Ephemera Newsletter Iss Nov.4

(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)

Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter, Მegobrebi! (Georgian for “friends”)

Thank you for your presence. Coming to you a tad late. We were so far in a rut that we barely escaped. The mire of the late-late fall is real. Take heed! As a note, we’ll bring you 4 issues in December all the same, our last issue being a vacation week issue which will be shortened considerably, but will contain some essentials and our December Poet, who is yet to be named. Until then, please enjoy our final November issue!

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On to our standard content matters: Won’t you please check out last week’s issue if you missed it.

And here are some reminders:

• Our letter can be cut off by emails! Please remember to click around any cut-off point and or try reading us on Substack.com or through the app.

• Call For Submissions: Submissions are in for the January issues. We are open for February now. December 31 is the deadline. If you are a paid subscriber to Ephemera, you can submit to poetry @ Ephemera for free as a membership perk! (We email you a secret link at the end of the month). Free subscribers and anyone else can submit, too, with the reading fee and can submit up to 10 poems. Paying the reading fee will grant you 1-month paid access to Ephemera’s full letter. Learn more or:

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In Brief…this week’s features:

• Thoughts on Gang Starr’s style and individualism via “You Know My Steez.”

• Thoughts on Arnulf Rainer’s destruction of forms, blackenings, and over-paintings.

• September’s poet, Freya Rohn and her fourth of four poems, “Ars botanica.”

• Our weekly lists:

  • 3 magazines with open calls

  • 3 awards/prizes

  • 3 recent job listings for editors and writers.

• **No sponsor this issue: Sponsor our letter! Reach out to info@Litbreaker.com to advertise with us.**

• More ephemera:

  • Interesante selection: How the brain distinguishes reality from hallucinations.

  • Book Recs

  • Our mini-essays to start!

• Support us on Bookshop - See our past book recs and others. A highly curated list.

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Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.

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Ephemera

Dear Readers,

The tortured artist might be a trope because of the necessary obsession with attempting original work, with being not who we are in order that we might rise from the ashes of self-immolation enhanced spiritually as a new creative phoenix by whose wings we’ll deliver fiery brilliance. This week’s artist, Arnulf Rainer, has us more fully understanding that long known artist trope. Rainer, it might be said, tortured himself through dissatisfaction to the point of un-learning his craft by painting blind over self-portraits. Read the pull quote below, and others from Rainer, which we’ve included in our artist analysis mini section below…Rainer very much suffered for his art, by his own hands, the act of self-erasure and blackening art as a manifestation of an internal struggle. We get it now. How self torment might actually yield. It’s not just the malaise of unproductivity that does it. It’s hating what you have in order to be willing to destroy it (yipes…kill yer darlings?), in order to create an unexpected non-you you-styled objet d’art, a quest for a taste of originality quintessence. Eh, it might also be that being alone in a room or corner for too long leads to masochism, nothing so glamorous. But maybe!

“I am tormented by a constant feeling of dissatisfaction.”
—Arnulf Rainer from Tate.org.uk

And maybe a prescription of focused self-torture can yield unexpected results. Ice bath studies suggest health benefits, sauna sessions and fasting too. These are flirtations with annihilation that cause the body to react and become more healthy. In a way, because of western lifestyle-ism, we’re falling apart from sheer over-comfort. Rats that calorie restrict leave significantly longer. Rat colonies dosed with bits of cocaine, i.e. dopamine bliss, self-destruct in the bad, irreversible way with no creative benefits of flirting with decay. December looms and the cold might offer us, experienced in seething blips, a type of rescue from malaise or feeling bored of our practice. We’re not recommending anything severe here, but we are wondering about the nature of adversity and restriction as a dark side of the equation of creativity. All those drug-abusing stories of artists past might have been the true means by which they ascended. Which is a shame, but also, being the smart sojourners of the current now-future, we know not to destroy ourselves, but maybe push our limits in controlled ways, a la ice dips. At the very least, bring a bang-inflation-deflation-bang-again approach to your pages. Create, destroy with panache and or pain—all things available—recreate, expurgate, cut, rewrite, dismember, rearrange, restore, cut, write blind, save what works, enhance and hone. In our drafts, on our pages, we can menace and be menaced, for sure. Severely and even exquisitely.

Madliereba!

(Gratitude!)

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Dec 1 Deadline for the January Issues

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Poetry by Freya Rohn

Ars botanica

Up from graven soil
they move
through dirt
we use for cover
excavate for answers—

but they need no digging—
they are simply
through—
air, water, leaf

seeking oceans of light
so that we may cut—
place on those we bury

for a resurrection more
gentle—

here is surely
holy spirit if there
ever was one—

to breathe
between seed cote
and soil—transubstantiate—

green embodied, knowing
earth even through
asphalt, macadam

moving so soundlessly
they escape notice.

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Bookstore: Guides, Gifts & Classics

Please consider supporting our letter and literature by buying books. It helps us and others! Bookstore via Bookshop.

What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing

From Last Week’s Artist: Bridget Riley

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Music: Gang Starr