Four Things To Read

“Coney Island”, A Dadaist Sound Poem by Victor Packer: The link will take you to the Yiddish Book Center’s website, where you can read a translation of this poem in English and listen to Victor Packer recite it in Yiddish. You can read more about Victor Packer in “The One Man Radio Department” on StoryCorps’ website. He was a force to be reckoned with.

Ode to the Powerless: Bessie Head’s ‘A Question of Power’ through a Personal Lens, by Nkateko Masinga: “I approach Head’s work with a reverence born from my failure to separate her characters from people I have met and closer to home, myself. I see myself in them and I want to understand the topography of their aches. I want them to heal because I want to heal. I grapple with powerlessness daily and it is only by writing that I can fight back, for myself and for them.” A brief introduction to a South African woman writer of whom I had never heard, but whose work certainly seems worth seeking out and reading.

A Persisting Inheritance: On the First-Ever Anthology of Sri Lankan and Diasporic Poetry in the UK: “Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) shines light upon a long-neglected national literature by bringing together, for the first time, Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry written in and after Independence. Featuring over a hundred poets translated from Tamil and Sinhala, or writing in English, the anthology intends to exhibit poetry as a vehicle of anti-amnesia and of witness to the various political events that have shaped the country since 1948.” This conversation between Sohini Basak and the three editors of the anthology is well worth reading.

Algorithms Hijacked My Generation. I Fear For Gen Alpha, by Freya India: “Instagram Face, I have come to believe, is just one symptom of something far larger and more pernicious. It is one manifestation of what I see as the driving force behind much of Gen Z’s growing and global mental health crisis. It is the end result—the inevitable end-point—of what I think of as the algorithmic conveyor belt.” This essay about the impact social media algorithms have on young people, especially women, is particularly powerful because it was written by precisely the kind of young woman the algorithms are designed to target.

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Four Things To See

These are chromolithographic patterns from L'animal dans la Décoration (1897) by Maurice Pillard Verneuil (1869–1942), French artist and decorator in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movement. Verneuil studied and developed his style from Eugène Grasset, a Franco-Swiss pioneer of Art Nouveau design. Inspired by Japanese art, nature and particularly the sea. He is known for his contributions to the Art Deco movement through the use of bold floral designs on ceramic tiles, wallpapers, textiles, and posters. (From Raw Pixel)

Four Things To Listen To

King’s X - Summerland

Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer 1987

Renaissance - Can You Understand?

Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hell

Four Things About Me

I have a SoundCloud account, though the only thing I’ve done with it is upload some songs that I composed in the 1990s, when I bought myself a Yamaha SY77 MIDI keyboard, thinking I’d finally start writing music seriously. You can listen to the songs here:

I also have a Micro.blog, which I call “Richard Jeffrey Newman’s Miscellany.” It’s mostly pictures, with some random thoughts scattered throughout. I haven’t been posting a lot there lately, but I did start two series that I had fun putting together. One is called “Bookshelf Juxtapositions.” Since I organize my books in alphabetical order, I thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of books would end up next to each other. (The last nine images break the pattern in that they are of books I’d bought but not yet shelved.) I called the other series “Lines Left On The Cutting Room Floor.” I posted, without comment, lines I cut out of poems I was working on. I am thinking of making that a part of It All Connects, except I’d shorten the title to “Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut,” and I would write about the lines, the thinking behind them, why I decided to cut them, and so on.

I have not posted anything to my blog since December 2022, which makes me sad, since I started it with high hopes of returning to the routine of regular blogging I maintained when I first started back in the early 2000s.

I’m on Facebook, Twitter (which I refuse to call by its new name), and Instagram, but I have not been able to decide how I feel about having a social media presence. I used to have quite a robust Facebook presence, but I deleted it because it was becoming such a huge time suck. I got back on when I decided to start focusing again on my writing because many of the poets and writers I know are still there; I was just starting to build a presence on Twitter, when its new owner changed everything and I am thinking of leaving; I have profiles on both Mastodon and Bluesky that I’ve yet to use—though Bluesky does interest me; and I confess I have no idea what to do with my Instagram account. Substack shows some promise as an interesting place to hang out online, but I am just beginning to explore that.

Photo of #4 by Stockholm Paris Studio on Unsplash.

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