The Weekender: Moon metaphors, procrastinating monks, and a visit to a cheese factory
What we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week
This week, we’re hallucinating poems, working odd jobs, road-tripping between Oklahoma and Oakland, and missing our pilcrow deadlines.
Ed. note: The Weekender will be on hiatus next week. See you in the new year!
POETRY
Lunar phrases
Will Dowd begins this post by listing things poets have compared the moon to, from a nocturnal cyclops (Mina Loy) to a broken mirror (Adrienne Rich). Hoping to expand his search, he turns to ChatGPT, where things go a bit off the rails.
The Oak Moon 2024
—Will Dowd in The Lunar Dispatch
Eventually, having exhausted my personal memory of Moon-related poems, I turned to a large language model, which could quickly trawl every word ever written and supply me with other lunar lines.
Or so I thought.
According to ChatGPT, the Moon has been compared to:
A crystal mirror (Augusta Webster)
A pearl in the night’s black hand (James Weldon Johnson)
A lonely hitchhiker (Jack Kerouac)
A drunken dancer spinning across the endless void (Gregory Corso)
A darkened mirror reflecting life’s quiet despair (Gwendolyn Brooks)
The bloom of a white flower (Octavio Paz)
There was only one problem with these additional metaphors.
None of them were real.
The poets are real, but the lines and the poem titles are fictitious.
To the surprise of their creators, these AI generative models “hallucinate.”
They dream.
In my opinion, it’s the most human thing about them.
I, too, once hallucinated a poem by Octavio Paz.
I dreamed I was at a poetry reading by the deceased Mexican poet. “Don’t judge,” he beseeched us with a charming smile. The poem he was about to read was new and yet to be revised.
As soon as I woke up, I wrote the poem down exactly as I heard him speak it in the dream:
You have been living in italics for two years.
Go where the oaks die.
That is what the poet does,
turns the moon into a pen
bleeding through your breast pocket.
I take you to the store.
My horseshoes laugh
on the warm pavement.
I am happy to be alive.
I have died.
INK & ACRYLIC
MUSIC
Moonlighting
Musician Lael Neale’s song “Waitress at Night” is accompanied by a post that will resonate with any artist who’s ever been asked, “But how do you make money?”
Waitress at Night
—Lael Neale in Consensual Sound
My favorite book as a child was called The Carrot Seed. The story is about a little boy who planted a carrot seed. He tended it for days and days, but no carrot came up and his whole family said over and over, “it won’t come up, it won’t come up.” But despite his detractors, the little boy continued to weed the dirt and sprinkle the ground with water. When suddenly, one day, a giant carrot came up “just as the little boy had known it would.”
I feel that there was some inkling in my small, child soul that I would need to impress the moral of this story onto my heart for the journey of my life ahead.
This simple little book from 1945 is an allegory for the path of any artist.
It is an eternal act of faith to show up each day and tend to the plot of soil that is our mind hoping that something nourishing for the self and others will eventually grow from it. This is creation for the sake of creating. Gardening because we love the feel of earth on our hands and sun on our backs. The blossom or the berry is simply a byproduct of the joy of daily communion with nature. The song is the jewel rewarded to the one who enjoys daily mining of the psyche and the soul. We do it because we love to or else are driven by some other maddening force beyond our control.
But how do we feed ourselves as we wait for the carrot to grow? How do we live in a system that values the carrot only and not so much the hours, days, months spent tending and toiling and hoping and waiting?
We get jobs.
DRAWING
FICTION
A short story
The author Tommy Orange has taken to posting his short fiction to Notes. In this excerpt from the short story “Zebra,” a seemingly inconsequential fight between parents reverberates through time, space, and their son’s memory.
Zebra
— Tommy Orange, shared in a note
One
The past begins again every day. New as any Tuesday morning view of soft light through the kitchen window curtain. Memory is the elephant in every room. Watch it when you can, occur to you. Once you were looking through the front windshield of your family’s minivan on the way out to Oklahoma from Oakland. You had always been afraid of driving at night, afraid of what shapes your mind made shadows become. But up ahead you saw a whole field of lights like you’d never seen before, some vast array of brightly colored circles, fixed to poles so they looked like lollipops, as if for city systems to suck from. The longer you stared at the lights the deeper into them you went. To get away from the doomed sound of your parents scream-whispering an argument they would never remember. The fighting never stopped. Until it did. Disappear inside the lights was not what anyone told you to do when you did it so naturally, when you disappeared inside them like an egg back into its nested bird. Your sisters were whispering to you a darkness about your family, about your father, they were asking you if you thought he was an ogre too. Those days spent back and forth between Oakland, and that former Indian territory where your father was born, and where your mother was reborn, saved by Jesus and Jerry Falwell in front of the light of the TV on a dark afternoon your father had been too drunk to remember where home had ever been.
PAINTING
TRAVEL
A visit to a cheese factory
In which Molly Young takes a multi-sensory tour of a parmesan factory in Italy.
Touch the cheese
—Molly Young in The Life and Errors of Molly Young
Dawn broke gaudily over the cheese factory, exploding in Francois Boucher colors as milk trucks crept into the parking lot. Caseificio Gennari was established in 1953 in Collecchio, Italy, and is still managed by the founding family. It is a fairytale factory, with meadow views and paths lined in rosebushes and a vintage Porsche tractor resting near a persimmon tree at the entrance.
I was part of a little tour group that arrived one morning to witness the making of Parmesan. We were met by an employee named Cristina Moroni, who handed over packets of hygienic gear and showed us the way to a locker room. The star of the hygienic packet was a yolk-yellow jacket featuring a chic collar for no reason other than ornament, which is a reason after all, and not a bad one. Blue slippers and hairnets. In our sanitary garb we looked like Prada Minions.
Inside the factory it smelled of clean mammal and controlled funk.
Trucks pulled up and unloaded milk into tanks labeled according to type of cow.
“There is milk from brown cows, milk from red cows, and milk from black cows,” Moroni explained. “The red cow is the historical cow. But during the passing of time, the red cow has been quite dismissed. Why? Because he does not give us as many liters of milk as the others.”
Later we would taste cheeses made from the milk of each cow, including the coveted red cow. It was implied that only a moron would fail to distinguish between the milks.
[...]
[There] was also [a] room in which a crucial administrative task was accomplished: the labeling of the cheeses. Each wheel was numbered—“to avoid tricky or fake Parmesan cheese,” Moroni said—and stamped with a QR code that, when scanned, revealed a dizzying amount of information. A buyer located thousands of miles away—at a store in Manhattan like Eataly, say—could find out which cowshed domiciled the animal that had contributed her milk to his wheel.
While we marveled at this information, Moroni issued an unexpected order.
“Touch the cheese,” she said.
ART
Sleep deprived
—An illustrated poem by Jamal Robinson in Found Notes
HISTORY
Of monks and pilcrows
—Posted in a note by Nathaniel Roy
Do you know why we indent paragraphs? Monks missing deadlines.
¶ Before we had that space at the beginning of each paragraph, we identified new ones with the pilcrow (¶).
¶ When medieval monks painstakingly inked a manuscript, the scribe would leave an empty space at the beginning of the paragraph for the “rubricator” to later draw the pilcrow and other decorative devices. The monks did things assembly-line style.
¶ Two things happened. The first: these pilcrows and other decorative devices became increasingly elaborate and time-consuming to add. The second: the printing press was invented.
¶ Even before Gutenberg’s machine, monks occasionally would run out of time. But the much faster process, and a continuation of this time-consuming practice, meant that as the sheer volume of printed documents grew, it became impossible to keep up. “The rubricated pilcrow became a ghost,” Keith Houston writes in Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks. “Its brief reign as the de facto paragraph mark was over, usurped by the indented paragraph.”
¶ We indent paragraphs because of missed deadlines and unnecessary complexity. Isn’t that just the most human thing you’ve ever heard?
ILLUMINATION
FOOD
Seasonal sweets
Zimtsterne may be hard to pronounce, but this “addictive and joyously gluten-free Christmas treat” sounds simple enough to make—and enjoy—with the whole family.
Zimtsterne
—Jamie Schler in Life's a Feast by Jamie Schler
“Who could imagine Christmas without cakes and sweets? We could list them all, the good things that, especially around Christmas, emerge from the chaos of the home and the traditional baking pans under the creative intervention of capable hands.”
“Cinnamon stars with mulled wine have almost become a symbol for us. But we refuse to buy cinnamon stars by the pound. We want them to be baked at home.”
Cinnamon stars—Zimtsterne—are a Christmas specialty of Alsace, a cookie baked at home for the Christmas holiday season.
The history of these wonderful, chewy, star-shaped cookies is murky at best. Some date its first appearance in a cookbook—a German cookbook—to the early 16th century. The best I could find were a mere handful of mentions in local Alsatian newspapers from the 1930s: the first quote above from Die Neue Welt (The New World: Communist Party Organisation of Strasbourg), December 24, 1930, the second from Strassburger neueste Nachrichten—Strasbourg Latest News, January 1, 1935. No cookbooks, no magazines or newspapers in French. Nothing. Strange indeed. And yet these delightful, satisfyingly chewy cookies fragrant with cinnamon are fairly well known in France now, even as they remain a specialty of Alsace, a symbol of the holiday season, as was stated so very matter-of-factly in the newspapers above.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography: K.L. Rockwell, Young Space, Jessica W, shannon viola, Ava Behjat, Kika MacFarlane
Video & Audio: Lael Neale
Writing: Will Dowd, Tommy Orange, Molly Young, Jamal Robinson, Nathaniel Roy, Jamie Schler
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The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Alex Posey out of Substack’s headquarters in San Francisco.
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I continue to promote my Substack here! I do a series called a Poetry Postmortem where I break down a poem: https://themaplemoon.substack.com
I enjoyed this Moon Metaphor Substack.