Monthly Roundup: Silver Door Swings Open
Dinner parties, digital peaches, Swift Mania, and submissions
Welcome to the monthly roundup for January, 2024 at Silver Door, where perusal-worthy articles and poetry related happenings from Substack and beyond are highlighted alongside recent SD news and posts.
This month saw the lead up to Silver Door opening itself up to poetry submissions on Feb. 1. We have already gotten a number of first-rate poems, which is wonderful, and at least one submitted poem will be published in March. If you’re interested in submitting, see the post below for more details.
On a personal note, the Woods family welcomed its second baby earlier this week.
Around The Web
: Taylor Swift: Goddess, Witch, or Christian? (Who is Taylor Swift?—Pt. 2)—As Swift Mania reaches a fever pitch heading into the Super Bowl, perhaps it’s a good time to pause and think about arguably the most powerful woman in western culture. If you haven’t already, you can read Pt. 1 here.And as I watched Taylor kissing her muscle, amplified by the elaborate screens behind her, remembering Woodstock, I realized who Taylor Swift was for this generation. She was the goddess of the Self. To her fans, the Swifties, everything about her was a mirror of the self, her self, her story, her mythology.
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The word hive-mind is often used. They were becoming they extensions of one single self, their Goddess, their Queen... Taylor Swift. From Japan, to Brazil, to Atlanta, to London, to Tbilisi, they were all taking their life cues from this Goddess of the Self. These mass concerts (rallies? spectacles of light and legend?) were unifying forces in a way no one else could match in 2023.
I have already gone on record defending Swift from those criticizing her songwriting ability:
If you really can’t bring yourself to listen to her music, I suggest Ryan Adams’ cover album of 1989.
Mary Herrington: Why the right fears Taylor Swift— While not as razor sharp as Herrington can be, as always she sees the obvious where others see 1’s and 0’s.
: Before I reach my enemy, bring me some heads—Just one of the best writers out there. An earned arrogance about his work.Now, as we roll into a crunch election year across numerous very online democratic nations including Britain, Germany and the United States, it seems more than likely that swarmism will play a crucial role. And this perhaps explains the Right-wing panic over Swift. For many conservatives — especially older conservatives — simply do not understand how swarm politics works, or how to exploit it for political advantage.
Conservatives are also, by and large, fairly inept at mobilising female-dominated swarms. And the genius of Swift lies in her capacity to render, musically, the emotional landscapes of young women; it’s no surprise that her internet-enabled fandom should be among the largest, most emotionally labile, and most female in existence. Given the now widely-noted global phenomenon of sex-divided political fandoms, in which the Left leans female and the Right male, it’s therefore reasonable to assume that Swifties are likely to be structurally Left-wing.
The era in which we really expected things to be original was a brief one. It was already dying fifty years ago in 1974, when someone at Penguin decided to pretend that the Book of Dede Korkut was really a collection of quirky and inventive characters. It’s roughly coterminous with the age of the novel: starting with Don Quixote; maybe starting to collapse with Pierre Menard, who could produce a word-for-word replica of Don Quixote that was an entirely different text, simply because it was written by Pierre Menard and not by Miguel de Cervantes. As of 2024, that age is very definitively over. You people are—not illiterate, exactly, since you do still consume large quantities of text, but maybe paraliterate. You might be reading, but you’re certainly not reading books. Even the rare people who do read books sometimes strain with the unexpected effort it requires. It wasn’t so difficult when you were a kid!
Silver Door Posts
Human Memory, Digital Peaches
Submit Poems to Silver Door
Poems on Silver Door
Video of the Month
I started following Frank a few years ago after stumbling across his cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” He mostly does covers, and after his recent of “Creep” by Radiohead popped up (yes, I am very millenial) I was astonished to see his YT channel is quickly approaching 1M subscribers. When I first subscribed he didn’t have more than 15K. Just an older gentleman and his guitar.
Congrats on the new addition!