Bread and Bread

Go toward the fluorescent light. Yesterday I went to Terry Wolverton’s annual Poetry Month workshop (more of a craft talk, actually) and reading at Skylight Books . I feel like I’ve been absent from the literary landscape for a while, and when I think about going to events, I think about seeing a lot of people I know a little bit, and explaining (or not) why I’m bald. Mingling takes energy for me even with hair, even if I have some new publication credit in my pocket. But Skylight and Terry’s crew feel like home, so it was a nice way to get my feet wet. I became a fan of some new poets (Ashaki M. Jackson—and Andrew Wessels, whom I work with three days a week but hadn’t read before), and by the end of the panel, I was jotting notes toward some kind of poem of my own. It’s below, and rough. I had a nice weekend, but it was threaded with thoughts of death, the way even some of my nicest weekends are. I watched an episode of Mad Men , in which a woman diagnosed with terminal c...

I started bingeing on Mad Men a few months ago and finished season four, the last Netflix has to offer, Tuesday night. I love the show for all the reasons critics do—the writing, the exquisite muted painting that is each art-directed frame. All the characters simultaneously perpetuate and are broken by the worst of what mid-century America has to offer. There’s a great scene in which sexpot Joan and career girl Peggy smoke a cigarette and finally admit to each other that they work with a bunch of pigs who take them for granted. But it’s not just the girls who have it bad—Don has the instincts of a good man, but he’s always pushing them down with his desire to be the cool guy in the fedora. But the real reason I like the show is because everyone is so wonderfully unhappy. Advertising preys not only on people’s existential dissatisfaction, but on their insecurity as well—their belief that just beyond the gate, other people are happy. All the fucking time. And that gate is a Lucky S...