Ephemera Newsletter Iss Oct.4
(Creativity and Motivation Weekly)
Welcome to the Ephemera Newsletter paid subscriber edition, Dostan (Persian for “friends”)
A fourth and final shortened issue basking in the poetry of Jack Stewart, Ephemera’s poet for the month of October! If you haven’t yet, please check out his artist statement and bio on this dedicated post. We thank you for your presence.
In Brief…this week’s features:
Thoughts on Robert Barnes paintings
Listening to Grime’s songs, “Genesis”
October’s poet, Jack Stewart’s fourth of four poems, “Extinct Marble”
Our weekly lists:
3 magazines with open calls
3 awards/prizes
3 recent job listings for editors and writers.
Interesante:
Book Recs, bonus content, and our mini-essays to start!
Last Week’s Letter.
Merci. Danke. Kiitos. 고마워 Go-ma-wo. Cảm ơn. Xiè xiè.
Ephemera
Dear Readers,
Quickly…the seasons slip away, rolling under the churning surf of the moment, every moment a breaking, a seepage, an ebb yielding another break. Plash plash. Quickly, now… We’ve only just crossed the threshold of October-November and the season chugs on, seemingly gaining speed until we’re on a feasting break, chug chug chug, a major holiday, chug, a time ceremony, chug chug chug, and then we’ve woken in the doldrums of winter, stalled out, icicle-tipped, inundated and we’re not sure how we got where we are or what to do about it really other than chug chug chug. We need plans for some weirdness. Some creative defiance. Anything to slow the slog or brighten temporarily beyond recognition. Invention is key during these times. Filtering through new-thinking, new-genres, new-tech. Chow down and decorate and pray and whatever else in the normal ways, but in between, look to defy and derail and redirect the crashing now with smaller increments of prodigious and weird jubilee.
“But I like to take aspects of that aesthetic [traditional femininity] that are really great and funnel them through noise music and stuff like that. The idea of the pop star really does appeal to me, even though I want to do it in a different way.”
—Grimes in tinymixtapes.com
Flambé your creative thoughts. Filter through something insidious, crazy, loud, opaque, or newfangled. Be a pop-star only, different, upside down, Grimes-y (see our write up on Grimes below). She treated her body as an experience avatar. She led herself down paths of discomfort, moderate risk, and the unknown for the good of her creative self. She took pop fundamentals and stuffed them with asymmetric noise music, with culturally unrelated riffs, hooks, and lilts, and then unlearnt formal training to sing over her creations intuitively. We can put anything back together in post production, when we edit and reread and rewrite. Be a bit wild. Let the surf tumble your body, stick you with a shell shank, ring you with water, turn you back and forth, and stuff your trunks with sand. When you’ve had a enough, stand up, towel off, and connect with the beauty that continues after your twist. Now we’re on to something. Now a merger of form and style with experimentation and poise can all coexist.
Sepasgazari
(Gratitude)
Poetry by Jack Stewart
Extinct Marble (When the final quarry is emptied, geologists call that type of marble extinct.) Certainly there are still slivers you could inlay into, say, the polished lid of a box, something that would show there is still some alive, at least in the imagination, the way a fossil animates a dry creek bed, or an ancient prayer just discovered energizes translation, the interlocking syllables so beautiful someone would mouth them for luck.
Music: Grimes
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