Songs and livestreams and crosswords and such

Well, it’s been pretty uneventful since January 2020, no?

Since the pandemic, I have left the house a dozen times maybe, but I’ve also been doing a few other projects. First, Mikey and me, we decided to go through the alphabet, day by day, covering a new song for each letter. It became a little less day by day as it went on, but we made it from A to Z. Oh, and we stole the idea blatantly from Grace Petrie and Ben Moss, who, at time of writing, are at it again.

We're all stuck inside for the duration and we're going to record a cover song for each letter of the alphabet until we don't. What should we do for B? Here ...

What else. Well, the podcasters over at Megaphonic decided to keep our sanity by playing Jackbox games once a week (i.e., a video game series of a party games that can be played over the internet). Then we started livestreaming them. In the most recent episodes, we’ve started branching out into other games. It’s been fun.

Your Megaphonic podcasters and their special guests play Jackbox games! Live! Fridays at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific, 9:30pm Newfoundland.

But once you start figuring out how to livestream, you might do other things with it. So I started up a long-dreamt-of project, a panel show where panelists have to draft their picks on a certain topic. It’s called Take Your Pick, and it’s based on the draft episodes of the lovely podcast The Incomparable (with host Jason Snell’s permission; they borrowed the format from someone else, after all). It’s been a lot of fun.

Join your Megaphonic podcasters and their friends as they draft the best... Children's TV shows? Lord of the Rings characters? 90s music videos? Take Your Pi...

But once you’ve figured out how to do that… I started a daily show on Megaphonic’s Twitch channel called Wordgarbling, where I solve The New York Times crossword puzzle and other word games. This is a nice morning hang. I need to start clipping some of the “best” moments from the stream. But that then led to discovering a bunch of other interesting crossword puzzle constructors, and to me making some crosswords of my own.

Oh, and I made a virtual museum.

That, in addition to my podcasts It’s Just A Show and The Spouter-Inn, have been keeping my busy. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things… Or maybe there are a few things in works that I’m not ready to talk about yet. But that’s the update. Stay safe.

The Key to All Mythologies

Oh, I haven’t updated this in a while. Well!

I had an essay published in a book (that I also designed) called How We Read: Tales, Fury, Sound, Nothing. Mostly it’s a bunch of person essays about the difficulties people have had with reading. My essay absolutely fits that description.

One of the editors of the book, Suzanne Akbari, started up a bookish podcast with me, The Spouter-Inn; or, A Conversation with Great Books. We’ve had a successful first year, talking about lots of great books and inviting on lots of interesting guests. I also took over from Beth, who had to leave It’s Just A Show for family reasons (and that isn’t code for scandal this time!), so now I co-host and produce it. Oh, and Megaphonic started up a Patreon: Please help support us, and then you can listen to some superfan bonus feeds and join us in a members Slack where, whatever we talk about, we always seem to return to Middlemarch.

Speaking of Middlemarch, my music project Theme Squad just put out a short album called The Key to All Mythologies. It’s on all the streaming services, or you can listen to it below. It’s instrumental (again), and moody, and maybe you’ll be into it? Here, listen to it below.

You Have the Rest of Your Life.

IT IS THE YEAR 2018. In this far-off future, you are one of the lucky ones: An employee at one of the five giant corporations who make up over half the world’s economy. You don’t know the extent of your employer’s activities. You’re not sure anyone does. You are a small cog in a vast engine of economic power. But your job provides you with a good salary and some interesting challenges, and it is surely better than the alternatives. It’s gotten rough out there. 

And then one day, after the launch of a revolutionary new product (that you had no small part in developing), your team leader holds a celebration on the rooftop of the building. Your contributions to the project are singled out for praise—but then again, so are everyone else’s. After small talk and celebrations, you wander away from the party to take in the magnificent views of the city. 

After a while, you notice a pigeon on the guard rail you’ve been leaning on. It too seems be to taking in the city views. The city has changed dramatically even in the short time you’ve lived here, sprawling outwards and upwards. Even the building you work in—with its austere hallways, magnificent atriums, and endless shared workspaces—is new. And you wonder: Does the pigeon realize it has alighted on something that didn’t exist even three years ago? Does it know how much things have changed? 

The pigeon abruptly flies away. You follow its flight for a while, but soon lose track. 

* * *

Theme Squad, the band under which I have been writing music for podcasts, has put out a new album: You Have the Rest of Your Life. An album of instrumentals, mostly chill, mostly downtempo. Perfect for writing, for driving, or for staring off into the middle distance, wondering how we got to this point and what will come next.

Available on Bandcamp (or on all the major streaming services). Enjoy.

Megaphonic FM

Today, after a fair amount of sweat, we have launched Megaphonic FM, a network of fancy little podcasts. I'm involved, in some way, with all of them, but I'm still producing It’s Just A Show, and now I co-host You’re Not Funny. That's a show in which I talk about comedy with Adam, who has actually done standup and whatnot, and I try to actually push myself to doing some comedy, publicly, instead of just thinking about it and wonder if I could.

I'm also the guest on the first episode of This Is Your Mixtape, where I pick five songs from different stages of my life and talk about them. I’m pretty happy with how the interview came out.

There are more podcasts on the network (well, one more, for now: click on the link to find out about it). I’m super excited to have a platform to explore what this medium can do, and to work with others to help them develop their ideas. Stay tuned. Or, rather, subscribe. That way new ideas can land in your podcast app of choice. It’s nice.

The poet and the fly

This is an introduction I wrote for David Hadbawnik's fascinating translation of the Aeneid: Books I-VI. You can read an interview with him (or two) or a review (or two) of the book for more information. But yeah, go get a copy of the book, now.

 

iamque faces et saxa volant—furor arma ministrat

Publius Vergilius Maro—who we call Virgil—lived through the rise of Julius Caesar, during the final days of the Roman Republic and its reformation into an Empire under the rule of a single man, the emperor Augustus, his patron. The Aeneid was written as this new Roman Empire’s foundational myth, and not only the poem, but also the writing of the poem became part of the foundational myth of empire. We are told that the work was not quite finished when Virgil died, and that he asked for it to be burned upon his death, but that Augustus—the emperor, the patron—having the final word in these matters, insisted it be published as soon as possible. Augustus wanted his foundation. The empire built upon this poem lasted for centuries. The Aeneid became a cornerstone of Latin education, the sort of thing one had to memorize in school: It was everywhere. Even after the Roman Empire collapsed, the Aeneid was everywhere. Now it was just the foundation of an educated mind, the sort of school text that was important because it was important, familiar because it was familiar. New and unexpected ideas grew on this foundation. Virgil’s poetry was understood as a pagan prophet, whose writings told of the coming of Christ. The Aeneid was, at times, a source of prophesies, of fortune telling; open the poem to a random page, let your finger alight upon a line, and you will find the oracular answer to any question. In twelfth century Naples, the idea arose that Virgil was a magician. John of Salisbury writes that Virgil once asked someone whether he would prefer a bird to be created that could capture birds, or a fly that could kill flies. He created a fly; the fly killed flies; Naples was free from flies, or from all flies except Virgil’s fly.

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