Monthly Roundup: Feasting & Fasting
At the wine-booth with no walls
Welcome to the monthly roundup for November, 2023 at Silver Door, where perusal-worthy articles and poetry related happenings from Substack and beyond are highlighted alongside recent SD news and posts.
J.Z Schafer began his duties as co-editor at Silver Door this month, which aside from being exciting was providential as the Woods family managed to get rather ill, buy a house, travel for Thanksgiving, and pick out kitchen tiles. I’m delighted all round and we have BIG plans for the publication heading into 2024.
Around The Web
For various reasons, I’ve been offline a good bit in November so just the one article this month for you:
: Dark Academia & the Longing for Identity— Johann is one of a handful of “dissident” online figures who can actually write well, and he understands digital media. Worth a read and a follow.Hogwarts is beautiful because - behind a facade of fantasy that allows us to pretend that we’re not attracted by what is actually attracting us - it is absolutely classist, elitist, exclusionary, traditional, and certain of its identity.
Silver Door Posts
J.Z’s debut post on Silver Door, in which, among other things, he “put together a couple of rash and ignorant attempts” at defining poetry:
Poetry dismantles itself and waits for God to put it back together. It is the falcon plummeting out a cloud; it is Babel made a lightning rod. It is an early grave, and the tomb of Alexander.
In which a proposal is made to reunite inscription and poetry:
One finds in the Chinese poet Yuan Mei reminiscences of a certain mountain pass where an ancient king lay buried, which all the poets of a thousand years had made a habit of leaving, so to speak, a wreath of verses. And we find him in his later journeys saddened, because “the wine-booth had no walls/so I could not inscribe poems.”
Inspired by comments from Metropolitan Saba of North America, I begin a short series on digital fasting:
From Silicon Valley nerds, to crunchy Whole Food moms, to the Übermenschen body bros, sometime in the 2010s it dawned on these disparate bands of weirdos that ancient people weren’t complete idiots after all.
Poetry on Silver Door
We are on track to start taking submissions for poems in early 2024. In the meantime, you’re stuck with work from The Editors…
Video of the Month
Byrne Power is a man who has influenced my thought a good deal in recent years, and is for my money one of a handful of essential art critics working today. You can find a treasure trove of his videos and lectures on YT. This video was released this past month and lines up nicely with my recent post We Have to Make Phones Lame.
Byrne, from the comments section:
The dream of movements I feel is ultimately destructive in our time. It falls prey to the propagandistic impulse. It's not about the numbers, it's about the quality.
Ha, appreciate it