Beyond journalism

Dear friends,

This morning, I read Hanif Abdurraqib’s marvelous New Yorker essay “In Defense of Despair.” In it, he talks about being part of a support group of people “who, like me, are constantly working through how to actively engage with a world that can feel relentlessly untenable, like a shoddy amusement-park ride accelerating into the sky and attempting to eject us all from our flimsy seats.”

The members of Abdurraqib’s support group have, at times, wanted to die. But no matter how strong your will to live might be, who among us has not experienced this world as relentlessly untenable?

 From the essay (which you can read here if you hit a paywall above):

We open each meeting by asking a simple question: What is keeping you alive today? This allows us to revel in the sometimes small motions that get us to the Next Thing. Yes, I did not want to get out of bed this morning, but there was one single long shard of sunlight that stumbled in through a tear in my curtains, and the warmth of it hitting my arm got me to that first hour of living. There was my dog, who, on the mornings I do not want to get out of bed, will rest silently at my feet and wait for me to slowly emerge from under the covers, and seeing her reminds me that I do, in fact, have only one lifetime in which I can love this animal. As far as I know, we will love each other only here, for a while, and that is worth seeing what I can make out of a few hours, even when I’m wrecked with despair.

This was what I needed to read today. It’s not, in the traditional sense, journalism, which is most of what I read. But sometimes you need to consume other things.

In his essay, Abdurraqib mentions two “poems of joyful accumulation,” and I’d like to offer them both to you. The first is Ross Gay’s “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” which you can read here. But I urge you to listen to the author read it instead.

The other is Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love,” which you can read here. Again, you can hear it in the poet’s own voice below. 

A model of sensitive interviewing

David Marchese called his conversation with poet and novelist Ocean Vuong "one of the most emotionally intense interviews I’ve ever done." I recommend it, and urge you to listen to The New Yorker Times’ audio version. (Yes, this is journalism. But still.) In the future, I intend to offer it to my students as a model of trauma-informed interviewing.

A television binge

I started watching the Spanish TV series “45 RPM” because I’m a fan of co-star Carlos Cuevas. But the series—about the quest to make music under Francisco Franco’s military regime in 1960s Madrid, when failing to kowtow could get you locked up—feels timely today.

It’s streaming on Netflix. If you want to watch all 13 episodes, you’ll need to make a commitment, because the platform is pulling it down on May 30.

An old musical that feels relevant 

Every day during ninth grade, my friend Eric and I walked to junior high singing the soundtrack of Hair. The 1960s counterculture it depicted was far from our suburban experience. But it was close chronologically: the rock musical had debuted off-Broadway just seven years earlier.

As a teenager in the 1970s, I didn’t experience the youth rebellion directly. But I felt its history on the back of my neck. People I loved and respected, slightly older than me, had grown up the crucible of the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement. They protested on college campuses. They went to Woodstock.

That was more than a half-century ago. Today, when my undergraduate students try to imagine the Woodstock generation (which they rarely do), they need to go back to when their grandparents were young.

I’ve been thinking about Hair during this moment when our democracy is at stake. Yes, we saw nationwide protests after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, and encampments to protest the war in Gaza. But the campuses where I teach have been quiet since President Trump’s inauguration. And current events have not produced a visible counterculture.

Recently in a thrift store, I found a double CD with the Broadway and off-Broadway soundtracks of Hair. I’ve been listening to them a lot, and have wondered what it would be like to stage the musical today. What possibilities would it awaken in a Gen Z audience?

It turns out that Texas State University did stage Hair in 2022. Based on the videos, it remains powerful and relevant. Here’s The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In, which the tribe sings after one of their own, Claude, dies in Vietnam and returns as an invisible spirit. Stick around for the last 20 seconds, which bring history full circle.

I’ll be back this summer sharing my own work. Stay hydrated.

All best,
Barry Yeoman