Music recommendation: This performance by Gallowstreet, a band comprised of seven horn players and one drummer. (video)
You really only need the headline of this story to know that these two ladies are rad, but the story is kind of touching too. Headline: Two women have sent each other the same weathered birthday card for 81 years (gift link)
To balance out the many links to actual poetry that I seem to have been including in this newsletter lately, may I present this McSweeney’s satire piece, The Only Possible Poems, which made me laugh out loud multiple times. It’s kind of like Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey monomyth, but poetry, and funny.
I do not link to every single Substack post that my wife writes, but I was involved in this one: Not only did I say “I think that’s your next Substack post” when Hilary, at the dinner table, said something about the similarities between toddlers and cult leaders, but I am in the same cult as her! Ahem, I mean, we are raising a toddler together. And that toddler frequently gaslights me (even though he doesn’t know what gaslighting is). Anyway: Quiz: Is Your Roommate a Cult Leader or Are You the Parent of a Toddler?
Love this display at a college library: Is it Kendrick Lamar or Shakespeare? (Subtext here: Is Kendrick the Shakespeare of our time? Was Shakespeare the Kendrick of his time? If they met, would they get along?)
If you have ever been young and kind of dissatisfied and kind of wishing you could be somewhere else and behind the wheel of an automobile, I think you might like this essay (which I believe is an excerpt from the new book Plum by Andy Anderegg).
I discovered Andrew Bird’s music sometime in 2008 or 2009, and when I bicycled across America in 2010, I only listened to music when we were not on our bikes—mostly because I thought I would get sick of whatever songs I listened to as we pedaled for pretty much 60 straight days. But one of the albums I listened to pretty much every morning on an iPod was Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs, so I have a solid emotional + nostalgic attachment to it (but lots of other people also thinks it’s good). Anyway, Andrew Bird just started a Substack, and wrote a post about the recording of that album, which he apparently had to attempt three times before it felt finished. Forgive the overly long quote here, but I love this:
“The Mysterious Production of Eggs started to reveal itself as a concept album — something to do with childhood imagination, conformity, bullying, measuring the immeasurable, arbitrary hierarchies, commodification of concepts like talent and genius. I always pictured a little kid with a cape and sword, fighting to keep these things from stealing her sacred, internal world. I had some things to get off my chest. I wasn’t rewarded by institutions, though sometimes a teacher would say something like, ‘you are very musical and have a nice tone, but you’re not technical. You need to practice your études and scales, and then maybe you can compete with so-and-so.’ Musicality is a very abstract idea to an eight-year-old.”
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