Monthly Roundup: Feasting & Fasting (cont.)

Digital entities, the transparent society, & feasting well

Welcome to the monthly roundup for December, 2023 at Silver Door, where perusal-worthy articles and poetry related happenings from Substack and beyond are highlighted alongside recent SD news and posts.

I concluded (sort of?) a short series on digital fasting in December. There’s still a lot to chew on and I’m not entirely sure what conclusions, if any, I really came to regarding this topic, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.

Heading into 2024, I’m excited to implement some additional pieces into Silver Door, including stepping outside of the digital realm.

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Around The Web

Julie Sunderland

: Poetry is Dead, Long Live Battle Rap — A fun and thought provoking evening with the poet Julie Sunderland as she and friends enter the world of rap battles.

Each battle is at least 20 minutes-long and the raps are complex, epic poems prepared in advance and memorized, with room for improvisation, especially in the rebuttals. It’s incredibly to think about how much effort goes into composition and memorization, a practice I can’t imagine my highly educated children doing.

Byrne Power

: Who is Taylor Swift? — It seems a bit mad to suggest that Taylor Swift isn’t taken as seriously as she should be, but Power suggests just that when he remarks “This woman could easily become president of the United States.” This is just Pt. I.

When she takes her first musical pause at the beginning of the three hour plus spectacle, she points to a single quadrant of the audience. Simply points. And that whole section breaks into ear splitting sobs and screams on cue. She turns and points to another part of the audience, without a word, and they suddenly erupt into a cataclysm of emotion. Religious emotion indeed.

Kevin LaTorre

: Advent Readings, Pt. I, Pt. II, Pt. III, & Pt. IV— Kevin rallied the troops and put together a series of poems for Advent written and read by myself,

J.Z Schafer

,

merkurymann

, and

D.A. Bishop

: “Come, child, creator, king, conqueror of death.”

Aaron M. Renn

: The Future of Media: Macroculture and microculture go to war. — Renn is one of the best cultural commentators working today. Here he analyzes another great piece by Ted Gioia: In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War. For those of us working on Substack and other alternative media platforms, it’s worth ruminating over these issues periodically.

Here’s Renn:

The macroculture world allows, in theory, cross-subsidization. That is, the commercial hits can subsidize the more artistic money losers. This used to actually happen. For example, it was widely reported at the time of his death that Cormac McCarthy barely sold any books for the first 25 years of his career, up until All the Pretty Horses. But publishers kept putting out his novels, including what are now viewed to be classics like Blood Meridian.

Also, Renn publishes a Weekly Digest on his Substack which I used as a template for creating these Monthly Roundups.

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Silver Door Posts

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Poetry on Silver Door

Kid Tricks for Critics

Full of Speech

Philadelphia, 2009

For Ill or Good

We will begin taking poetry submissions in January. Stay tuned for more info.

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Video of the Month

John Heers

at First Things Foundation specializes in “heavy things done lightly” and whose “goal is to bring you deep insights on the Old World in order to understand the New.”

After stumbling around this past month exploring the word-space of fasting and feasting, it was a real joy to overhear this conversation. Have a listen to get a sense of the on-the-ground experience of a true feast, and the healing that can happen around the table.