It seemed to be yet another year measured by headlines (or, for those held captive there, by Tweets). I expected my content to be hidebound to the news-cycle, as just about everything in life has become. But when I scrolled through the archives I was happy to find some exceptions.
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| "Drum-roll, puh-leeeeaze!" |
- I picked up Erik Davis’ High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience In The Seventies, and commented on its pertinence to this particular cultural moment here and here.
- I bought The Book of Weirdo and commented here.
- I read a Larry Norman bio (you wanna talk “high weirdness”?) and shelved it.
- I mulled over the capers of one Dan Maloney.
- And I cast a critical eye on our nation’s election results.
- The Mennonites in my village have been practising social distancing long before it became mandatory for all.
- Here is how a pious Mennonite kid could be a punk in Winnipeg, circa 1981.
- In 1983, fresh outta high school, I attended a Non-Denominational Bible College, and. . .
- . . . kept exactly one textbook from that weird year. Changed my life.
- In 1985 I went winter camping with a buddy. Six years later I read Snow Crash. It fits, trust me.
- Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse — not just staggeringly good, but the best MCU movie to date, period.
- My 10 Most-Listened-To Discs of 2019, plus a surprise bonus.
- The Bible Story by Arthur S. Maxwell, illustrated by various artists.
7 comments:
Hit hard with a head cold today (fingers crossed that that’s all it is), and catching up here a bit. Whether I’d read your post on Timberg last year I’m not certain, but anyway today am taking (with what concentration I can muster) a little time to learn about him. Can’t help noting our closeness in age — he was 50 at death, I’ll be 50 next month — and geographical coincidence in teens, just a few miles apart in Anne Arundel County. I’ve had a pretty rough few years and certainly experienced my share of episodes of suicidal ideation, as the lingo has it. April post was very much in the spirit of gratitude, the trend not being toward the worse, however challenging things continue to be. But whatever got him, last year, wasn’t reducible to disappointment with life merely, obviously, anymore than whatever’s sustaining me isn’t about the consolations and small victories. I do wonder, though, if I wouldn’t find it harder to be sustained at this point in my life if I had a son watching me, as he had.
* anymore than what’s sustaining me is about the consolations and small victories (merely)
thanks, head cold
Inquired through T., on phone with her parents this evening, whether her dad, who’d worked at the Sun in the ’80s, recalled Timberg Sr. He did, but didn’t really elaborate. Did mention this detail, though, that Timberg Sr. had been a classmate of his older sister’s husband, T.’s uncle, at the Academy in Annapolis — also Anne Arundel County, MD. Has me musing further on the space between the younger Timberg and myself, in class terms and so on, which take on sharp definition in my memories of place and personality in that little mid-Atlantic corner with the outsized reputation, where our lives overlapped for a few years.
I’d be much more cautious than Steve Wasserman is, here, by the way, about more or less laying Timberg’s suicide at Zell’s feet. Not a helpful way to think about suicide, I feel pretty strongly. Zell is nevertheless very much a villain for me, of course. A message you can expect me to belabor is the need for an ownership revolution in media. (Principal Brick House organizer Maria Bustillos was Timberg’s LARB colleague for a while, I note. Wonder what he’d say about that project.)
Your head-cold seems intent on directing me to Orthodox concerns :)
Guys like Zell (and there are a few too many like him) make it easy to get swallowed up in one's own rage, and despair. "Suicidal ideation" has entered my vocabulary too, alas. That being the case, I am extremely reluctant to lay blame for a suicide at anyone's feet, including the killer's. Though God knows (I hope) that Zell et al ain't helping.
Re: Brick House -- and Substack, etc -- must say I'm not sure what I think of it all. But it does get me thinking.
I'm pleased you're still here, btw. I'd miss you.
You’re personally a bigger part of what I’ve found sustaining me through those stretches, Darrell, than you might think. I certainly don’t take occasion to say that often enough.
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