The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.
⛱️Substack Summer Update
Substack Summer is back for a second year, and kicked off on Monday with a review of Holiest of Cities by Tom Schecter which also launched on Monday June 8. Paperback copies are available here, and the review is available here.
If you are an author with completed work you’d like reviewed, you can find out how I manage that via the Review Requests page. If you’ve already sent me an ARC of your work (or if I bought it myself), you are already on “the List.”
🐀Despite All My Rage, This Is Still Just an Internet Page
On Impotence, uh, the Angry Kind
At some point on Tuesday night, I guess I ran out of distractions from the world; from the white-hot searing rage that runs under my skin and pumps like magma through my blackened heart. I watch my baby boy sleep on one screen and fucking pukes cosplaying as Nazis terrorize immigrants on another. I want to become a hurricane, an eye at the center for kid and the tempest for the rest of us. Some kind of storm that would make Noah shit himself.
I sat here and typed these meaningless words into this meaningless void and envied the pure fucking spine of Luigi and Tyler. Thought about the cruel irony that there are enough bullets to solve all the world’s problems, but too few of them seem to hit the right targets. I went to bed angry and slept like shit.
I woke up Wednesday morning to find my three-year old son wearing his pajama shirt as a skirt and his pajama shorts as a sassy, off-the-shoulder number, head through one of the leg-holes. Commando underneath. And lo, my reason to hate this world dancing around bare-assed with his stuffed animals.
You can’t fix the world, and you can’t protect them from it.
There’s a joke that goes something like this: Emo is when the world is horrible, and you’re sad about it. Goth is when the world is horrible, but there’s beauty amidst the horrors. Punk is when the world is horrible, and you’re pissed off about it. And ska is when the world is horrible, but you have a fucking trumpet. I don’t know what a trumpet can do against surveillance drones, pre-school bombing, AI propaganda, acre-wide data centers, the rising ocean tides, and child sex slavery, but I do know that if you can’t wear your shirt as your pants and your pants as your shirt and dance around bare-assed there’s no point to even fighting.
Also, it is hard to be an angry bad-ass when you have your nails painted bright red and blue to match your toddler’s.
📚Book Bits
Hell’s Half Acre by will christopher baer (Phineas Poe trilogy, #3)
My biggest issue with Baer’s books is they read so fast that I have to catch myself and slow down to note all he’s doing. It’s a wonderful mix of tight Chandlerian prose interspersed with utterly unique ways of describing scenes or settings; a sky the color of muscle, or hair black as seaweed. An almost surrealist bend on noir. This one leans a lot harder into the stream of consciousness/unreliable narrator stuff and I’m diggin’ it.
Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk
Started this on audiobook while I’ve been running errands in the car this week and going back to my hard copy to add highlights and markers. I am impressed so far with the practical, tactical advice in this one. He also brings up “Guts” a lot, which always makes my stomach tighten.
Recent Book Haul:
Why Teach? by Peter Shull - An instance of “wait, this is still in my cart? Let me check the bookshelf. What? I really don’t have this already?!” Anyway, sorry, Pete, it’s been rectified.
Light Where There Is Light: An American History by Keith Waldrop - New York Review of Books monthly read. Introduction/recommendation by Ben Lerner.
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Sailinger - “Centennial” edition1 from Book of the Month Club and a gift from Mrs. Reads. Probably the book I’ve read the most and maybe my favorite that doesn’t include giant alien sandworms or southern accents.
📺Screen Time 🖥️
I finished Deadwood season 3 and felt disappointed. It’s a decent season finale but doesn’t work as a series finale; the curse of many good shows. Still haven’t watched the movie yet but I think I’ll get to that this weekend. After that, my buddy told me to watch Mr. Inbetween and he hasn’t steered me wrong yet.
Brian Fallon has a trio of new songs on Spotify. None of them are great. They’re a little more varied than the last Gaslight Anthem release, and not quite as flat sounding but nothing to write in a newsletter about. Sturgill Simpson also has a new release out under the name “Johnny Blue Skies2” and the first track is called “Make America Fuk Again.” Make of that information what you will.
💡Substack Spotlight:
I mentioned the Yellow Coat Raffle, fundraiser for Nikki | Nocturnal Narrator in last week’s Digest, but in case you missed it, Alexander Sorondo has graciously offered line-editing services as a prize for the raffle!
The Nine Story Hotel is reporting vacancy after closing for renovations. This is a cool project I’m deeply interested in, and it has had some dope collaborators in the past.
Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos by Adam Mastroianni - a meditation on how “selling out” stopped being a thing and we’re all the worse for it. This pairs well with Dan Ozzi’s excellent book Sell Out about the rise of pop-punk music in the 90s and early 2000s.
Not for nothing, Pearl Jam seems to have re-entered the zeitgeist recently and I’m here for it. Though lately I’ve been listening mostly to Dark Side of the Moon.
🖋️Writing
On Momentum
My greatest enemy is inertia. Some people stay in perpetual motion; I am the opposite. My brain might pinball between a million different thoughts, but my ass usually stays in the chair. I am working on momentum, on getting into motion and staying in motion once I’m there. Around the house the evidence of our collective ADHD is scattered between the half-empty dishwasher, the half-cleaned play area, the on-going bakery projects (hers), and an office (mine) so filled with books and notes that it makes Indiana Jones look like Marie Kondo.
But I’ve been reading and I’ve been writing. Substack Summer is a great little motivating force, and it means I’ve always got notebooks around to capture any stray thoughts and nurse them into feral alley cats.
I exercised yesterday. It was horrible. But it was forward movement. Well technically it was circular movement around a heavy bag, but I mean it was progress. Lost steps aren’t necessarily lost forever.
🌞Fleeting Thoughts
I find myself waiting on a thunderstorm that keeps gathering pressure but never releasing it. The air here is, well, it’s conditioned, but outside it is warm and gelatinous. It exists in a state that is not quite gas, solid, or liquid and clings like cellophane. I keep waiting for the flash and the crack of lightning, for the sky to empty the stored tears of gods and angels… but it just fucking won’t.
A smarter man would draw a parallel there, make a succinct metaphor, and derive some deeper meaning. Me, I just want to hear the rain and smell the damp earth. “Petrichor” it’s called, right? Terrible name. Alas.
🍻+🤙,
— V
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I guess BotM is rounding up from 75, since Catcher was published in 1951.
As someone who uses the gamertag “JohnnyToughnuts,” I appreciate this nom de guerre.