More friends doing cool things
Book releases, pre-orders, and albums, oh my!
One nice thing about starting this Substack is that I suddenly have the opportunity to share about all the cool things my friends are doing. (Is this what social media used to be for, before it was devoured by capital? Just me?)
My friend Walter’s partner Maria has a book coming out this fall, about fungi (among many other things). It’s blurbed by Ross Gay, one of my favorites, so it’s gotta be good! You can pre-order here.
And my old college (and grad-school) classmate Cutter’s book, Earthly Materials, also just came out. (Sometimes I catch myself thinking about old friends – I wonder if X is still writing? – and so it’s always a joy when, out of the blue, I find out oh yeah, he’s 384 pages deep into writing a book about human excretions across different time periods and cultures. Yep that checks out.)
I can already tell these are going to be two beautiful, lyrical, delightfully weird books, and I can’t wait to read them.
Finally, coming off of my previous post on loss, I wanted to share my friend Matthew’s album, which came out at the beginning of January and I’ve been playing all year.
When the album title first landed in my inbox, it felt almost like a private joke: about the difficulty of artistic output as we get older; about all of our political efforts seemingly falling short; something about the arc of life itself, all in one condensed little aphorism.
Back in early March, under the gauzy veil of Trump’s first 100 days and listening to the album on repeat, I wrote:
I’m finding hope these days in realism. Bleakness, even.
No silver linings, no gray no white no black. Just clouds and sky all the way down. Weather that changes.
Matthew’s poems have always had a kind of hermetic and compressed quality to them, but to witness those powers suddenly stretched into new dimensions – music! collaboration! – felt unexpectedly moving. Here is someone I love, everything about them that I love, flourishing and new. The real joke, for me, was that Too little too late was abundant, and right on time.
You can listen to the whole album on Spotify or Bandcamp.
See you next week,
Adam