about pivotal moments in their lives. Watch me talk about becoming Mommy-Man in “Adoption, Transition, and Becoming Whole”. (Shirt by RSVLTS because Facebook clothing ads know me better than I know myself.) These guys were super fun to work with. Get in touch with them if you have a story to tell.

On the Button Poetry channel on YouTube, Ethan Smith’s poem “A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be” shows kindness towards those parts that can be hard to integrate after transition.

A.T. Steel won the 2025 Narrative Prize for “Honey Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwell,” the sad but defiant story of a young trans woman on the streets of Harlem in 1991. You will need to create a free account at Narrative Magazine to read it.

I have had the pleasure of meeting Solstice Lit Mag poetry editor Robbie Gamble on several occasions. One would not suspect that this modest man with a history of activism for immigrants was the heir to the Procter & Gamble dynasty, as he chronicles in the poem “Gamble Patrilineage” in The Nomad. A short narrative poem with the scope of a 19th-century novel, it reckons with the racist and eugenicist history that many American fortunes share, but in a gentle rather than shrill way.

In the Guardian, this vivid excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me describes a childhood of wild outdoor exploration and emotional neglect, as the author’s mother burned herself out trying to provide secure housing for the family during political upheaval. Now I’m eager to read her books. I’ve gotten interested in Indian literature lately, and am struck by how little we were taught about non-European history in my junior high and high school classes. I feel like a 12-year-old again, reading isolated novels without cultural context and missing so much of the significance of the action.

At her Substack twenty-first century demoniac, Helena Aeberli gives us another reason to hate AI: it can take revenge porn to another level by making realistic deepfakes of any woman who dares to speak out online.

Technologies like AI are changing the way we relate to one another. They are exacerbating the worst parts of human nature and society. When social media becomes a first-person shooter game and personalised algorithms deliver your interests on a platter, anything goes. The nonconsensual use of generative AI to doctor women’s images is just the beginning. The end point of individualism is the belief that only you exist. Everyone else is just an NPC.

As AI becomes more humanlike, albeit in a meaningless, surface-level sense, and as people come to regard it as such, the reverse is also true. People come to see each other more like AI, approaching them with an eye to utility. We regard those we encounter online more like characters than people, one-dimensional and stereotypical. They exist to provide a service, whether they like it or not…

In an essay with the catchy title “Stupidology” in n+1, William Davies argues that our social systems are tending more and more towards normalizing the abdication of individual judgment. Authoritarians and tech oligarchs benefit from the destruction of universities and the discrediting of experts, which is why Trumpism aims its guns at anything that “help[s] make the world intelligible”. Artists, too, because imagination alone lets us respond properly to new situations rather than regurgitating data as AI does.

Rabbi, journalist, lawyer, meditation teacher, professor…Jay Michaelson wears many hats, according to the bio on his Substack. In a recent post, he asks the question that’s certainly been weighing on my head since January 20: “Does Anything You’re Doing Matter? (And does it matter if it doesn’t?)”  In this time of great disruption and uncertainty, one can find relief in the spiritual principle of non-attachment to results, as propounded by Thomas Merton and the Talmud’s Rabbi Tarfon, who said that “it is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” On the other hand, a too-glib reliance on such reassurance can make us satisfied with merely performative activism, “an un-pragmatic and ineffectual politics of purity, as we see in some corners of the Left today”. Michaelson concludes: “For me personally, the ‘Both/And’ synthesis has to do with using one set of tools to ascertain which interventions can be effective, and a different set of tools to assess the spiritual and emotional worth of those actions.”

September Links Roundup: Ungovernable Witches

This month, I started my coursework for Year 3 of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School, focusing on shamanism and shadow integration. So let’s begin our links roundup with an article from Temple founder Christopher Penczak, addressing the key question for my spiritual practice in these times: what can magickal practitioners do about the destruction of American democracy? In “Things to Do to Be Ungovernable,” Christopher writes:

I’m not big on “resistance” as a word. There is magickal truth to the idea that what you resist, persists. What you are anti-, evokes its opposite to perpetuate the identity of being against it. Like antimatter and matter, and explosive results that can destroy all. As a magician you have to hold both as tools and over-identification with one results in your own harm and often your transmutation into your opposite.* The magician is not the positive or negative end of the magnet, but the person holding and using the magnet itself.

I’m big on Destruction. Binding. Transmutation. Transcending. Going around/under/over if you can’t go through. Noncompliance and non-recognition of authority. Ignoring deliberately, as an act, not passivity. And most importantly outcreating. The future is in new visions of the world and creative solutions that can entice and inspire. Destruction as in catabolic function, not wanton cruelty.  There is a show, an illusion that has always been a part of the world and we have to be better in being illusionists for good, for inspiration, ethics and justice. We have to present an option that everyone wants to choose. We not only have to outcreate, but use those tools to sell the new vision to others.

Horror fiction author Lincoln Michel offers encouragement to despairing writers in his Substack post, “Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop”:

I’m not saying that you can’t enjoy an airport novel or a microwaved burrito or the design of a corporate logo. They all have their place. I’m saying that your art is no more in competition with such content than it is with Candy Crush, bad reality TV, or social media doom scrolling. Yes, in an abstract sense there are a finite number of humans each with a finite amount of time in their lives. It does not follow that a statistically significant number of people are going into a bookstore and thinking, “Hmm, do I buy my 25th commercial thriller by James Patterson or this experimental work by an author I’ve never heard of?” The readers of your work are different readers. Your work was never going to appeal to all or even most people, not even if you were the reincarnation of Tolstoy or Toni Morrison. The AI evangelists with NFT avatars who tweet about wanting to eliminate artists weren’t ever going to read your work. The people who only care about multimedia corporate franchise “universes” or who simply have interests other than reading weren’t going to either. So why bother worrying about what they do with their time? You don’t need to think about that…

…Why make art in an age—like most ages—in which few care about it? Make art because making art enriches your life in ways other than money. Practicing an art form changes you and enlarges you. It makes you look closer at the world, think deeper, live better.

I think often about Alexander Chee’s essay “On Becoming an American Writer,” in his book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, where he says that he’s had to write through several apocalyptic historical moments: the AIDS crisis, 9/11, Trump’s first ascent to the presidency. The question his students always ask him, as if it were new, is “How can I write at a time like this?” At his Substack, The Querent, Chee recently revisited that question:

I take a moment for a thought experiment, every so often. As I try to do everything I have to do in this life, I sometimes try to imagine doing it without a job or an income for over 650 days, all while facing down missiles, bullets, starvation, the destruction of my home, torture, the murder of my family and friends, no water or working toilets or medical care, buying food off of a black market and enduring repeated forced relocations in a landscape that has been bombed so much it is a different color from space now than it was even a year ago. And still doing what I can to fundraise for myself online from people outside the country, on social media. Or to stand in lines that might get me shot.

When I think of the people still alive in Gaza, I think of how if they can survive this long, how incredible they could be if left to thrive. And yet now even the doctors left are being starved. The reporters too…

…An hour before my student had asked this question about how to write now, we had been discussing Close To The Knives by David Wojnarowicz, his 1991 essay collection that included the text of a flier from a 1989 ACT UP protest, the die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral protesting the Catholic Church’s message on AIDS, sex, women, queer people. The flyer detailed the Seven Deadly Sins, a list of 7 prominent conservatives, Catholics and politicians culpable in the AIDS crisis. I recognized this as the kind of flyer I used to write up as a part of ACT UP SF’s Media Committee. I think Wojnarowicz was trying to expand the radius of people who saw it and even to send the flyer into the future. He was flyering us from inside his book and each time someone opens the book it is like welcome to this demo, here’s a flyer. Sort of like these flyers and posters I found at the Met Online.

He died a year after the collection was published. In putting the book together he was doing what he did with a lot of his work, which was to take what he could and put it in front of an audience, a way to say this is how we fought, this is how we loved, this is how we died, do not forget us, learn from us, keep going.

On that note, some links for Gaza:

In “A Map to a Place That No Longer Exists,” published this week at Jewish Currents, Palestinian Abdullah Hany Daher writes about the surreal horror of navigating a city that’s reshaped daily by bombs:

Sometimes at night I try to picture our house in all its specificity: the way afternoon light spilled through the window, the cool hallway in summer. But the picture blurs, and panic sets in. What if I forget? What if the place that no longer exists vanishes inside me too? I’ve learned that memory, like a building, can erode without care. It starts with small things—forgetting the exact sound of the front door closing, the smell of rain on the balcony—and ends with a kind of internal demolition, the slow collapse of memory, the sense that pieces of yourself are being erased.

Here, houses are more than walls and roofs. They hold footsteps, smells, echoes of conversations. They keep the map of your life. When too many are gone, the city itself begins to forget.

“Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war,” the Guardian (UK) reported last month: “an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.” From the same article:

The general who led military intelligence when the war began has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day, adding that “it does not matter now if they are children”. Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024, said mass killing in Gaza was “necessary” as a “message to future generations” of Palestinians, in recordings broadcast on Israeli TV this month.

Also from the Guardian on Aug. 14, “‘Censorship: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine”:

More than 120 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.

In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies”.

…[T]he special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group (HEPG), a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.

When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether.

…In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.

I guess writing does matter, or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress it.

Check out the album Lider mit Palestine: New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love on Bandcamp.

Yes, Reiter’s Block is a Garth Greenwell fan site. I know I’m a little obsessed. But Greenwell’s musings on the purpose (or glorious futility) of the artist’s life help me unhook myself from external metrics of success. Whether as a reader or a writer, I’ve learned from him to suspend my expectations of the experience I want to have, open generously to surprises, and be curious even about what feels awful. “Garth Greenwell Is Too Much,” an interview by Jordan Kisner at Pioneer Works, puts these qualities on display:

We talked about what happens when a person makes art “the central activity of a life”—not family, not religion, not place—and how to determine when that devotion is just too much. When I posed this question about too-much-ness, Garth almost completely refused it. “My whole aesthetic practice is predicated on: if something is too much you do more of it,” he said…

[GG:] …There is a kind of absolute ruthlessness about aesthetic practice, and if I catch sight of something that I’m after, I’m going to pursue it. That ruthlessness consists in refusing to allow the question to intrude, “Will anyone go along with me?” And I do believe that especially when you’re drafting, you only arrive anywhere by going absolutely as far as you can go.

So I don’t ever think about that, is it too much? I know that that question will arise at some point. But my first novel has a 43-page paragraph. My second novel has sex scenes that many readers have been unable to go along with. If I try to anticipate resistance to what I’m after, I’m just giving up the game. That is really central to my aesthetic practice. You just do it and you are absolutely ruthless about it.

We neurodivergent people know all about the too-much-ness of learning everything possible about a niche topic. My husband and I are so compatible, we discovered when we merged our book collections that we both had copies of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s essay collection Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, which includes three entire essays on font design.

In that spirit, I share with you “The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan,” an article by Marcin Wichary in Ares Luna. That block-capitals font you take for granted on your computer keyboard is a descendant of “Gorton,” also a staple of 20th-century metal elevator panels, road signs, and the moveable plastic letters on restaurant menu boards and office building directories. Wichary’s article tracks down the mechanical reasons why this workmanlike font became so popular.

Finally, some creative writing that made a strong impression on me this month: Amelia Loeffler’s “Osteoporosis Ghazal” in palette poetry is an elegant, poignant meditation on the symbolism of milk. “In the supermarket I am surrounded by so many cures, it is too late.” At the Marsh Hawk Press website, Michael McColly’s “Lessons for a Tukkikat” describes how coming to terms with his uselessness as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal was crucial to his education as a writer. Payne Ratner’s fairy-tale-like horror story “Eat Jimmy” in The Masters Review spins out a metaphor for parental abuse, with an ending that made this post-Christian reader feel that maybe Jesus’ sacrifice has some meaning for me still.

August Links Roundup: That’s Not My Department

“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” Rest in peace to that great satirist of American warmongering, Tom Lehrer, who exited this mad world in July at the age of 97. The Harvard-trained mathematician’s fame rests on his catalogue of political humor songs that he wrote in the 1950s-60s, skewering such targets as obscenity law, the Catholic Church, and the nuclear arms race. The songs endure because the jokes don’t depend on political details from yesteryear. The cultural currents they tap into are deeper features of American life. Everything I knew about 20th-century American politics as a junior high schooler, I learned from the Stockbridge Library’s copies of Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer and Jules Feiffer’s America, From Eisenhower to Reagan.

Maybe not as deep, but almost as funny, Thea Von Engelbrechten’s TikTok and Instagram video series Sylvanian Drama puts cutesy Calico Critters figurines in soap-opera predicaments involving adultery and day drinking. The critters’ manufacturer, Epoch Company, recently dropped its lawsuit against Von Engelbrechten, probably figuring that all publicity is good publicity. I’m guessing that adults care more about Barbie nowadays than children do, especially after the 2023 movie. Epoch’s future may lie in generating a cult following for fuzzy toy hedgehogs who behave like BoJack Horseman.

While we’re on the topic of strange adult crossovers with children’s media, I got a kick out of the video “Werner Herzog reads Where’s Waldo?“ Listen to the moody film director search for Waldo “in the chaotic morass of society”. Hat tip to Winning Writers Managing Editor Anne Mydla for this one.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni’s found-poem “Subject Lines from Democratic Fundraisers in an Election Year”, published in Bodega Mag, will make you laugh and cry at the same time. With nothing more than line breaks and juxtapositions, he turns familiar email banalities into a cri de coeur of helplessness and fragmented attention brought on by our political crisis. Hat tip to Cavar.

In her essay in the July/August Poets & Writers, “The Author’s Wife is Also an Author”, Erin Almond opens up about the unequal trajectories of her fiction-writing career and that of her husband, Steve Almond. Patriarchal expectations from extended family and society seep into their marriage despite their egalitarian intentions. Moreover, the obstacles to women’s success can become a tempting way to let herself off the hook for the often unrewarded work of being an artist.

The question of whose work is “indulged” and whose work is seen as “necessary” is one I suspect has attended the relationships of other artist couples throughout history. I deeply admire my husband’s writing and think he deserves every accolade he’s ever gotten; at the same time, as the years have gone by, I’ve come into an increasing awareness of how quick I’ve been to step aside, put down my own projects, and direct my attention elsewhere. Much of this is due to external forces—how often I’ve been praised for my mothering or my attention to some mundane, logistical detail, versus my writing—but I’ll admit that some of it is internal, too. Writing a novel is incredibly difficult, and while laundry can be tedious, it’s not hard. There are plenty of afternoons when I could have been writing but instead folded towels and dreamed. But, of course, at the end of the day the laundry must be done—and what makes it feel urgent to devote time to writing a novel? Some external reward? Or an internal sense that the work is important, regardless of its reception?

…Maybe I’m wrong, then, to take issue with my literary ambitions being described as a “fantasy,” while my husband’s are considered real and worthy of a life’s work. Maybe I shouldn’t take that word as an insult, because isn’t that the whole point of writing in the first place? To take a fantasy—an intangible dream, notion, or idea—and make it into something? First on the page and then in the mind of another human being? To perform that miraculous alchemy that results in multiple people having the same fantasy—dreaming the same dream—at the same time?

Sustaining that fantasy has felt especially hard for me since January 2025. Anarchist author and musician Margaret Killjoy crystallized what I’ve been feeling in her July 23 Substack post “How to Live Like the World is Ending”. (Hat tip to my fellow “trans faggot witch” Orion Johnstone’s newsletter.) Killjoy exhorts us to inhabit the paradox of savoring the fragile present (“Act like we’re about to die”) and working for a better future (“Act like we might have a chance to stop this”).

As much as I need to live like I might die tomorrow, I need to live like I might see a hundred years on this odd green and blue planet. Unless things change, I’m not burning every bridge. I’m trying to maintain a career. If I was certain to die under a fascist regime by 2021, there wouldn’t be much point in writing novels: they take too long to write, publish, and reach their audience. I get some joy from the writing itself, sure, but I get more joy from putting my art in front of people, of letting it influence the cultural landscape. With novel writing in particular, that takes time. That takes there being a future. I want there to be a future. Almost desperately. Not enough to bank on it completely.

Keeping some small portion of my time and resources invested in the potential for there to be a future is important for my mental health, because it keeps me invested in maintaining that health.

When I realized this spring that my current novel needed a massive revision, it was equally clear to me that I had no more juice to invest in a project with such a long time horizon and uncertain future. Should we all live so long, I will eventually do something with the characters and ideas that came out of the first draft. Meanwhile, I’m storing up my creative energy to start Year 3 of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School in September. Shadow work, what fun.

Some good reads from around the web:

Lo Naylor’s “object permanence” was a recent Poem of the Week at The Missouri Review. I like the delicacy of this short poem and how its spare, repeating language handles a heavy topic like suicide gently and obliquely. The mystery of death reduces us to infants not knowing whether their mother still exists when out of sight.

Another Missouri Review pick, Kate Partridge’s “After the Architecture Tour”, leaps rapidly as a squirrel from thought to thought, reflecting on popular myths about animals and what they tell us about our expectations for good motherhood and responsible behavior.

In the journal Dogthroat, Jackie Roberti’s flash fiction “Born a Whale” feels like a fable about neurodivergence, as well as the mystical inner worlds of children, which they cannot talk about in the too-literal language of adults.

Mom Egg Review spotlighted the painter Sarah Lightman’s series of “Biblical Women Aging Disgracefully”. These satirical, yet stylistically pensive and subdued, paintings place women from classical paintings in mundane modern settings. What’s that odd-looking leftover in the back of the fridge, Mom? Why, it’s John the Baptist’s head!

 

Jendi or Jend-AI?

All writers have a shtick. Garth Greenwell was musing in our online book group today about his fondness for the word “little” as a substitute for the affectionate diminutive endings that English lacks. The novel he asked us to read this month, David Szalay’s noir tragedy Flesh, should win the Booker Prize for Most Occurrences of the Word “Okay”. Still it’s humbling to face the cold data of a computer program that has caught on to your favorite tropes and phrases.

A musician friend who loves the protest songs of Jesse Welles was dismayed by a lyric hinting at the young songwriter’s use of AI–probably how he manages to turn out several bangers a month. As an experiment, my friend asked ChatGPT to write lyrics for an anti-Trump song in the folk-blues style of John Prine and Bob Dylan. We had to admit that the lyrics were pretty good, but the genre does have certain conventions that are easy for real humans to imitate too.

So then I set my friend the task of using ChatGPT to produce a creditable Jendi Reiter poem on a topic of his choice. I don’t even understand what I’m doing in my poetry sometimes. Could there really be a formula to imitate someone as weird and obscure as yours truly?

The poem was…decent. And sort of sounded like me, or a younger version of me, when I belabored the message a bit more and indulged in more rambling internal arguments. There were some lines I would actually want to use. It was up to the standards of a semifinalist in a Winning Writers contest, which is going to make our job of detecting the real humans a lot harder.

AI says the hallmarks of a Jendi Reiter poem are “persona and surreal imagery,” “tone mingles wit and solemnity,” and “form shimmers: short stanzas, evocative word images, and metaphorical layering.”

What do you think, readers? Can you tell which one is the AI poem, and which is the real Slim Shady? To make the comparison fairer, I’ve chosen a B-list poem from my unpublished files, one that I decided didn’t quite land well enough to keep sending out on submission.

People or intelligent robots who correctly identify my poem, or make an interesting case for either selection, will receive a small and unimportant handmade gift.

 

Under the Neon Clinic Sign

I.
A deflated Mylar balloon stalks the clinic steps,
dinged by spray‑painted prayers: “Don’t Step In.”
It whispers, hiss, “I bore your weight once,”
its tether fraying like a mispronounced name.
I cling—air and pleading—to that fizz of resistance.

II.
In a room lit by fluorescent interrogation,
hums the buzz of law and lens and mirrored fear.
The doctor reads me like a user’s manual
with pages torn. “Stand where the law says you are,”
it hums. The law flickers in saline and regret.

III.
Outside, the billboard flicks on—Make Gender Great Again—
neon glows like broken bourbon in barroom mouths.
Its letters bleed: “MA‑MA‑MA.” Not mother, not nature,
just echoing frames demanding we bow inside them.
I pass by in my jacket’s borrowed trappings.

IV.
I fold myself into a dream of Lederhosen,
hoping trans history unspools like a tattered comic—
soldier‑princes, mother‑figures, and eggbeaters voting.
I joke: “Self‑Portrait as Mobilized Gender.”
But the laughter dissolves into a sob: “Catch me if you can, state.”

V.
So I stand in my body, unverified but unbroken,
my voice a remnant hymn, un‑housed by their rulebooks.
I flex—no, constellate—my scapula into wings
etched with the names they threatened on indexes.
I am part‑angel, part‑design, part‑groan.

VI.
They want us flattened, licensed, quiet.
We rise like mutant autopilots—non‑binary embers
in the body politic’s refinery.
Your bills and bans cannot extinguish our helium,
nor halt the morning of being.

****

What Not to Do in Boston

It is illegal to possess a wooden spoon
for pleasurable purposes.

24-7 is for coffee, not slaves.

You may not consent to danger
without pants.

There is no position known as the “Crème Donut”.

Chains around the neck must be held by a policeman.

Call no man Master
unless he is the dorm supervisor of Lowell House.

Boys in a row who kneel open-mouthed
belong in church.

It could be considered assault to give
a man more than he begs for.

Don’t worry, you’re still allowed to tie up
your future.

You’re encouraged to beat each other with numbers.

After all, this isn’t Wisconsin,
where you can’t even fire a gun during her orgasm.

Go ahead, do that rodeo clown,
but not in the presence of horses.

We just don’t want you riding around hell-
for-leather on people’s backs.

You’re supposed to step on them lightly and move on.

July Links Roundup: Hit Me, I’m a Writer

Happy summer! (Just kidding, I hate summer.) It’s time for my monthly effort to close all my open browser tabs before the End Times.

Bestselling crime novelist Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress and many more) talks about being both Black and Jewish in this 2022 profile from The Jewish Chronicle (hat tip to Noah Berlatsky). What stood out for me was his tough-love advice about perseverance as a writer:

“I tell writers all the time: ‘Listen, you got to write every day, you got to just keep writing and writing and writing.’ They say, ‘Well, this isn’t any good.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s not any good. You just keep writing.

“You think when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace — the first word he wrote down — that it was good? No, it was not!”

After close to 50 novels, he’s not stopping.

“It’s like people who love boxing,” he says. “Who loves being hit? There are people who really like it… and it’s like that.”

Yes, writing is my kink, and I bottom for novels…

At Electric Lit, Jacqueline Alnes interviews Sarah Chihaya about her memoir Bibliophobia, which, among other things, describes how academia engenders an extractive approach to literature that can kill the pleasure of open-ended discovery. Chihaya says:

Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful.

This resonated with me because the self-hating voice in my head is usually nattering on about why anything I’m doing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.

Lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage gave this inspiring 6-minute speech at Bar Harbor Pride about the link between joy and resistance. When we work together to resist oppression, we create a more meaningful life for ourselves, which liberates our capacity for joy. Gage reminds us to look up the histories of our queer elders for examples–a frequent subject of her plays, which have foregrounded historical lesbians and butches such as geneticist Barbara McClintock, Imagist poet Amy Lowell, and actress Eva Le Gallienne. She quotes Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, saying that if we’re not uncomfortable with some of the people in our coalition, it’s not broad enough. I especially appreciate Gage saying this as a radical feminist, because that community has too often indulged their discomfort with masculinity to exclude trans folks.

Did you know that the term “drag queen” was pioneered by William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person who organized pageants and drag balls for Black queer men in 19th-century Washington, DC? Watch this 3-minute video from the Black Gay History Channel to learn more. (Hat tip to Robert Jones, Jr.)

In this 2016 essay in Guts Magazine, “Forgiving the Future,” Laura Shepherd reflects on the Tarot’s Death card and the bittersweet emotions of transitioning in midlife.

In the wake of increased and widespread attention to the trans experience in popular culture, I began to feel like the future was already happening…

Suddenly, it seems, people don’t spend half a century in the closet for being trans anymore. The stories we tell now—of coming out loud, proud, young, and beautiful—render my own story a homely tale of timidity. That I climbed out from under the weight of an almost universal narrative of denial to become proud to be trans is, these days, like having taken the scenic route to travel a great distance—as though I was simply fearful of highway speed. That it was for a long time unfathomable to live as we do now is close to irrelevant. That’s what it feels like to me, at my age, being part of a larger movement so much younger, so brazen in motion, with more room to move—space created in part, I sometimes forget, by lived experiences like my own.

Instead, I grieve that I don’t get to be young and be me.

Social worker Griffin Hansbury writes about the value of bad feelings in “Be the Brick: Notes Toward Thinking About the Clinical Value of Trans Negativity,” published in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues last month. The brick, here, is the one thrown to start the Stonewall Riot.

As the state attacks links that connect us to society and its processes of normalization, trans people may re-link to trans negativity – a refusal of hegemonic happiness, an embrace of otherness and its bad feelings as empowerment, connection, and resistance…

Trans people, like other queers, feel pressure to be happy, normal, assimilated; but rage, shame, alienation endure. Refusing such affects can mean feeling worse: I should feel okay (happy, normal), but I don’t, so something’s really wrong with me. But why should we feel okay when trans-antagonism persists (past and present)?

For a book-length exploration of this theme, see Hil Malatino’s Side Affects (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which my transmasc book group read last year.

Some poetry that struck a chord with me this month:

“Fauna” by Richard Siken, at The Shore Poetry, makes the Elks Club more surreal by taking it literally, as a symbol of an older generation of men’s unspoken inner damage. “Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a doubled fact.”

In Rattle, Cam McGlynn’s “Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits” is pure pun-filled fun about human and avian mating. “I’ve yet to check a European Shag/off my life list and now that I’m married,/I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance…”

Abby E. Murray’s “I Can’t Find My Gender,” in One Art, uses wistful humor to depict the gap between knowing one’s self and being legible to others. Hat tip to the e-newsletter from Perugia Press, which published Murray’s excellent poetry collection about being a military spouse, Hail and Farewell.

…I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be…

Another Perugia Press poet, Lisa Allen Ortiz, understands why new purchases can make me sad, because I’m already mourning their wear and tear, their future unwantedness. In “Furniture,” published in Sixth Finch, she muses:

Last week my friend Farnaz
taught me the term
anticipatory grief
meaning we’re sad now for a thing
that will happen
later.
Imagine that.

Thi Nguyen’s “In the Time of Tuberculosis,” at Frontier Poetry, describes intersecting assaults on her well-being, from the illness that the doctors initially dismissed, to being locked in the ward when it progressed to a dangerous point–all this occurring against the backdrop of the 2016 election.

She had forgotten
that when she left Viet Nam
30 years ago, she was once dirty.
Given the TB vaccine,
she was made clean.
She was once an outsider
allowed to be let in.

I was born in the US.
I was born clean
but now I am dirty.
I’ve dirtied others.
I am not allowed outside,
I am kept inside, the door locked
from the outside.

And finally, some fine prose links:

In “Residential School Requiem,” an excerpt from D.A. Navoti’s memoir-in-progress, published in Craft Literary, the author walks through a park on the site of the Phoenix Indian School that his grandmother was forced to attend, pondering what is memorialized and what is left out.

The teachers were mean and the housemothers abusive, Grandma Lois had said during a 2009 interview for my graduate studies project (and tape-recorded the same year as my first Pride). We sat in her trailer on the Gila River rez south of Phoenix as she told her origin story. At eleven years old, she wagon-traveled from the homeland to late-1940s Phoenix. Alone, she asked for directions and dragged her trunk around until a trolley transported her to the school grounds. The army cots were uncomfortable, Grandma continued. And everyday was militaristic when the cowbell woke students. They’d march in formation to meals and to class and to chores and to prayer and to spankings and other abuses until graduation. Which historical marker mentions the residential school horrors? None so far—why?

For the first four decades, another marker explains, Phoenix Indian School adhered to a policy of providing primarily a vocational education to prepare Native American pupils for entry into mainstream American society. More text: But that changed in 1935 when federal policy on Indian education began to emphasize academics. Grandma’s retelling conflicts with this so-called academic reformation. The white teachers were mediocre and harsh, Grandma regretted, including a math teacher whose strictness was so severe she made learning impossible. Ironically, the sole exit from math class was from a passing grade. Another teacher sent students to the library for an entire academic year to read whatever. They were rejects, Grandma explained, rejects from other institutions, which is why they taught at Phoenix Indian School.

In fractured lit, Anais Godard’s “The Clay of It” is a sweet and surprising flash fiction about the nature of intimacy.

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

Queer nerd fan site Geeks Out interviewed Andrew Joseph White, whose horror fiction foregrounds transmasculine and autistic characters. I’ve read two of his powerful novels, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and an ARC of the forthcoming You Weren’t Meant to Be Human. Body horror in the service of social justice, these books hold nothing back.

As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially thriller and horror?

I’ve always been a writer at heart. I talk a lot about writing being my special interest as an autistic person, and that’s true. Writing is how my brain processes information and works through emotions, on top of it being my “safe space” where I feel seen, soothed, and understood. The fact that I write thrillers and horror seems like it should contradict that, but it doesn’t. I’ve always been drawn to horror—my gender dysphoria and social deficits have always felt “at home” in the horror space, so to speak, especially when I struggle to express my anger or upset in other ways. The tension and fear are cathartic.

And these days, I’m not just writing for myself anymore. I’m writing for my readers, especially my younger ones. It’s amazing how you can connect to the roughest, messiest parts of yourself and others through the lens of fiction…

***

What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers, especially queer ones out there?

Be ugly.That’s the advice I give to every young writer, every queer or disabled writer just starting on their journey: be ugly. I was held back for years by a fear of being “bad representation”—I threw away complicated characters, flinched from messy topics, and denied myself the chance to become a better writer because I was afraid of how my work would impact the reputation of my identity group. But you can’t do that! You can’t let yourself become beholden to a bigot’s perception of you. You cannot make art attempting to stave off every single bad-faith perception that could ever be made of you. Tell the ugly truth of the situation, be honest and unashamed and unflinching, and you will go far.

Thanks for talking back to my brain worms, Andrew!

June Links Roundup: Ungovernable Pride

It’s June–that month when we shove our lifestyle down your throat. You know you want it, baby.

Via the novelist Robert Jones, Jr.’s Substack, I discovered another Black queer radical newsletter, ToussaintF12’s notes from the edge of empire. His latest post, “queer as in ‘rocket launchertttt'”, is a snappy and well-researched battle cry for the current resistance. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a highlight:

…empire, liberalism, and corporate agendas flatten all forms of deviance into marketable identities. specifically, a distinction between “gay” as an imperfect umbrella term and “queer”, as a term that alot of people still draw a false equivalence with. gay usually refers narrowly to sexual orientation, while queer functions more as a political orientation: a refusal of normativity in all its forms: gender, family, citizenship, economy, whiteness, nation-state, even time itself.

the difference matters because we live in a world where u can be gay and uphold carceral logic, imperial war, and racial capitalism. queer, signals something deeper than who u fuck or love. it signals how u resist. it pushes us to interrogate what we’re aligning with and what we’re opposing. without making that distinction, we risk reducing queerness to aesthetics, visibility, or lifestyle, and stripped of its insurrectionary potential.

the empire has learned to neutralize queerness by flattening it into mere identity. being gay is not a choice. it’s a biologically-influenced orientation shaped by complex interactions of genetics, hormones, and development. but queerness is not the same tho. queerness is a political decision, a social posture, a structural antagonism. it names a refusal to comply with the systems that manage and discipline sexuality and gender. to be queer, as in radical as fuck.

queerness is a mode of war against the social, political, and hegemonic order. it’s the art of becoming ungovernable while keeping love intact.

I found the above to be an enlightening framing for the dynamic between choice and innate identity with respect to my own transition. Because I’d already stepped (or been pushed) outside certain systems of normalcy, I was able to recognize who I wanted to be, and had some practice with putting my existing attachments at risk in order to thrive.

Speaking of Robert Jones, he is a very well-dressed man. His essay on the Met exhibit “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is a delight.

While it’s not often the focus of mainstream conversations, dandyism, as an identity, is a precursor to queerness; and many of the Black men (and others) who embraced the style were not just making fashion statements, but sociopolitical ones as well. They were attempting to break free of the patriarchal expectations regarding gender, gender expression, race, and sexuality that were (and are) forced upon Black men.

And they did so with enormous sartorial flair! Oh the drama, honey! The draaamaaa!

Also linked in Jones’ article, check out playwright Jeremy O. Harris’ Vogue essay “On Being a Modern Dandy,” archived here. Harris’ works include Slave Play.

A dandy, at his or her core, is a rewriter of narratives—the narratives carved into a society’s understanding about the communities from which the dandy has emerged.

…to be a Black dandy is to dress as though you know you’re loved and therefore have no use for shame. Shame is the enemy of all exuberance. Shame comes from fear, and fear is the enemy of style.

In an interview by Stephen Meisel at CRAFT Literary, poet and prose author Jesse Lee Kercheval discusses the mechanics of visual storytelling in her first graphic memoir, French Girl. I read a lot of graphic narratives, both for pleasure and for the Winning Writers self-published book contest (still open through July 1! send us your comix!). Something I’ve noticed is that text and image can wind up battling for dominance. Especially in nonfiction, the words may take over the page, reducing the visual element to static illustrations that leave me wondering why the memoir or exposition was put into a comics format at all. Conversely, an image-heavy story may lack verbal connective tissue to explain plot and setting. Kercheval talks about leading with the image so that it actually adds new emotional information to the text.

Most of the pieces in French Girl did begin with drawing rather than writing. After so many years as a writer, if I start with words, I end up with way too many words for a comic. And if I write first, then draw, I end up drawing the very thing I write… The idea is for the words and images to be different, for each to add something new to the whole.

…you can’t just say “apple” and draw an apple. Unless you are doing a children’s alphabet book. Something in the art has to fill in the scene, the character, the mood. Add what is not in the words. And the art needs to do a lot of work because the hardest thing for me with comics is how very few words you get.

In Electric Lit’s personal narratives column, Michelle Gurule makes a heartfelt case that “My Uncle Doesn’t Need to Die in Prison to Learn His Lesson”. Gurule humanizes her aging uncle before revealing more details that would lead some to deem his crime unforgivable, an effective rhetorical move that reminded me of Sister Helen Prejean’s philosophy that a person is more than the worst thing he’s ever done. Whatever we conclude about his worthiness for medical parole, we can’t see him as anything but a fully rounded human being, forever altered by decisions he made as a traumatized and impoverished 19-year-old.

The Guardian has a name for why I’m feeling crazy: “hypernormalization,” a Soviet-era term for dissociating about the collapse of society so that we can function in daily life.

For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, [digital anthropologist Rahaf] Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”

Hat tip to Charis Books & More, a feminist bookstore in Georgia, for the link. Donate to their fundraiser.

Practicing Candor: Don't Pretend Everything is Fine

You know the meme.

In honor of Father’s Day this month, a couple of literary links. Hayan Charara’s poem “Translation” in Jewish Currents cleverly uses line breaks to bring out layers of meaning from an immigrant father’s misspoken idiom.

Get the get out of here my father
said to men and women he wanted
gone from his world By his world
I mean the beer and wine he built
and ran in Detroit And by beer and wine
I mean the convenience store he wanted
to call Father & Son but went with
Beer & Wine which is also
the prison he made for himself…

Winner of the Palette Poetry 2024-25 Previously Published Poem Prize, Ollie Schminkey’s “My Father” is an exceptionally successful contrapuntal. I’m never sure whether to read these two-column poems across, like lines with a large break in the middle, or down, like a newspaper. When they’re written properly, as here, they work in both directions. The form is perfect for this poem about losing his father to cancer. The father is both absent and present in the speaker’s mind, like an optical illusion flipping back and forth.

Another cancer poem, sorry, but this one is beautiful too: Geoff White’s “To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God,” at Frontier Poetry. Similar in its use of duality as a formal device, the poem repeats variations on “And I did. And I didn’t.” to express the contradictory demands of witnessing a friend’s death. One cannot do anything to stop it, perhaps one cannot consistently have faith, yet one must do something to acknowledge and be present with this awful/awe-full passing.

…They said she was still listening though I didn’t
remember the last time
I saw her awake.      And I didn’t
Then I did.     Then I didn’t
Then that wasn’t the point anymore.

In response to RFK Jr.’s eugenicist statements, Illinois has taken steps to shield autistic people’s medical records, Noah Berlatsky reported last month for Prism.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed an executive order safeguarding the medical records of autistic people in Illinois. The order follows a recent federal proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a national autism database. It prevents state agencies from sharing autism-related information with anyone outside of state government without a clear reason and informed consent.

The order also clearly states that “autism is a neurological difference—not a disease or an epidemic—identified by trained clinicians and healthcare professionals, with rising identification rates attributable to improved practices, greater awareness, and expanded access to screening tools.”

Support Noah’s freelance journalism on Patreon.

May Links Roundup: Alexa, Am I a God?

That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, talking to ChatGPT:

“People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” Miles Klee reports in Rolling Stone this month.

…[A] Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT…made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software…

…Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

The robotic folie à deux arises from two weaknesses of large language models (LLMs). An AI’s built-in responsiveness to consumer feedback teaches it to skew future answers in a direction that pleases the questioner, whether or not it’s true. And current LLMs persistently “hallucinate” data in a manner both humorous and horrifying. Remember when Google’s AI Overview recommended glue as a pizza topping because it misunderstood a joke on Reddit? Now try basing your theology on that.

My son makes fun of me because I’m the only person in the family who refuses to buy an Apple Watch. I tell him, I spent 40 years having an abusive parent monitor how I walked, what I ate, and how much I weighed. I don’t need a robot on my wrist to do the same thing.

Well, I’m right, because Secretary of Holistic Horse Shit RFK Jr. is proposing to create a national autism registry drawing upon biometric information from our personal devices, according to this May 5 article in The Guardian: “‘A slippery slope to eugenics’: advocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism database”:

The health agency did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about whether individuals would be able to opt out of the database, or how it would be structured, what kind of security and privacy measures would be taken, and whether similar databases would collect information on other conditions…

To gather the data, the National Institutes of Health is exploring partnerships with other federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others.

Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also proposed collecting data from pharmacy chains, health organizations, insurance claims and medical bills, and wearable devices like smart watches, to conduct “real-time health monitoring”.

A related essay in The Guardian by Derek Beres contextualizes the autism “cure” push as an aspect of “Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed”. Elon Musk’s baby-making fetish, the attack on vaccines, cuts to USAID, and the destruction of social services are all based on “the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.” Check out Beres’ Conspirituality podcast for more analysis of the strange overlap between right-wing white supremacy and left-wing wellness grifts.

In the Columbia alumni magazine, Josie Cox interviews social scientist and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz on “What Your Digital Footprint Says About You”. Matz’s new book, Mindmasters, is about how our technological transaction history allows algorithms to target us for psychological manipulation. She argues that individuals don’t have the time or expertise to protect our privacy across the thousands of apps and websites we interact with. Tech literacy is necessary, but not a substitute for government-mandated transparency and antitrust reform. Matz envisions an optimistic scenario where the Facebook algorithm could allow us to opt into exploring other people’s worldviews instead of reinforcing our echo chambers. When I was growing up, we called that reading novels.

On that note, here are some worthwhile literary reads I discovered this month. My favorite contemporary poet, Ariana Reines, has two new books out, the hybrid prose collection Wave of Blood and the poetry collection The Rose. In Lit Hub’s column The Annotated Nightstand, Reines recommends some books old and new that have guided her preoccupations with gender, esoteric magic, and “fraught romantic entanglements”.

At the blog of Sundress Publications, there’s an interview with trans poet Nora Hikari about her collection Still My Father’s Son. Hikari talks about identifying as a plural system, the link between sensuality and violence that she experienced as the child of a Christian pastor, and using hybrid and fragmented poetic forms to challenge oppressive concepts of family and selfhood. Read two poems from the collection in the online journal beestung.

Speculative fiction writer S. Qiouyu Lu’s flash story “Th Fifth Lttr” is a witty Oulipo piece that at first works around, and then liberates itself from, its original constraints. It implicitly asks whether we should find creative ways to coexist with censorship, or challenge it directly. Check out their Twitter feed for the comical adventures of their food-stealing cat, Onion.

A decluttering webinar offered by the ADHD magazine ADDitude gave me advice that really resonated: “You’re not saving stuff from the landfill by turning your house into a landfill.” I often hang onto things simply because I feel empathy for them. I don’t want to throw something away as if its years of service to me meant nothing. At The Missouri Review, Mindy Misener’s essay “Object Limbo” explores this feeling and what to do about it. I may have 35 books I want to read sitting atop a plastic tub of calendars from 2006, but at least I don’t have a placenta in my freezer…yet.

The problem is this: whether you keep a thing your whole life or give it up partway through, there comes a time when you stop knowing where it is and how it’s faring. Maybe you trust that it will be tended in a way that you can live—or die—with. Maybe you don’t.

 

April Links Roundup: A Cruel, Poetic Month

Happy National Poetry Month! The same absurd positivity that puts reclusive Emily Dickinson’s face on tote bags across America has designated April for celebrating poetry, based on T.S. Eliot’s decidedly un-celebratory opening to The Waste Land, “April is the cruelest month…” Old Tom was onto something, because the reawakening to life is painful when each day brings news of society’s disintegration, alongside forsythia buds and birdsong.

Nevertheless, we go on.

In Ploughshares, poet Pádraig Ó Tuama’s “The Death of Eve” imagines the beginning of creation as a fall into dividedness: past from future, God from the words we remember or invent about God, and those who speak from those who are able to hear the truth.

On the first day God began splitting
things, and time began.
The angels gathered in little groups
—even though it was forbidden—
and said things like: remember when death
and life were the same?

Levi Abadilla’s dark fable “Adam and Eve as the First Horror Story”, published in Singapore Unbound, suggests that paradise without choice is a kind of hell, especially for women. (Link discovered via Authors Publish, a great newsletter for writing opportunities.)

The Garden extends as far as you can will yourself to walk, stretching on and on and on in whichever direction you pick. An endless hallway of perfect harmony, a perpetual state of existential tunnel vision. There is fruit for you to eat should you wish it. There is water for you to drink should you thirst. There are the creatures of the earth for you to seek company in, because you were made to cure the loneliness of Man, but nothing was created to cure yours.

The snake looks at you the way the Man does, like it doesn’t quite know what to do with you. Adam was lonely, yes, but he didn’t ask for you, specifically, with everything that entails you. You must soothe the emptiness of his heart, and he must be content in your existence. A one-size-that-has-to-fit solution, because there’s no one else; there’s only you to appease him, and your role doesn’t give him a lot of options.

Another archetypal pair discover that the worst part of captivity in a gingerbread house is when you can’t afford dental insurance, in horror writer Lincoln Michel’s bleak and satirical tale “Hansel and Gretel’s Teeth” in the magazine Outlook Springs. (Hat tip to speculative author [sarah] cavar’s Substack, Library/Card.)

…And so Hansel and Gretel began their new life as assistants to the dentist witch. Although the witch called them hygienists, most of their time was spent procuring new teeth. “You can never have enough stock,” the witch would say and send them to graveyard with a pair of spades and pliers.

The witch had calculated their debt at one thousand teeth each. Hansel protested—they’d only used 28 apiece after all—but the witch said this was standard markup plus time, labor, and overhead. The witch put magic collars on their necks that would cause them to howl in pain if they didn’t meet their weekly quotas. “This is called an incentive,” the witch said. The only other rules were that they had to brush the walls of teeth every week and they were forbidden to go into the dark basement.

Yeah, that’s going to work out well…

All the poems in Mom Egg Review’s recent poetry folio, Mothering Alone, are well-crafted and emotionally resonant. I especially admired Jill Crammond’s “When I Sell My Wedding Ring at the Pawn Shop”, Kali Pezzi’s “I Treat My Postpartum Depression With Friends On Facetime” (“I finally weigh the same amount of grief I did at the beginning of the/pandemic” and Julia C. Alter’s “The Nursing Chair”, excerpted below:

…The first person who ever sat in this chair was me,
nursing the baby that used to be our son, deep
into the milk-blue nights, fighting my own monsters.
Now he’s half my son, and half his son.
This is his dad’s gaming chair, and he’s sleeping
upstairs on a mattress on the floor.

In beestung, a quarterly online journal of nonbinary writers, Aerik Francis’ “Fat4Fat” extravagantly celebrates our unruly bodies.

…We are still here, still holding
each other– not cropped out, no, more crop tops & muffin tops, bikini bottoms & bottoms up, yes
in any season we please! Love, we have beautiful bodies. We are more than our bodies
& our bodies are more to love. We sit naked in front of each other, belly to belly,
thunder thighs & lightning strikes.

The driving force of Maureen O’Leary’s noir story “One Thing About Blue” is the narrator’s fascination with a toxic friend. Is there honor among thieves? In the end, maybe, just a little.

March Links Roundup: Fictional Truths, Factual Lies

Two months into the regime described by the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog as “Triumph of the Shill,” we hear the word “fiction” thrown around a lot as an insult, the devil on the shoulder whose nemesis is the angelic “fact”. At the same time, this administration seems grotesquely afraid of the ethical and historical truths that fiction and the other imaginative arts can reveal.

Neuroqueer author [sarah] cavar’s Substack alerted me to Hannah Kim’s Aeon article “The truth about fiction,” which explains that the metaphysical assumptions behind our genre classifications are not universal. In modern Western thought, fiction is distinguished from nonfiction because the latter is true and the former is invented. However, in classical Chinese literature, genre divisions pertained to the significance of the topic.

Analytic philosophy came to ask the questions it asks because it inherited the ancient Greek idea that some things are less ‘real’ than others. In Anglo-European philosophy, ‘fiction’ is closely connected to what’s imagined – that is, what isn’t taken to be real – because the tradition inherited the appearance/reality distinction from Plato. Fiction occupies the ‘appearance’ side of things, whereas nonfiction occupies the ‘reality’ side…

In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.

Recall how Plato relies on the appearance vs reality distinction to argue that what’s ‘really real’ (the unchanging Forms) are beyond our sense perceptions. Humans were meant to use the intellect, and not their senses, since sense data mislead us, while philosophising gives us a chance to grasp what’s beyond phenomena. In contrast, Chinese metaphysicians didn’t think ultimate reality is unchanging. Instead, the dominant view was that reality, including nature, follows consistent patterns (the Dao). What is ‘empty’ or ‘unreal’ was seen as the generator of all things, and all things were considered equal in significance since they are all manifestations of changing patterns…

… Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ [fiction] and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived.

Kim argues that beneath our supposedly objective tests for fiction versus fact, the genre border is a political battleground. Classifying a work as fiction can allow more leeway for controversial takes on current issues…or it can be a rhetorical device to undermine narratives that challenge us.

cavar is editor-in-chief at manywor(l)ds, an online journal of creative writing by neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and Mad writers. I learned a lot from this poem in Issue #7, “plurality: a personal primer,” by rose& elysium. The author(s) are members of a plural system, i.e. several personalities sharing the same body.

…many professionals promote final fusion, becoming a singlet,
as the ideal outcome for Plurals; to us, it’s a nightmare, another
type of conversion therapy entailing the fundamental loss
of separate, functional identities as we would merge into
an “original” self, a singlet who none of us remember being…

Plurality threatens Western metaphysical beliefs about the One being more perfect than the Many. A lot of psychiatric professionals are too uncomfortable with that critique.

Lu Chekowsky’s essay in Pigeon Pages, “How Sex Work Prepared Me for a Career in Advertising,” has sharp humor with the ring of truth. The hermit crab structure of a resume adds to the satirical edge.

I make you want what you are supposed to want: love, clear skin, acceptance, white teeth, redemption, a flat stomach, fame.

I separate you from your money, time, and the disappointing truth of your life.

I get you off and get inside you. I sell fantasy as a product.

I make promises that I know I can’t keep, even while I’m making them. ​You can be happy. You can be wanted. You can have everything. 

I’m invisible and exactly who you want me to be. I have the right face, the right ass, the right words, ready to deploy at any moment. I construct aspiration with the very best lighting. I make ugly things beautiful. I tell stories that let you sleep at night.

Because of me, you believe the dreams you have are your own.

March Xness, the tournament of literary essays about pop songs, took a break from competition this year to showcase a month’s worth of favorite first-round losers from previous years. Writing about the song “She’s Like the Wind,” Erin Vachon’s “Swayze ode to queer failure” won my heart yet again. “Dirty Dancing,” like “Jurassic Park,” was one of those iconic Gen-X movies that I only watched for the first time recently, when I had the tools to perceive its gender-expansive subtext. (Dr. Ian Malcolm will forever be a trans man in my head canon. Life finds a way!)

Take an hour out of your doomscrolling to watch this interview with novelist Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets, on Wesley Dixon’s Vassar College series Conversations @ the Salt Line. The Prophets is a brilliant, beautiful, tragic, yet inspiring novel about two enslaved young men in love and how the purity of their relationship disrupts the plantation’s ethos of sexual exploitation. The interview touches on such topics as having empathy for your villain characters and  recovering the history of queer-affirming and gender-expansive African cultures before colonization.

Need something lighter? Check out Elizabeth Zaleski’s playful essay “Hung Up” at The Missouri Review, a compendium of penises she has known and their importance, or lack thereof, in her relationships with the men attached to them. If you’re more of a back-end person, see “Great Farts of Literature”.