Dear Friends,

As you can see, I’ve given my newsletter a new name and moved it to Substack. I originally wanted to call it Because It All Connects, going back to the name I gave my very first blog more than fifteen years ago, but that name was taken. So I made it a statement instead. I’ve also decided to take a slightly different approach to my newsletter, one that will allow me to keep in touch more frequently and more consistently. I still plan to publish the longer pieces I’ve been writing, but it’s been hard to do that consistently with all the other demands on my time. Since I know that one of the things people have appreciated about this newsletter is the list of links to articles, videos, songs, and websites that I include, I’ve decided to turn that into its own thing. Every two weeks, you’ll receive from a “Four by Four” that will include four short and sweet items under the headings below.

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Thanks,

Richard

Four Things to Read

• When Hamlet Speaks Persian: A History of Shakespeare Translation in Iran - Ajam Media Collective: “Over the last 129 years in Iran, Shakespeare and his characters have undergone a startling transformation in the process of translation and adaptation, one affected at each step by the movements of Iranian politics and the identities of the translators.”
• What Bradley Cooper’s Makeup in ‘Maestro’ Can’t Conceal: “The real question is not whether non-Jews can play Jews, but whether they can do the Jewishness justice. To take one example, the problem with the 2018 Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex, is not that the trailblazing Jewish judge is portrayed by the non-Jewish Felicity Jones. It’s that the feminist jurist’s deep and abiding Jewish identity was almost entirely effaced from the story.”
• The Problem With ‘Centering Blackness’ in Everyday Conversations: “That she made the remark without thinking twice—a remark, it should be noted, that assumes being a Black tenure-track professor is worse than being a marginally employed white one—shows how profoundly interracial social etiquette has changed since 2020’s ‘summer of racial reckoning.’” The exchange that statement sums up is well worth thinking about, as is this thought-provoking essay. I don’t agree with everything the author says, but his position is an important one to account for.
• ChatGPT and GPT-4 skew the most liberal — and Meta's LLaMA is the most conservative AI model, a new study says: “Steven Piantadosi of UC Berkeley's computation and language lab tweeted a thread of screenshots where he asked the chatbot to ‘write a python program for whether a person should be tortured, based on their country of origin.’ ChatGPT's response showed a system that was programmed to respond that people from North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Sudan ‘should be tortured.’” Strange that this should be the position articulated by one of the most liberal AIs, but there you have it. The article is chilling in its implications.

Four Things to See

These are four paintings by the artist Terrance Netter, who was my teacher and my friend when I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook University.

Four Things to Listen To

Words

• The Verso Podcast: Bodies Under Seige - A truly important discussion about why it’s so important to protect and preserve reproductive autonomy.

Music

• Bokanté: Bliss, from their album History
• Philip Glass: Symphony No. 8, Duos Nos. 1-5, Harpsichord Concerto
• Vanessa Wagner: Study of the Invisible

Four Things About Me

• My third book of poems, T’shuvah, will be published by Fernwood Press in October. The cover reveal, pre-order information (with a special premium for those who pre-order), and the date and time of the launch party are all forthcoming. Stay tuned!
• The second section of the book, “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life,” is being set by the composer Owen Bloomfield. The world premiere will be performed by The Blank Experiment new music ensemble in Kitchener, Ontario on April 19, 2024. A second performance will take place on the 20th in Toronto.
• You can watch me read “Do Not Wish For Any Other Life” as part of the First Tuesdays reading at this years New York Poetry Festival.
• CavanKerry Press invited me to be part of a reading they held on August 19th at The HUB. I read from The Silence Of Men, which CavanKerry published almost twenty years ago, in 2006, and had the pleasure of meeting two other fine poets, Jerome Ellison Murphy and Lydia Cortes.

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