if-i-had-a-zine

[if-i-had-a-zine]

Stairway Landing Under Water

Fridays in December, follow the Vectorizing adventures of Sidney Dritz as she leaves poetry and art in her wake. (See all her posts here.) Sidney writes: 

Annie Finch was my professor in my last poetry class in college before I graduated. She was also the first professor I had who talked about meter and form in poetry in anything but an academic way. Annie didn’t want us to just recognize meter and form, she wanted us to internalize them, to think in them until we weren’t just writing in them to fill assignments, we were writing in them so it felt natural as breathing. It wasn’t a long enough class to really achieve everything I felt it wanting to inside my head, but it made enough of an impression that, a few months after I graduated, I sent Annie an email about a poem I had read, something about a mountain, with a reference to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the title, laid out in a block of something-teen lines so it looked like it should be a sonnet. I emailed her about how I read it and realized it wasn’t even trying to be a sonnet, and how disappointed I was. “Is this what it’s like to be you?” I asked her, and she told me that yes, it was, all the time.

When I read “Landing Under Water, I See Roots,” I thought, “Annie would love this,” and then I looked to the bottom of the page, and of course, she had written it.

I meant to bring this broadside down to somewhere near the water, but I happened to have it in my bag when I was doing some tutoring the other week, and yes, this was another impulse-vector, but it just felt so appropriate, leaving a poem by my teacher somewhere I’m just starting to feel out whether teaching is something I can do. I left it in a window heading down the stairs, and I hope one or two of the serious business students who make their way through the space enjoys stumbling across it as much as I did.

Sidney Dritz plays English major bingo when it comes to jobs, and currently writes content for a women’s health app company in Boston. She received her BA from the University of Southern Maine on the final stop of her three-college tour of America, and you can find one of her youthful indiscretions in Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, or keep up with her news on twitter at @sidneydritz.

The broadside in this post is “Landing Under Water I See Roots,” by Annie Finch and Jennifer Moses.

Want to share your story? Contact [email protected]

#my writing

[if-i-had-a-zine]

zine availability

For reference, my zine is still available via Atomic Books here: https://atomicbooks.com/products/going-places-ghosts

It, um, actually appears to have sold out at Silver Sprocket? And as of next week, it should be available in the physical world for anyone in the San Francisco area at City Lights Books, which I am horribly, embarrassingly star-struck about.

(City Lights, guys. CITY LIGHTS.)

[if-i-had-a-zine]

Broadsided Press on Ice!

Fridays in December, follow the Vectorizing adventures of Sidney Dritz as she leaves poetry and art in her wake. (See all her posts here.) Sidney writes:

I had a pretty specific vision in mind for where to put this broadside, Aaron Anstett and Ira Joel Haber’s “Limits,” which takes images and ideas that have the potential to turn a little bitter, and uses that bitterness and that potential to do something interesting and, by the end, surprisingly warm. I wanted to put it up on the side of the ice-skating rink in the park, so the skaters could glide past it, and the people sitting on benches and watching them, from proud grandparents to curious passers-by, might look down and get caught up in the poem. This felt a little daring to me, since I’ve been putting up these poems in this furtive, nervous way, like I’m stealing something badly, and this idea had the potential to be a pretty public piece of literary reverse-larceny. Luckily, the weather had other plans.

It was pouring out that night, and I thought about finding somewhere indoors for this poem’s new home, but after all the impulse-vectoring, I felt like I really ought to stick to the plan for once, just for variety. And so, ignoring the fact that using tape to stick the poem to anything was going to be tricky in the rain, I dug around at work till I found a lightly-used, over-sized sandwich bag for poem-rain-protection, and headed out.

You’ll notice I got lucky on the tape front–in the plastic bag, the poem wedged pretty neatly under the lip of the railing outside the rink, so trying to spontaneously convince dying adhesive to adhere wasn’t necessary, and the rain kept away most of the witnesses to my non-crime.

A couple of people walked past as I was lurking around on the walkway, but none of them really slowed or stopped. That’s fine, though–I planted it there for the people who sit on the benches and watch the skaters go during the day, and tomorrow I intend to be one of them.

Sidney Dritz plays English major bingo when it comes to jobs, and currently writes content for a women’s health app company in Boston. She received her BA from the University of Southern Maine on the final stop of her three-college tour of America, and you can find one of her youthful indiscretions in Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, or keep up with her news on twitter at @sidneydritz.

Want to share your story? Contact [email protected]

#I've been thinking about this project lately #I always expect to run across more Broadsided fliers in the city but I don't usually #time to do more myself? #my writing

[if-i-had-a-zine]

for reference, this extends to patterns in sewing, and makes model-airplane-building an impossibility entirely

if I had a zine I’d call it “Recipes for people whose authority issues extend to not liking when recipes tell them what to do” and it would not include any measurements for ingredients

[if-i-had-a-zine]

Mary Poppins - a creeping socialist menace no longer?

Mary Poppins Returns, Disney’s most recent sequel-cum-reboot, is full of homages to the original movie, from the return of the infamous kite to the second incarnation of an-out-of-touch, bank-employee father who needs to be reminded to value his children appropriately (although Ben Whishaw’s Michael Banks makes an infinitely more sympathetic and troubled young dad than his father before him). It also takes some of the familiar themes of the original and turns them on their head. In 2014, when Mary Poppins Returns was just a twinkle in a series of studio executives’ eyes, a blogger for the Fraser Institute was taking Mary's original Disney-incarnation to task for her Disney property's socialist propaganda agenda. Last night, as I walked out of the theater, one of the thoughts pinging through my head was “Jonathan Fortier must be so pleased.”

The thrust of Fortier’s argument, which he posted on the blog of the Canadian conservative libertarian think tank The Fraser Institute, is that while the children’s musical of Mary Poppins, adapted closely from the movie, presents Mr. Banks the banker as misguided and out-of-step with the spirit of childhood present in his son Michael, who would rather spend his twopence of pocket money of bird seed from the soft-voiced homeless woman with a soft spot for pigeons. When Mr. Banks suggests that Michael should invest his twopence instead, so that it can be transformed via the vehicle of industrial imperialism into a larger sum of money, Fortier argues that Banks is making a good point that Mary Poppins dismisses. Not so, however, in the film’s 2019 sequel.

Mary Poppins Returns ups the ante of the series — the Banks children of this generation are troubled not just by the benign indifference of their parents, but by the imminent threat of the loss of their home through foreclosure by the bank. Luckily, it is revealed in what should have been the final moments of the film, young Michael Banks, folded to his father’s pressure, and rather than give a coin to a kindly vagrant with an interest in urban wildlife, he invested his twopence with a credible-and-only-semi-corrupt financial institution, and through the magic of compound interest, it has now grown large enough to save the iconic Banks homestead from Colin Firth’s evil banker’s clutches. Let that be a lesson to all the children in the audience to be sure to have parents who work in the financial sector.

The movie also makes the baffling assertion that, yes, young bankers are tricky and evil, but the crusty old ones whose secretaries have candy on their desks are good, honorable fellows who don't have designs on your house, and who have an appropriate respect for inter-generational nepotism. Surely there was a better way to give Dick Van Dyke the space to shine in this movie than as a representative of a bygone, noble capitalism like the one the children's father had to be redeemed from in the original movie.

None of this mars what is positive about the movie — there are a few truly excellent songs in it, not least the one that champions imagination over practicality, and the adventure inside the chipped china bowl is as charming as any of the protracted dream sequences which made up the original film. What the ending does do, however, is serve as a reminder of the endearing weirdness and irony of the original as a part of the pantheon of works made by major corporations which seem to express an idealism the supersedes their origins.

A further caveat: one thing that many adults could stand to think a little more often when critiquing children’s movies is, “this isn’t for me.” This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with adults enjoying these works, and it doesn’t mean that adults can’t find value in them; it just means that we’re not the intended audience — and that’s fine. Not everything has to be about you, Kevin. Mary Poppins Returns, however, like many new movies, straddles that line by virtue of the nostalgia it bathes in, to wildly veer into a different metaphor. Mary Poppins is directed at children, but many of those children are the ones who grew up watching the original movie, and who can’t help but watch her next adventure from a more adult point of view. This is all to say that this review should be taken with a grain of salt (rather than a spoonful of sugar), since the truly qualified critic on this matter is my coworker’s four-year-old daughter who was Mary Poppins for Halloween two years in a row.

There’s a lot to enjoy about Mary Poppins Returns, from Lin Miranda’s charm offensive that mostly manages to bulldoze right through the unbelievability of his accent to the brilliant visuals and the excellent high-stakes callback to “let’s go fly a kite,” — and if you, like Jonathan Fortier, felt like the original Mary Poppins was shameless socialist propaganda, then the deus ex machina moment of denouement just before the entirely unnecessary final number may be just one more thing to enjoy about it.

#Mary poppins #mary poppins returns #movie review #practicing my critical writing

[if-i-had-a-zine]

[if-i-had-a-zine]

you know that thing where parts of the natural world are so cool they look fake?

[if-i-had-a-zine]

some days you're a normal, rational, down-to-earth human person. other days it's completely imperative that you spend three hours scouring the internet for information about Britney Spears' custody arrangements because you're worried. that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

[if-i-had-a-zine]

good morning!! not temporally, just, you know, emotionally.

[if-i-had-a-zine]

if we’re being honest, i mostly made a zine because i can’t be in a punk band.

The reason i can’t be in a punk band is because i can’t play any instruments or carry a tune. and it freaks me out when people look at me too much. otherwise, I'm a natural.

[if-i-had-a-zine]

the road to success is long and dusty. sometimes there are cows on it.

#motivational #cows

[if-i-had-a-zine]

zine availability

For reference, my zine is still available via Atomic Books here: https://atomicbooks.com/products/going-places-ghosts

It, um, actually appears to have sold out at Silver Sprocket? And as of next week, it should be available in the physical world for anyone in the San Francisco area at City Lights Books, which I am horribly, embarrassingly star-struck about.

(City Lights, guys. CITY LIGHTS.)

#going places vol 1

[if-i-had-a-zine]

spades = swords = scissors

Gatsby's biggest problem was that his goals didn't develop as his world expanded. Don't be like Gatsby, don't get shot in a swimming pool without even getting the chance to make out with your milquetoast neighbor.

#diy tarot

[if-i-had-a-zine]

hearts = cups = water element = spiders

Prognosis unclear, try again later. Maybe take a nap first?

#diy tarot

[if-i-had-a-zine]

clubs = wands = matches

Most decisions aren't inherently emotionally healthy or unhealthy in and of themselves, no matter how they do or don't fit into a given cultural narrative. What's going to make a difference, in the long run, about whether you look back on a given action as a calculated-but-worth-it risk or a piece of full-on self-destruction, comes down to the result of an action. Ghosting a bad date may seem, objectively, like A Bad Choice, for example, but if you can use that action to make positive changes in your own life, who the fuck's to say it's not exactly the thing you needed to do?

#diy tarot

[if-i-had-a-zine]

if i had a zine i would start with issue #50 and then count back. because it’s important to be ambitious, and because nothing builds narrative tension like a countdown. 

[if-i-had-a-zine]

jack of all spiders, the page of cups

your empathy will ruin you. people who think they’re healthier than you will probably tell you to let it. this isn’t advice so much as a statement.

also, be aware that only assholes think about themselves like this.

#diy tarot #the you i am talking to is usually me #just to clarify