As a child, I squeezed extra hours of reading from each day by switching on the tape deck after lights out. I didn’t like surrendering my active mind to sleep, but I could let unconsciousness catch me unawares. Decades later, driven to desperation by insomnia, I unearthed old cassette tapes from my childhood bedroom and discovered that their comforts still worked on me. So I did the only logical thing and subscribed to Audible, the Amazon subsidiary with a near-monopoly on digital audiobooks, and before long I was catching up on contemporary fiction while I swiffered my floors every Sunday, speeding through classics while my dog decided where to pee. It’s a little embarrassing to admit how much this habit has come to mean to me. I’m sleeping better, but it’s not only that. The precise elocution of the practiced actor-narrators is often the only human speech I hear all day. I was lonelier than I realized before it entered my routine.
There have been plenty of debates about whether the phenomenon of Instagram poetry is “good” or “bad” for poetry in general. But aesthetic judgments about Instagram poetry, whether positive or negative, may be less interesting than the contexts for poetry—ones we often don’t talk about—that are revealed in our reactions to it. The rise of Instagram poets makes more visible the different poetry worlds that contemporary poets occupy, whose boundaries are not just aesthetic, but economic and institutional as well.
By categorizing light skin as the norm and other skin tones as needing special corrective care, photography has altered how we interact with each other without us realizing it.
The adage that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” has been ascribed to Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson and Thelonious Monk, among others. Undaunted, in “Why You Like It” Nolan Gasser attempts to explain the ineffable ways music produces sensations in listeners’ brains: its power to move people to tears, evoke awe and induce involuntary toe-tapping. Plus the odd proclivity of sad songs to seem uplifting.
And what now of dreaming?
We’ve failed the planet has published our failures.