“‘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!
