Welcome to the 44th edition of Content Nausea. You can read No. 43 right here. Please let me know what you think. Thank you for being here. Here is the welcome blog.
I read Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems this week, and that led to me to dig up a Tumblr that I will not link to that was protected with the password “poems.” I took a poetry class in spring 2012 and made the Tumblr to store quotes I thought were interesting. There are also Japandroids, The Babies and Youth Lagoon lyrics on it:
Here are some selections from the Tumblr that provides a glimpse into my incredibly shaky headspace from the first half of 2012 for your Sunday evening:
So it ends
As it begins.
Off we climb
And no one wins.
—Thom Gunn, “Seesaw”
Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.
—Thom Gunn, “Jamesian”
I see him abandon himself
To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do
That the branch will not break.
—James Wright, “Two Hangovers”
The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,
And I see that it is impossible to die.
—James Wright, “Today I Was So Happy, So I Made This Poem”
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?
—Frank O'Hara, “Poem”
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive
—Frank O'Hara, “Steps”
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
—Frank O'Hara, “Steps”
I’m so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing
I’m so damned empty
what is all this vessel shit anyway
—Frank O'Hara, “Poem en Forme de Saw”
Back to our regularly scheduled programming later this week.
Some content I wrote this week
Breaking down the Eagles rookies at the bye.
A look back at the first eight games of the Eagles season.
How the Eagles got after Ben DiNucci.
Rodney McLeod & T.J. Edwards were in the right places at the right times in the Eagles win.
Some content I listened to this week
Currently sitting outside and listening to Caroline Polachek’s Pang while watching the sunset:
The 102k20 playlist is here:
I am very excited about the new Romy song (some might say a little too excited):
The Tomberlin EP is a good contemplative listen:
Dove back into Remember Sports this week:
Charmer’s ivy has been on repeat:
Some content I read this week
A lot of World Series stuff that I never really got around to sharing because I had a good thing about the Dodgers that I wanted to write, but I lost the momentum after the whole Justin Turner/COVID situation.
A Defector dispatch from Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Northeast Philly.
I was not a Salem early adopter, with most of my familiarity coming via Hipster Runoff in 2010 (though I was familiar with the infamous FADER Fort set). The music was more abrasive than what I wanted to listen to. I just wanted to listen to chillwave. But parts of Fires In Heaven go off, and Emilie Friedlander did a typically good job pinning down the band and where it belongs in today’s zeitgeist:
When the band rose to MP3-blog prominence in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the Midwestern three-piece of Holland, Donoghue, and Heather Marlatt had a knack for putting unemployed college graduates like myself in touch with how lost we already felt. I'm still haunted by the memory of a January 2010 performance at Brooklyn's Glasslands Gallery, when journeying down to a darkened warehouse on the Williamsburg waterfront still carried with it the thrill of something dangerous. (Now, the building is occupied by VICE). The band appeared on stage, openly smoking cigarettes as though they'd forgotten to extinguish them before emerging from the greenroom; the music they played felt less like a collection of songs than one continuous, deafening squall, punctuated by the odd sluggish trap bassline, slurred rap, and projected image of a burning cop car. When I got home that night, I remember laying in bed, worrying about how I was going to pay rent that month and listening to the Water EP on repeat: I couldn't stop thinking that this was music that sounded like what drugs must feel like. The disturbing part was that it felt good.
Analytics in high school football.
The search for the identity of “Mostly Harmless.”
Tom Scocca on “How the Awful Stuff Won” in The New York Review of Books:
From inside the content-making machinery of 2014, perched on the ledge of the ring at the Twitter arena, it was possible to feel a new future coming, shapeless and terrible, yet it all seemed too dumb to be real.
Drew Magary on Al Michaels in Defector.
As a man who lives with an unorthodox fridge situation, I was gravely offended by The New York Times’ fridge exercise.
Wallace Shawn on “Developments Since My Birth” in The New York Review of Books:
The country had been brutal for a very long time, from the beginning actually. And now the rhetoric began to mirror reality.
David Roth on the president’s son.
The author of ‘Astroball’ — who once sent me a weirdly unhinged Twitter apply at 4 p.m. in 2016 or 2017 because I noted that it was weird to write that a pitcher “possesses the wokeness” of not hewing to conventional wisdom, or something — reconsiders the Astros and the dark side of ruthless efficiency.
Garth Greenwell on making meaning in art:
I can’t bear the thought that art is a zero-sum game, that we have to choose which kinds of stories are relevant, which lives have value; I can’t bear the thought that works of art exist only at the expense of other works of art, that books are locked in some ferocious competition for space. Maybe there is virtue in rejecting any reality construed along these lines; maybe there are certain choices that so deform our character that no claim of necessity can justify them. Besides, the rhetoric of scarcity often turns out to be exaggerated. Our time and attention might be more like the loaves and fishes than we think. After all, we could always cancel our Netflix subscriptions; we could always delete our Twitter accounts.
A delightful piece on Anthony Davis from Louisa Thomas in The New Yorker.
An interview with Phil Elverum on ideas.
OK, the World Series content I stockpiled (minus anything Justin Turner-related):
Andy McCullough on Clayton Kershaw.
Pedro Moura on Mookie Betts.
Pedro Moura on Clayton Kershaw.
Jeff Passan on Clayton Kershaw:
A guy sticks around long enough, and you see him become the man he's meant to be. Kershaw is 32 years old, past his prime, more craftsman than conqueror. Although there's an almost irresistible instinct to measure our greatest athletes against what they once were and to nevertheless hold that as the idea of what they should be, it always felt unfair. Because for every unicorn who stares down Father Time and wins, a hundred others learn the vagaries of age, of regression, of a clock that ticks endlessly.
The acceptance phase is the hardest, and that's where Kershaw, he of the worst October reputation this side of the house that gives out Mounds on Halloween, lives today. He isn't what he once was, and he doesn't need to be because what he is impelled the Dodgers to a 4-2 win against the Tampa Bay Rays on Sunday. The win left the Dodgers one victory shy of their first championship since 1988 and Kershaw oh so close to getting sized for the ring that has eluded none of his pitching peers.
Jeff Passan on Game 4.
OK, cool.
Some other content (mostly tweets) I saw or thought about this week
Thank you for reading the 44th edition of Content Nausea. It will get better. Thank you, and see you soon.
[instrumental]
—D.G.