⢠Do you have a good Werner Herzog impression? Of course you do. Youâre great. (If you donât, watch this for three minutes, then get back here.) Ok, now use your impression to read this quote: âThe teenagers on their mopeds are moving toward death in synchronized motion.â
Classic. The phrase comes from the German filmmakerâs own diary. He kept it as he walked from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter, thinking that his journey would prevent the death of his mentor, Lotte Eisner. He published the diary, Of Walking on Ice, a few years later, but now the University of Minnesota Press is reissuing it. Just in case you forgot how cool Werner Herzog is, watch how he handles getting shot in the stomach during an interview:
⢠New Realization: When a poet dies, all of their rhyme and metered poems automatically become 10x more thoughtful and heartbreaking. This is because in death the poet achieves a distance commensurate with the distance of artifice, a distance no living person can achieve, no matter how far away they are. RIP, Franz Wright.
⢠Guns are generally pretty terrible, but there are some guns in the only good poem the New Yorker has published in a long while: Ocean Vuongâs, âSomeday I Will Love Ocean Vuong.â I talked to Vuong recently, and he told me he made an edit to the poem. The line about gunfire now reads: âDonât be afraid, the gunfire / is only the sound of people / trying to live a little longer / and failing.â You should listen to him read the poem, but only if youâre prepared to drown in a puddle of hedged-hope tears.
⢠Speaking of hedged-hope tears, students from Baltimore have been writing in response to the demonstrations, and, holy shit:
Every hashtag pounded
too loud. Every journalist
talked too much. They shut
us up and kept us
from remembering that
if they fixed the streets children
wouldnât have rocks
to throw in the first place.
⢠OK ENOUGH WITH SADNESS AND DEATH. Letâs talk $$$DOLLAS$$$. Are you good at raising money? Then you should apply for the Development Manger position at Hugo House. Only apply if youâre really good, because they need someone who can handle big thangs.
⢠Are you good at writing but not good at raising money? Maybe in desperate need of money? Then get your shit together over the weekend and apply for an Artist Trust Grant. Tell them youâre working on a novel. Tell them youâre working on a book of essays. Tell them you want to wheatpaste poems all over new construction. If they like it theyâll give you $1,500. But whatever you do, tell them before the deadline: Monday, May 18.
