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Plus, before I get into this, I wanted to say that A. David stopped by the house yesterday with a wrapped gift for me and Rich, which turned out to be his Christmas mixtape! It's a DVD full of pirated Christmas terror (terrifyingly bad Christmas specials and Christmas-iana, I mean) with a hand-illustrated cover and a cheeky warning on the back. 

He also brought in some unexpected packages from the front porch. And then he had to zip off to work, so we didn't chat at all XD But the packages were a fun surprise. One was a Gargoyles trade paperback that I didn't order, don't know why it was sent to me -- I assume something went wrong at the Gargoyles comics Kickstarter and I got sent a free extra as a mistake. The other was a huge box from Madelgard, full of wrapped presents and a birthday card that cracked me up (my favorite part was where she pasted an Andy Warhol Christmas tree painting, and then a picture of Warhol himself, with a speech bubble addressed to my very long nonsensical email address). 

The gifts she sent me were so on-point and hilarious -- an erotic Mr. Burns-themed zine called 742 Evergreen Ter., a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror mystery figure (Mr. Burns and Homer sharing the same body), and a hardback copy of "Desperate Passage" about the Donner Party, one of my favorite historical tragedies and something I love to read about during the winter. She didn't even know that, she just correctly assessed my vibes. 

Rich and I ended the night by rewatching It, Chapter 2, which was oodles of fun. 
( TE Lawrence, Gu Cheng, Carol Emshwiller )

( Tiptree, The Tenants, The Fates ) 

I got a little messed up on Days 4-5 because of going to Michigan with A. David one day, then working all day + going home to my parents' the next. But I still did my best XD

( Mickey and Minnie, F. Scott Fitzgerald )


( The Dark Room, Judas Iscariot )

( Upstream, The Elephant Man, Yuki Tanaka )

( A Hanging, The Yellow Bird, Glamor on the West Streets )

( Writing off the Subject, Rattlesnake, There Shall Be No Darkness )

 1. What's the first book you ever remember reading?

It's kind of a wild card -- I know it wasn't the first book I ever read, just the first I remember. My mom had a big leatherbound copy of Shakespeare's tragedies; it was one of her high school textbooks. When I was 4, Rich was really enamored with Shakespeare and with theatre in general, but he couldn't read yet. So we'd sit cuddled up together on the steps of our house and I'd read Romeo and Juliet to him. That was his favorite play, so we read it over and over again. I didn't understand a ton of it, but the illustrations helped, and I remember a few years later Rich and I would deface that book by painstakingly copying the illustrations, in crayon, in the margins. 

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 A. David and I had a phone call the other day where he told me he's doing the Bradbury Challenge -- apparently something Ray Bradbury said during an interview or lecture, where he challenged his audience to read one poem, one essay, and one short story every night before bed. A. David had been doing this for a while and really enjoyed it, and I thought it sounded fun too.

I did an inventory of the short story and essay collections I already have but haven't read yet and it's some good stuff but also a little sparse -- for essays, it's The Triggering Town (Richard Hugo, I think), Nobody Knows My Name (James Baldwin), Our Women on the Ground ("essays by Arab women from the Arab world"), White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion), Sexually Speaking (Gore Vidal), plus a T.E. Lawrence selection of essays and some science/nature-writing anthologies. 

None of these were immediately interesting and novel enough to entice me -- I've had them all for too long XD So I went on Internet Archive and did three searches, one for "poems," one for "essays," and one for "short stories" and came up with a pretty good selection for my first night.

Poem: "Memorial" by Audre Lorde. 

This is a short, rhyming, expertly-crafted poem in four stanzas about death/grief. Favorite line: "only those who stay dead / shall remember death." But I also love a line from the final stanza, something like, "we sit here beneath two different years" -- I like the implication at the last second that this isn't a conversation between a dead person and their living relative, but between two dead lovers sharing a grave. 

Essay: "That We Should Lie Down With the Lamb" by Charles Lamb, the Victorian fella who famously chopped up Shakespeare's plays and reformatted them into child-friendly abridgements. My parents got Rich an anthology of Lamb's Shakespeare stories when he was six or seven, and he was PISSED. 

It's a fun essay, though. Very short -- one page, maybe -- and very lyrical. It's all about candlelight and darkness: how light affects the senses, and how unnatural light (the candle) is better for your romantic, sensuous side than natural sunlight -- especially when it comes to creating art, and to understanding artwork that other people have made. Lamb argues that no good art has ever been made in the day (obviously humorously) and that the best way to parse said art is to do so at night with a flickering candle nearby. 

Short Story: "A Richer Dust" by Noel Coward. 

This is almost a novella, formatted in around 10 chapters with a prologue as well. It follows Morgan Kent, an ultra-famous Hollywood actor in the 40s, whose hungover day at the pool is ruined when his wife brings him a letter from his kid brother Sid. Morgan is first irritated by the fact that Sid uses his real name in the greeting ("Les" as in "Leslie") and then alarmed when he realizes that Sid's ship is stopping near L.A. and Sid will come to visit soon. 

The truth is that Sid's always been the better of them -- he's moral, hard-working, kind, loving. And he genuinely hero-worships Morgan, who doesn't deserve it one bit and is deeply insecure about it. He's simmering with rage during Sid's visit, humiliated by Sid's affectionate stories of their lower-class English childhood, and bitterly jealous of all the attention Sid gets for being a Royal sailor during the early years of WWII. He wishes secretly that Sid's ship will sink and he'll die -- and he gets that wish! Not long after, a telegram arrives informing Morgan that Sid is missing, presumed dead. 

Morgan's career really takes off after that. Everyone in Hollywood is soooo sympathetic to him about his brother's death; he plays Stoic Grief very well, and he gets the best roles of his life -- all in war movies, playing heroes. But his bubble bursts when an emaciated, haggard Sid reappears in L.A. for a surprise visit. Sid's ship did sink, but he survived for 10 days on a raft, was taken prisoner by the Japanese, escaped a POW camp, and is making his way back home. The media goes wild, and Sid gets the full Hollywood treatment -- mobs of photographers, invitations to the best parties, adoring press. It wearies Sid, and he's glad to return home to England -- and it infuriates Morgan. Worse, his next two movies are such awful duds that his contract is severed; he develops an ulcer that affects his acting, and the studio sends him on a humiliating USO tour. 

During that tour Morgan finds some measure of peace and is even looking forward to the tour's eventual end -- in England. He hasn't been back home since he changed his name and found fame in Hollywood. But his ulcer completely downs him, and the USO tour goes to England without him, while he recuperates. When he does finally go back home years later, his father is dead, his sister has two kids, and Sid is getting married himself. His mother is frail and elderly. There's a very melancholy tinge to this whole scene, and Morgan's briefly happy as he catches up with everyone. But soon they run out of things to say. He finds it odd that they won't talk about the devastation of the war; he's keenly aware that they were all here (or fighting), facing the bombs together, while he stayed in a mansion in Hollywood, unsure if the bombing of London was even a true fact or if it was just propaganda. 

Morgan stands to leave; his mother rushes after him to say one last thing in private. Morgan, and the reader, think it'll be something sweet or hopeful or sad, but instead, she tells him in a rush that she's awfully sorry about his ulcer -- but she also found the whole ulcer thing embarrassing, so she's told everyone it was a tubercular lung instead. 

I LOVED THIS. Dry, funny, kind of subtly sad, filled with quick little commentaries on patriotism, war (I love when Morgan goes to Canada to promote War Bonds and is puzzled and surly about the less-than-enthusiastic response), happiness, success, antisemitism, gossip, etc. It's also a great sense-and-vision depiction of Hollywood in the 40s. And I learned a new word for "spitoon" -- "cuspidor." Never heard that one before, sounds hilariously fancy. Morgan is a deliciously unlikable main character. 

---

I don't know if I'll update every day with the Bradbury Challenge, or if maybe I'll just do a weekly review instead highlighting my favorites. I'm keeping a written journal to go along with this, that way, regardless of what I decide re: Dreamwidth updates, I'll have some brief notes on each essay/poem/short story to refresh my memory.

Total: 9 books

-- Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (technically only read like the last 100 pages in November);
-- Walking Practice by Doki Min;
-- Penance by Eliza Clark;
-- The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis by Adams Mars-Jones and Edmund White;
-- All S/he Wanted by Aphrodite Jones;
-- The Zombie Pit by Sam D'Allesandro;
-- I Look Divine by Christopher Coe;
-- Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery by Casey Parks;
-- Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture by John M. Sloop/

I know I also read 1 or 2 books which were not findable on Goodreads, but I didn't note them down anywhere and they're slipping my mind. DEATH BOOK by Bruce LaBruce may have been one, but I think that was last month. 

Our Lady of the Flowers: New favorite book, probably my new favorite author. Wrote a short story inspired by the vibe, a quick little flash fiction piece about a prison guard, a prisoner, and their power struggle and sexual tension. 

Walking Practice: This is a very short novella, yet I couldn't torture myself into finishing it. I got 75% through before acquitting myself from the prison sentence. OK, it wasn't THAT bad, it just felt very derivative and boring; the prose was not nearly good enough to justify the fact that the story itself was just rehashing sci-fi concepts that haven't been new/exciting since the 90s. 

Penance: Hard to rate, mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was totally riveted and have actively recommended this book to two people. On the other hand ... this is a faux-true crime book with an unreliable narrator who is himself a skeevy true crime author. The book's real claim to literary merit is that it's a critique of the true crime industry. But other than some half-hearted swipes at the narrator, it doesn't exactly make any scathing points. Worse, as it attempts to indict true-crime exploitation, the book itself exploits a real true-crime case. It was so blatantly based off Shanda Sharer's murder that I recognized her case without being told -- I'd read Aphrodite Jones' true crime book on Shanda a few years ago and recognized it immediately. 

I also think that just having an unreliable narrator is not in and of itself impressive, especially when, like in Penance, that unreliability never amounts to much. It doesn't have anything to say; knowing that he's unreliable doesn't really inspire deeper thought about the narrative. We're told exactly which parts he lied about and why. The unreliability isn't meaningful or significant, it's Just There. 

The Darker Proof: This is a collection of AIDS-related stories by two gay authors, one British and one American, all published in the late 80s. Excellent stories. IIRC the blurb on the back claims it's the first AIDS collection with literary merit, and while I can't say it's the *first* I can definitely confirm it's literary -- meaty prose, and each story presents with a casual everyday-life veneer that you can really dig into and think about for a long time. 

All S/he Wanted: I wanted to reread Aphrodite Jones' Shanda Sharer book after Penance, but I got distracted and reread this instead. It's about the Brandon Teena story, and I did write a lengthy analysis of the book in a previous post. If you didn't read that (because it's very long and manic), All S/he Wanted is the first + only full-length nonfiction book about Brandon's life and death, and it's both highly valuable and highly ... chewy. Jones flip-flops between pronouns, indulges in some sneering transphobia, sympathizes at times with Brandon's killers, and casts some irresponsible aspersions on certain real people's characters. She also does her typical shoddy journalism, failing to cite sources, admitting outright that she fabricated or fictionalized elements without marking those scenes so readers know...

The Zombie Pit: Short stories by Sam D'Allesandro, a gay writer who died of AIDS at 31, just as his literary career was taking off. These stories are, imo, even better than The Darker Proof, which I already gave 5 stars. There's an almost-magical surreal quality to these, while at the same time they're very slice-of-life. Time slips, sexuality slips, reality slips. But you never feel unmoored. The details are so crisp and the characters are simultaneously so real and so enigmatic that you always feel grounded. 

I Look Divine: This is a wonderful novella, Christopher Coe's first; it's a first-person narrative from an unnamed man who is inspecting his younger brother Nicholas' apartment after Nicholas' murder. The narrator moves back and forth in time to paint a picture of Nicholas, who is vain, gay, incestuous, and entirely unknowable -- even though the narrator has known him literally his entire life. It starts with a story of 7-year-old Nicholas tweaking his brother's balls during a Christmas photoshoot and ends with a haunting examination of a photograph of Nicholas as a young, beautiful man wearing a kimono, compared to the never-described un-beautiful old man that Nicholas inevitably became. 

Diary of a Misfit: A fun and frustrating read. This is a memoir by Casey Parks, a butch lesbian who grew up in the South in a highly volatile, religious family. When she came out as a lesbian in 2002, Casey learned that her grandma was once in love with a man named Roy: a local country singer who was handsome, sweet, and secretly AFAB. Casey becomes obsessed with learning more about Roy, and for more than a decade she returns periodically to Louisiana to hunt down Roy's acquaintances and find the diaries he kept religiously until his death. 

Part of what made this so interesting is that Casey is from the same general area my ex-wife is from, so I recognized all the small towns. The town where Roy lived, Delhi (pronounced Dell-high), is one my ex and I visited so we could meet up with her ex-boyfriend, a white trans man a little older than us, about the same age as Casey Parks. 

What made it frustrating is that it's very much billed as Roy's story, not Casey's -- and that's very much NOT how the book shakes out. I'd say 90% of the book is a straight memoir about Casey's childhood and adolescence; the remaining 10% is about her search for Roy, which is in itself very frustrating. While Roy is still alive, Casey makes no effort to find him; after his death, she frequently chickens out of interviewing his friends and searches for excuses to justify why she canceled. By the time you hit the last 100 pages, you've completely lost your optimism and you're certain she's never going to find out anything more about Roy than what her grandmother told her in Chapter 1.

But the ending really hits amazingly well. Casey's story hits hard, for sure, and connects more solidly to Roy's, via their mothers -- Casey's abusive opioid-addicted mom, with all her complexities, and Roy's forgotten mother, who may have kidnapped him when he was a toddler. And finally, Casey's investigation into Roy hits pay-dirt. She finds his diaries and shares excerpts with the readers -- at some point you might think, "Fuck you, I don't want excerpts, I want the full diaries!" but Roy was a day-laborer whose diaries primarily consisted of, "I mowed Jane's yard today, the weather was cold," so you kind of simmer down and trust that Casey's pulled the important parts for you. And the parts she does pull are extremely affecting. 

Disciplining Gender: This was a fun but very dry academic book with chapters on Brandon Teena, David Reimer, and k.d. lang. The first two chapters focused on media reactions to Brandon and David Reimer (Reimer was the boy from the John/Joan case -- his penis was damaged during a circumcision and he was surgically altered and raised as a girl, then asserted his gender identity around the time he hit puberty). The k.d. lang chapter was the most interesting to me, positing that her gender presentation was most troublesome and confusing to the general public *before* she came out as a lesbian -- that people were more bothered by her when they couldn't categorize her easily, and that when she did come out, the public breathed a sigh of relief and happily sorted her into a new musical genre where she "belonged." 

Overall, the only book I disliked was Walking Practice; the books I'm most ambivalent toward are Disciplining Gender, Penance, and All S/he Wanted; everything else was 5-stars. 

Stolen from huxleyenne 

The rules are simple — bold what you've read, italicize what you intend to read, and underline what you loved. I've read 53 out of 100 books and am largely uninterested in the rest, tbh. Many of them are books I've started in the past and put down without regrets. There's a very distinct vibe to this list, and when I finished reading it, I realized what it is -- it's all the same books stocked at my Christian elementary school library, and/or the local Walmart, when I was growing up! 

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I've read The Hobbit and enjoyed it, but not enough to keep reading the series)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (I do love the King James version...or parts of it)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

 Total: 

September: 4 books

-- The Official Boy Scout Handbook (1970s) by William Hillcourt;
-- SUPER LOVERS Vol. 1 by Miyuki Abe;
-- The Rats by James Herbert;
-- Nam by Mark Baker.

The Boy Scout handbook was useful for "Cry of the Loon," since Ira was in the Scouts as a kid; "SUPER LOVERS" was a random manga I saw on a "BL nostalgia" video, and it was the only one I'd never heard of. Cute art, wildly funny dramatic storyline; I may have actually read 2-3 volumes but didn't bother to log them on Goodreads. "The Rats" is a very fun, compact horror novel from the 60s or 70s, set in London's slums, where foreign mutant rats start devouring the locals. Very class-conscious, excellent at making you fall in love with a character within one chapter (because, of course, that's all they get before they're eaten alive. By rats.)

"Nam" was a collection of anonymized first-hand accounts of the war from American soldiers and medics, which was very interesting. I think this for every Vietnam book, but it's wild how many of them have a reputation as being viciously pro- or anti-war, and then you read them and you're like, "...which part?" The pro- or anti- sentiment is almost indistinguishable with all of them. "Nam" was supposedly anti-war, and I'd say it does a good job of not glorifying the war at all -- it shows the gruesome immoral aspects of that war in nauseating detail, especially when the doctors tell their stories of patient neglect and racism. But that vicious, graphic detail is also shared by "pro-war" books I've read, like "On Killing." 

October: 10 books

-- Foe by Iain Reid;
-- Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt;
-- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut;
-- Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov;
-- Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis;
-- Fantastic Orgy by Alexander M. Frey;
-- Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood;
-- David Lynch: Someone is in My House by David Lynch;
-- Death Book by Bruce LaBruce;
-- Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet.

DNF'd: Walking Practice by Dolki Min. This was hyped up so much and I found it ... a struggle. Bland, repetitive prose, and I couldn't get into the main character or the set-up at all. It felt like a less successful Murder Bot, and I already didn't LOVE Murder Bot. "Walking Practice" is very similar: it's about an anxious alien who's been stranded on Earth for years and feels disconnected from humanity and convinced of its own worthlessness/evil nature. Like Murderbot, it's genderless; unlike MB it's very sexual, and it feeds off humans by assuming appealing forms, seducing them, and then eating them when they're at their most pliant, post-orgasm. Sounds great; wasn't. I got like 76% through it before I stopped torturing myself.

Started: Desperate Living by John Waters. It's a screenplay so I just pick through it when I want a laugh. 

"Foe" and "Tell Me I'm Worthless" were the only less-than-stellar reads this month, everything else got a full 5 stars. "Foe" is just an okay thriller; excellent at the start, horrible by the end, overall just average. Iain Reid is more famous for "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," which I haven't read yet, despite buying it as soon as it came out! It wasn't famous yet at the time, I don't think, but I saw it in the horror section, and the title really appealed to me...

"Tell Me I'm Worthless" is my new worst enemy. God, that book. It was so bad that I live-blogged my entire reading to Madelgard, and force-fed screenshots to her to prove I wasn't exaggerating. It's got to be the most unsubtle, condescending, smug book I've ever read. There's a constant air of "I know you, my readers, are stupid as hell, so I'll have to spell this out for you: FASCISM IS BAD!!" Like yes, I know??? I agree?? Why are you interrupting the narrative AGAIN to explicitly tell me that the monster in this horror book is a metaphor for fascism? It's not even a metaphor at this point, it's just a haunted house that you keep reminding me is LITERALLY FASCISM INCARNATE. Agh!! 

(I also felt that there was a weird assumption -- very telling about the author -- that everyone secretly hates their minority friends, and is just constantly teeming with bigoted thoughts about them?? I don't think that's true, and I think it's a sad way to view the world; AND if you insist that everyone thinks that way, then ofc I'm going to assume YOU think about minorities that way, and I'm not going to feel inclined to listen to a lecture from you about social justice. Don't tell me that you hate Jewish people and then presume you're qualified to lecture about antisemitism because you know it's bad. Yes, everybody has internalized bigotry of various kinds, but I don't think it's helpful or correct to assume that your cis straight friends are constantly thinking, "Ugh, I'm so embarrassed to be seen with a trans woman. Trans women are just so gross, you know? So gross and degenerate. Evil, in fact. I mean, I like THIS one, but OBVIOUSLY if a trans woman ever came onto me I would kill her." I mean, god... "When I hang out with my Jewish friend, I can't help but think about how Jewish people run the world and are actually super evil...maybe we should exterminate them...? but I know that's bad and wrong of me, so I'm officially qualified to teach YOU, dear reader, about fascism!" No, you know what, I will accept a lecture on fascism but I'd like it to be from someone who isn't constantly mentally shouting slurs)

"Our Lady of the Flowers" and "Dykette" were my favorite reads of the month, I think. This was my first time reading Jean Genet and he may be my new favorite author. Everything in this book is so lush, so sexual. It's a hypnotic mix of fairy-tale sugar and disgusting bodily fluids, all rendered with the same affection and eroticism. "Dykette" has an average rating of 3 stars, so it's not for everyone, but I had a CRAZY good time reading it -- it follows three lesbian couples over a 10-day Christmas vacation they share together. An older, settled couple (Jules and Miranda) hosts, and the story is narrated by Sasha, a young insecure femme dating butch artist Jesse. Sasha is obsessed with Jules, the older butch, and viciously jealous of Darcy, the femme part of the other young couple who joins them. It's a very funny, kind of sad examination of butch/femme dynamics, the nature of camp and performance in queer relationships ... and I think there's a hefty element of, like, "Is it WRONG to want to perform, and have others perform with me? It's annoying for SURE, but is it *wrong*?" Which I thought was excellent, because a lot of classic femme performance involves behaviors we've started to call out as toxic. It reminded me a lot of my ex-wife, who was definitely the stereotypical femme. 

Is it bad to be a stereotypical femme? A performance femme, I mean, not just a lesbian who happens to wear makeup? I don't think so. But are there going to be issues in a relationship like that --? For sure. Communication issues, drama, all kinds of delicious things to read about (and to experience, to a certain extent, if you enjoy dramatic highs and lows). 

I also really enjoyed the one-two punch of Fantastic Orgy and Goodbye to Berlin, which were written during the same period, one by a straight German author and one by Christopher Isherwood (gay, English). Isherwood gets a lot of flack, or maybe it's mostly self-flagellation, about his ignorance re: the rise of fascism in Germany at the time, but Goodbye to Berlin definitely faces the issue head-on -- it's not the focus of the novel, but it is the heart and theme. Whereas Fantastic Orgy references it only obliquely, metaphorically, if at all. Still, both were excellent and moving. Fantastic Orgy is much shorter and more bizarre, sort of sci-fi/fantasy: there are automatons, freak shows, magical gardens filled with rich people and tigers, fairy-tale type stories of beggars and aristocrats. 

Death Book and Someone Is in My House are both art books by directors Bruce LaBruce and David Lynch. Death Book is photography only, explicit queer photos of death, similar to Yukio Mishima's Death of a Man but more gory. I mean, REALLY gory! "Someone Is in My House" is mixed-media art by Lynch, including standard paintings, photography and sculpture, matchbook drawings, etc. Both excellent.

And then for Transparent Things and Mother Night -- neither had a super-affecting story, emotionally, but both were great. Transparent Things follows a man named Hugh Person (insert Brian Griffin writing joke here: "I'll call my protagonist Norm, because he's Normal. That's one for the scholars 100 years down the line.") who goes to Switzerland for the third time in his life, and the story cycles back through his memories there -- the death of his father, the day he met his wife, etc. Mother Night follows an American double agent who wrote propaganda for Nazi Germany but also smuggled messages to the American military, and it deals with the question of identity and what you become when you "pretend" to be something -- whether the main character, Howard, really was a Nazi or not, whether it matters, whether he deserves to die. 

Overall a great month of reading. 

Total:

-- If the Stars Wish for Happiness by ... Wang Mo? I can read the name in Chinese but not Japanese, yet T__T
-- A High School Girl & a Widow: Till the Day I Kill You by irua
-- A High School Girl & a Widow: Till the Day You Kill Me by irua
-- A Chance of Yuri by irua
-- The Evil Friendship by Vin Packer
-- You're My Sunflower by Wang Mo (but not actually Wang Mo)
-- Aoi is too hot for me to handle by Yanqi Momota
-- Whisper His Sin by Vin Packer;
-- One Last Run by Bryce Oakley
-- Couple of the White Room by Ryoko Yamagishi
-- Big Name Fan by Ruthie Knox
-- Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany by Rudolph Herzog
-- My Dearest Father by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
-- Another by Paul Tremblay

Also started reading Beebo Brinker and Moral Panics. 

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 Me: would you like to do this interview in-person, on Zoom, or over the phone?
Interviewee: Sounds good
Me: It's whatever you're comfortable with, so would you rather it be in-person? Or virtual?
Interviewee: Okay

It's Rich's baby, not mine, but it's excellent imo. It's here on itch, and Rich is gonna print out a few copies if anyone wants one. It's his poem, How to Grow Mold in a Petri Dish, with illustrations. And the poem is so good it makes me want to gnaw my leg off and bury something foul in a shallow ditch.