Crouching in a box of fetid air to keep my blood from boiling, I wonder how my molecules are doing and figure I should ask them. So I do.

Just fine, they say, but we don’t really do much besides fine. It’s a granular thing – leaving me to ponder their connotation of “granular”, since molecules need different stuff than that which they comprise, and how my eyes deceive me is a matter of mind. So I wonder how my eyes are doing, and I figure I should ask them.

We’d be doing better if you’d stop messing with us, they say. How that? I ask. Fingers and all the soil of your eternity, they clarify, leaving me to ponder what my eternity is. So I wonder how my fingers are doing, and ask them.

Fuck you, they say, we’re busy. Turn up the damn air conditioner. So I do, and in the process ask the air conditioner how it’s doing.

You’re killin’ me here, it says. And how did you know I’m sentient?

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NEW RELEASE :: I’m honored to announce that Collapse Press will be releasing a Second Edition of my 2021 book of poetry and flash prose Unit of Agency. What started as an effort to correct a few typos snowballed into a new printing with five additional poems, most of them substantial. It actually feels as if this is the book it was meant to be – and we’ve made it $5 cheaper. How do you tell them apart? Just look for the little green words at the bottom. This is a collection of what I like to call my “pissed-off leftie poems”, at least in shorthand; these pieces are implicitly more concerned with social justice and human struggle than much of my other work, and always seemed to need to live together. So we built them a house, which now has an addition. Dena Rod, author Scattered Arils and swallow a beginning, said of the book,

“Sharp and incisive, Unit of Agency cuts to the bone, echoing what’s always been present but shifted to the shadows. Balancing irreverence with an unflinching eye, Loranger pens anthems for the rebel hearted everyman and declarations against MAGA’s with bloody knuckles. Here is where we find what guts are made of: grit and determination.”

And Hilary Brown, author of When She Woke She Was an Open Field, noted,

“Unit of Agency is a gift of the tenderest rage, rage at its most righteous–against injustice, against inequality, against homophobia, against colonization and gentrification, against the dying of the light of humanity and human kindness.” Through his poetry, Loranger reminds us that none of us escapes this life innocent or unscathed. We are bruised and broken with blood on our hands, but we are also together. It is not a bleak view. The riches that capitalism and greed have stolen from us, Loranger gives back with poetry that is rich visually, auditorily, and, most of all, emotionally. These works are both ammunition and imperative. This is poetry that matters.”

If you’ve not had a chance to check it out, ask me personally for the most expedient copy. As well it’ll be available on Amazon later this month, and through Collapse Press as well. And if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, stop on by the release reading on November 16, noted below.

UPCOMING EVENTS :: On Saturday, November 9, I’ll be hosting After Math, a nice relaxing reading under a big old oak tree at Live Oak Park in Berkeley. This is a Steve Arnston shindig and therefore extravagant of word, meaning there’ll be eleven readers over the course of three hours. I’m hosting and not reading, but can’t wait to hear everyone! Check the Events page for details. :: Then on Saturday, November 16, Collapse Press is hosting a RELEASE PARTY for Thawing by Taneesh Kaur and the Second Edition of my 2021 book of poetry and flash prose, Unit of Agency, noted above. We’ll be at the Mercury 20 Gallery in Uptown Oakland, ready to rant at 5 pm. Taneesh and I will read selections from our books, which will be available for purchase. Hosted by Paul Corman-Roberts of Collapse Press. :: And if that’s not enough, on Sunday, December 8 it’ll be DADA time at Spec’s Bar in North Beach, for the San Francisco release of MAINTENANT 18, Three Rooms Press‘ annual Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art. If you’ve never been, you wanna, I guarantee. This yearly reading redefines “antic” again and again, and ups the ante every time. Be there! Or be confused at home. :: As always, deets for all on the Events page.

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Crouching in a box of fetid air, I strain to keep my blood from boiling. To ask how we came to this would be akin to wondering why we breathe: because we are. Yet if you ask, what happens if too many breathe at once, you are labeled as anti-human and pronounced accordingly. I’m told it is a sign of privilege to be concerned with overpopulation, but I’m yet to understand exactly why that is – and I mean exactly. Is it because I am educated (well, I’m somewhat educated) and therefore accusing less-educated people for not knowing better then to have too many children than they have the resources to sustain? But what if I’m not accusing anyone of having children, which I’m not, but rather pointing out the hubris of the species for inanely believing our superiority to any other species, the ecosystem, and the planet itself? Humans! So touchy and tittery, so thin-skinned and rancored, such babies we are! I suspect, though, that most humans, regardless of their level of education and for whatever reasons, don’t think of us in terms of species but rather of culture, nations, and individuals. So maybe the real hubris is idiots like me thinking the human landslide can somehow be reversed.

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PODCAST & VIDEO FAST :: I’m just finishing Week 22 of My 12-Month Video Fast, which is both an actual endeavor and a cockamamie podcast. I’m about to post the 17th episode (on Sat, Nov 2), which is called “Tree”, in which I defend asymmetry and take you on an unexpected wellness journey. If you want to know what that has to do with a video fast, you’ll have to listen in – or keep reading.

For those unfamiliar, on June 1, 2024, after streaming movies and shows and playing video games every day for years, I put my television in the Time Out Corner. In the podcast I describe how going without it for a year changes my home life, my health, and my creative life. At least that was the original idea, and it still is, but the ‘cast has gone in a lot of unexpected directions. And thank goodness for that, because who wants to listen to me saying, Boy I really wanna watch TV, over and over and over?

In the first 12 episodes, which run till August, I focused on shaking off that streaming and gaming addiction – which was less easy than I thought and is still a work in progress – and discuss a lot of (mostly) adventurous and misadventurous things I’ve done over the years which had nothing to do with television at all. I also do a deep dive into the book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, a couple of books on the workings of dopamine (the main pleasure-seeking neurotransmitter), and the notorious appeal of video games. Those eps amounted to what I call Chapter 1.

In Chapter 2, starting in August, I’ve been exploring more internal ways to curb the habit (or habits in general), focusing on things like moving the body, discipline and punishment, etymologies, and, now (maybe) trees. And wow the episodes are far more interesting than I just made them sound! Here are the teaser descriptions for a few random eps.

Week 0: The Time-Out Corner – In which the podcaster explains his motive and purpose for putting his television in the Time Out Corner for a year, and suggests why that might be of concern to you. 

Week 5: Intentionality and the Blackhawk Blues – In which the podcaster sees a ghost of his television, escapes from nuns, and gets unintentionally lost.

Weeks 10-11: The Final Fantasy of Commander Shepherd, Nora Witcher – In which the podcaster takes you down a rabbit hole but doesn’t guarantee he’ll lead you back out. But don’t worry, it’s not a real rabbit hole, not really. Or is it?

Weeks 19-20: Get-a-Job & Other Misnomers – In which the podcaster plays Telephone Games with prehistory, breaks down the industry of Western tradition, and leaves you with a pile of bacon. Mhe!

Sound intriguing? If you haven’t checked any of them out, click on the Podcast page and you’ll find them all revved and ready. You might also notice a page underneath that one (in a drop-down) called Episode Logos, in which you can check out the artwork for each and every one. They’re kinda pretty!

If you listen and you like it, let me know!

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The heat breaks and the world is still a mess but my skin begins to breathe. At least I think that’s my skin, though it’s more likely our skin. My box is the world again and all this breathing feels somewhat like hope. A river undisturbed. A plunge into the next. But that expedient box of air will linger, I think, for some time: 1,000 cubic feet sounds like a lot, but 10 x 10 x 10 with two desks, two filing cabinets, a bed, and an air-conditioner in the middle of the floor gets tiny fast. My cloistered cell. But isn’t that my body as well, or ours? We can’t go very far without it, that’s for sure. And that box of air might well be the future, as space shrinks and humans multiply and the trucks are just down the road and revving to scoop us all into bins. Soylent green is people, you know. In the meantime, I let myself live in my body for a minute, which I think many people do every day, and the luscious air washes me, and the birds in the distance call at their leisure, and many things seem possible, seem doable, and the quiet day allows me to think, They could all be like this.

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REVIEW :: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press, 2024)

I love novels and have read a great many, but I could probably count on two hands and one foot, if that, those that have swept me away from the first page and carried me like a river all the way through. I’m not thinking about thrillers that are designed to be page-burners but novels of nuance that expand my world. Blindness by Jose Saramago. The Handmaid’s Tale by (need I say) Margaret Atwood. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. A Hundred Years of Solitude. A Tale of Two Cities. [A few authors have styles that hook me in consistently: Vonnegut, Robbins, Stephen King (thinking of his more layered works).] And I’ve just found another one: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz. Read the first page and couldn’t put the cursed thing down.

Often I’m smitten by the intelligence of characters, but in this work I found myself trading that focus for perseverance. Not that Håkan (pronounced “Hawk Can”) Söderström is lacking in intelligence, and he does exhibit a remarkable inventiveness, but his perspicacity is often overrun by fear or anxiety. Indeed that flux is in some ways the engine of the work. This is no novel, though, of the hauntings of civility and manners; quite the opposite, it thrusts its character into the vast and uncivil wilderness of the Gold Rush and wagon-trailed colonialist era of Western America. And it leaves him there, a naïve and penniless youth with no knowledge of English, to survive or perish. And we watch him persevere.

I’m not going to spoiler the plot, which hovers between dreamlike magical realism and one of visceral barbarity, but it does paint a singular landscape of brutality and beauty, and more so of a man who grows into a towering self-determinism. That it is borne on a current of mistrust bordering on misanthropy, brought on by mad acts of greed and ignorance that he endures, only makes his perseverance mightier, and moment of kindness break through like most welcome rays of winter sun.

The book begins with a formidable and laconic Håkan sitting down to tell his story to a group of men ice-locked on a ship (ringing in echoes of Heart of Darkness and Frankenstein, perhaps purposefully). So it is not a tale of whether he survives, but one of how well he makes it through his trials and with what scars. As he wanders at times through almost hallucinatory landscapes, his purpose and will to live waxing and ebbing, his story becomes a study in the psychological elasticity of endurance, along with one of how myths and legends are formed in the popular mind (as he becomes one), and the harm they wreak on their subjects. But it is also, at least for me, a narrative so compelling and forthright in its relentless motion, one that is reactive and adverse to the Westward Ho of the settlers, that it unveils a fresh and stinging and revelatory world that I couldn’t help to want to endure myself.

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Box of air is all we have, is a sky-blue lav, is a greening sieve, is a tithing give, is a mind full of reeving, let me go, let me go, box of air, let me know all the space in there, let the oxygen come and humm and thrum and habit me, habit me, inhabit me till the dawn strikes red and the next world in is barely abed and the next one so is ready to go and habit me, habit me, gravid me, box of air having me, is all.

Sincerely,
Richard

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