The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times
Issue #6 June 22, 2020
Mark Yurkiw: Chaser
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“Are we all in love, just because?
No, I think it's poetry and magic.”
--Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), “Hold Me Anyway”
Jeff Tweedy’s memoir is Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) and Wilco’s newest album is Ode to Joy
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Screen Share: A College Teacher’s Zoom Journal. For 15 years, my students and I huddled together in cozy classrooms to study the craft of writing. Then came Covid-19. —Ann Fadiman
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“One’s reality doesn’t simply shift in a pandemic; it becomes radically uncertain—indeed, uncertainty is the reality.” – Elizabeth Outka, How Pandemics Seep into Literature, Paris Review, April 8, 2020
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“We are living in the darkest West, in the dark that does not precede the dawn but the birth of a radically different order of things.” — Robert Kelly
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Kit Robinson
LOVE IN A TIME OF COVID-19
Gasping for air
The mountain is the mountain
I can’t breathe
The water is the water
Hands up don’t shoot
Mask up
Take a knee
Testing, testing, testing
Can you hear me now?
Get your knee off our necks
When this is over
Or is it forever?
The green mountains are always walking
First there is a window
Get up stand up
Eternity in a grain elevator
Transit system of a gone
Compassion the water
Crossover dribble
Change gonna come
Performative allies of the solid black meme
People talking chances
A stone woman gives birth to a child at night
We pray for our hearts to keep breaking
You have to walk with your own legs
6/4-5/20
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Janan Ganesh: "I have a neighbor in his seventies who is determined to go on his European holiday this summer. It is not because he thinks he is immortal, but because he knows he isn’t. How many more times, after all, will he get to see the Mediterranean? Understood from this angle, “recklessness” is its own kind of prudence, and “caution” its own kind of complacency. Post-crisis, we might see other marginal decisions in the same light. Save for a house deposit or splurge on dinner? For older readers, it will be all too obvious that tomorrow might never come. But the young are some way into their lives before they even think about the end. (It is a serviceable definition of middle-age.) I myself had not considered it, really, until mortal fear coursed through the planet this spring. I am now glad of bold choices made in another time. And more inclined to make similar ones in future. Unless the guys at Calico Labs come up with something special, we can only ever stave off death by so much. The point is to near it without kicking oneself. Let that, not caution, be the “lesson” of recent months." (Financial Times – paywalled)
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If you are finding The Weird Times useful, inspiring, or even just OK, please let me know. Or not. I’m always happy to know how these missives strike you, on the mark or off base. Good thoughts and beatitudes to all.
The great Rogers Hornsby says it all for us.