June 5 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about some ways that elected Democrats have been failing their voters when they could be making real progress—and give one example of someone who is walking the walk. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

What do you love unabashedly? I’ve been trying to focus on that concept intermittently, because it’s easy to lose sight of it in a society that forces you to either a) check out entirely from current horrors or b) think about politics all the time to the exclusion of everything else. As humans—or maybe it’s just me—attending to multiple ideas on any given day can be difficult. But I refuse to think only about the grim destruction currently underway.

So for your weekend, here are just a few of my favorite human creations. (This is by no means a complete list.)

Toni Morrison’s Sula, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, the Aubrey-Maturin series, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Pale View of Hills, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones, Philip Levine’s “Sweet Will,” Lucille Clifton’s good woman, Ghost World, The Apartment, The Conversation, Blood Simple, Andy Shauf’s Norm, Television’s Marquee Moon, Allison Saar’s art, Kara Walker’s “Unmanned Drone,” Thelonious Monk’s “Green Chimneys,” Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, Philip Glass’s solo piano recordings, James Booker’s Junco Partner, Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Mississippi John Hurt’s “Ain’t No Tellin’,” Halldór Laxness’s Independent People, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Joe Henry’s “Flower Girl,” Robert Wyatt’s “Shipbuilding,” the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” the Kinks’ “Oklahoma USA,” Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.

Sometimes, I’ll even become attached to a single line that I love from a poem, as with this, from “After a Long Illness” in Robert Duncan’s Groundwork II:

“‘I have given you a cat in the dark,’ the voice said.”

I can’t think of a more vivid blessing to send out than that you might watch, read, or listen to something in the coming days that is the gift of a cat in the dark to you.

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