og / oad
Lyceum / Derek Ridger / 1982
Before I start yapping, ‘cause you know I love to yap, we did a lovely interview with the poet Leigh Lucas about grief books, poetry, her writing support bulldog, and more. It’s at the bottom past all the other stuff. Scroll down. Read it.
Hello.
It’s the end of the year/the world and my brain is decidedly more scattered than usual. So, here for you, a mixed bag (in subject and quality) of thoughts.
I heard the phrase “the soft exploitation of convenience” this morning and nothing felt like it fit into my general worldview of technology. Everybody wants things to be easier, everybody wants things to be more convenient, everybody (seemingly) wants to wear soft pants to the movie theater. And when everyone wants something, every tech CEO worth their puffy vest wants to swoop on in and prod that want until it starts bleeding money. Which only means the simple joys of easy living have now been monetized and forced into a compounding infinity loop where sitting on the couch is a billion dollar industry and the whole capitalistic world wants to make sure we stay right fucking there.
Nor went to a party last night. When she got home she said, to paraphrase, “I had the most interesting conversation with so-and-so about all the important topics that define humanity as a whole.” I, who had been home tending to the Boy Prince, responded, “I had a three hour conversation with a two-year old about Frog and Toad drinking iced tea with their imaginary brothers, Og and Oad.” Then we stared at each other for a while.
Through a combination of trying to seem like I care, and trying to seem like I’m in favor of our future robot overlords, I have somehow ended up on an AI Team at my job. As it turns out I do not care, nor in any way am I in favor of our future robot overlords. This is no great surprise, but I still find myself after each interminable meeting where everyone blows smoke up the asses of the algorithms that are helping us spend even less time interacting with other humans in favor of telling a screen to do it for us, surprised at how we have all come to this point where we believe there is, at best, any good to come out of AI, and at worst, that we are not part and partial to the expansion of this societal, group-think AI bubble that will eventually explode in gruesome fashion. It’s a long sentence but I don’t know how to better communicate my exasperation with the advent of AI, sure, but more so how eagerly we all seem to be to give ourselves over to a concept that only has purpose because the people who are profiting off it continue to say it does. This is Internet 1.0 all over again. AI clearly has powerful uses, but this is a cash grab while everyone’s trying to sort out what those uses are and how they can gouge the public for every cent (RIP, cent) they can. I don’t have a lot of faith for the future of AI. The internet seemed like an infinite space where the work could be done to create a new, better version of the world, and humanity ended up colonizing a stretch the size of Rhode Island and building strip malls full of phone stores and porn shops. But aside from what may happen, in this moment, where everyone is scrabbling to the top of their own respective junk heaps to declare themselves the owners of a future that only exists in their minds, I’m just annoyed at how little foresight we all, collectively, seem to have.
See? Very random.
what other people are doing
The Bullet Takes Forever / Heidi Kasa
Heidi Kasa writes for The Racket on occasion, and I always wish she’d write more for The Racket, but she can’t, because she’s too busy publishing books. The Bullet Takes Forever is one of two books she’s releasing in short order, and acts as a poetic witness to the continued scourge of mass violence in America.
in the middle
You know what’s great? Surprise. Just plodding forward with no idea what’s coming but with eyes and heart open to whatever it might be. The Slip is this kind of surprise. A kid in Austin, TX disappears one day and Lucas Schaefer, a writer I’m so excited to read more of, traces the infinite threads that somehow lead to that disappearance. Somehow being the key word, because at this point, halfway through the book, I can kind of see where it might be going, but every page sort of pushes me off a different cliff in the very best way.
at the end
You Dreamed of Empires / Álvaro Enrigue (trans. Natasha Wimmer)
For no reason whatsoever, I’m not someone who reads a lot of translated work. After reading Natasha Wimmer’s translation of You Dreamed of Empires, this may change. It feels alive. It feels ripe to the fine edge of rot. It feels swollen but sharp, dreamlike but unbelievably real. Enrigue is clearly a genius, but Wimmer’s work with the material is jaw-dropping.
we like songs
The end of the year is a disparate time for listening. A time where I deeply question not just what I listen to, but how and when I listen to it. A time of all-consuming overthinking that usually ends with me throwing up my arms and declaring that I’m done listening to music. It never sticks. I’m always here.
###
Jesso made Goon in the 2010s and then disappeared into songwriting for other people. He’s back though, in extreme pared down form, and outside of the unwanted sonic experimentation that weights the latter half of this song down, he’s sounding goooood.
Never has a song been more aptly name. It’s a lot groovy and a lot greasy.
Whatever the title/band name of this song brings to mind, it’s probably correct.
Sometimes don’t you just want some mildly discordant, dude-forward indie rock? Well, for you, that.
Tinkly.
###
All of the songs we, uh, liked are here.
Jay Kelly, d. Noah Baumbach
Look, Jay Kelly isn’t going to be for anyone. It’s a big, broad, tonally challenged film that jumps between soul searching and slapstick to a point I was always expecting someone to break out in song. That said, it feels like a pretty good, very Americanized, remake of Fellini’s 8 1/2 with George Clooney in the role of Mastroianni. It probably dips too many times into too many tones to be effective, but I thought between the solid performances, the lush cinematography, and the surprisingly layered look at what a lifetime of public celebrity leaves you with (spoiler alert: not much) it was a smarter way to spend a few hours than I thought it was going to be.
also watched
The New Yorker at 100, d. Marshall Curry
Love, LOVE, a behind-the-scenes-of-a-newspaper documentary. Love to see all the delightfully nerdy folks trying to make something beautiful out of the mundane day-to-day of existence. If you are of a similar ilk, this is a lovely film.
Downhill Racer, d. Michael Ritchie
To celebrate perhaps the last of the great American movie stars, we threw on this deep cut from the early days of Robert Redford when he was still okay with being less charming, and more of an asshole. I heard it described as F1 but with skiing, and I'll take it. Beautiful location shooting, great part for a young Gene Hackman, and more skiing than you can shake a stick at.
I feel like every time I turn my head these days Leigh Lucas is publishing something new, something brilliant, something that’s increasingly bringing her to the attention of the poetry-loving world. Her newest, Splashed Things (BOA, 2026), follows Lucas in the wake of her partner’s suicide as she navigates the “arc of grief”. Lucas answered a few questions for us
Where do you write?
I don’t have a desk right now because we moved houses and the desk at my old place was built-in. I belong to The Ruby, a wonderful writers’ coworking space, and should be writing there, but I’ve left the house less since having my second child. Lately, I carry my computer around the house with me to whatever room I need to be in and write in short little sprints. I bet this is pretty common of moms of young children.
What objects are in that space?
Not an object by my french bulldog Stevie follows me everywhere. She is the best companion and I really should cite her as my coauthor on everything I’ve ever written.
How do you maintain writing focus?
The poet Megan Pinto and I send each other our words every day to stay accountable to our writing projects. We’ve been doing it for over five years now and it’s completely changed both of our lives. Not only have we helped each other write our books, life is just so much richer with a good art friend.
What books on grief do you recommend to people?
Nox by Anne Carson, The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend by Sarah Manguso, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, What the Living Do by Maire Howe, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
Were there books (or other works of art) you turned to while navigating your journey of loss?
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. But I mostly read a lot of the unpublished poetry of the person I lost.
What recent poetry collections can you recommend?
I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken. This book is so good, I don’t think I’ll ever stop talking about it (thank you sam sax for showing it to me).
What was the last book you read? What led you to it?
Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish. My friend Alisha Gorder told me she thought I’d love it and I did. She has given me so many of my favorite books, including All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. She gave me Nightbitch when I was pregnant with my first child and I read it when I was newly postpartum. It was that experience of a book finding me the exact moment I needed it.
What do you think you’ll read next?
Staying Still, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s forthcoming poetry collection from Tin House.
What did you read while writing Splashed Things?
Just Kids by Patti Smith, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, The Flexible Lyric by Ellen Bryant Voigt, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, Bough Down by Karen Green, The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
What’s next?
I’m working on a novel but always procrastinating by writing poems. We’ll see what reaches manuscript-length first.
That’s it.
Next week: Top 5 lists.
After that: Blissful silence until the new year.
See you soon.
N
Brilliant piece on the AI bubble. The comparison to Internet 1.0 is spot-on, we're watchign the same playbook where profti motive precedes any real understanding of utility. The bit about everyone scrabbling to the top of junk heaps to declare ownership of an imaginary future kinda captures the whole charade perfectly. It's exhausting to see how little collective memory we have for these cycles.