A Poet’s Worst Nightmare
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Hey, my lady readers. You bastard. Sight is so angry today. I am livid. We're going to explain why. But first, I'm Sam Sanders. I'm Sight Jones. And I'm Zach Safford. And you're listening to Vibe Check or the day that Sam's life ends because Sight Jones is angry.

So listeners, full disclosure, some of the episodes that you're going to hear in August have been pre-taped in advance because the team is taking some time off in August. So as we were thinking of episodes to run during that time that we could pre-tape, I said to the group, a thing I like to do...

I like to take certain readings and call them my modern scriptures. Things that I've read recently that I find myself constantly going back to because they speak to me in such a real way. So I said, what if for one of these August episodes, we had an episode all about our picks for modern scriptures? Two things we've read in the last few years that stick with us, that we go back to, that help us. Simple request.

Unless you're asking a poet who reads everything. In which case, it seems as if this has sent my dear friend Saeed Jones into an existential tailspin. Tell us how you're feeling right now. Even as Sam was rambling, I don't know what he just said. Because I was using it as an opportunity to scoot my little sliding desk chair over to the side to go through a copy of a Sarah Schulman book. Look, this is my worst nightmare. I...

First of all, if you ask me to number anything, if you were like, Saeed, what's your favorite three colors? That always stresses me out. Yeah. Having to pick not my favorite books, not the best books, but texts that have helped me make sense of the last few years. Yeah.

Do we know what the last few years... Yes. It's been very stressful. I've been running, literally running from bookcase to bookcase in my apartment. I'm surrounded now by a pile of books. You're surrounded by books. Also...

This is so emotional. I was like crying reading an Audre Lorde essay, which is probably going to be one of my pieces. But also like one of my first breakthrough moments as a student of literature was when I was able to have a vulnerable conversation with a professor in class about the canon. And I realized that I had such hurt and

and anger and antipathy because of how the canon had informed my education up until that point. And so when I was finally able to have someone I respected as an educator say, no, there's actually a lot going on. It's not just you. There were many people who are frustrated by the politics of the canon. What's your canon, Saeed? That was such an illuminating moment as a student and a future student

artist that I think now I'm like what are the responsibilities I've been asked to modern scripture it's too much so I want to one

express my deep and sincere regret. You don't have regrets. But I also want to reiterate that this is always a movable moving target. Like today, your scriptures are this tomorrow. They can be that we could record again in an hour. And I say that because the thing that even got me on the idea of calling certain texts, modern scriptures, um,

It came from a profile of Melissa McCarthy of all places, right? So let me explain how I got into this. As long as I've been a journalist, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for a really good celebrity profile. And for years, my favorite celebrity profiler has been Taffy Broaddus or Ackner.

She perhaps most famously profiled Gwyneth Paltrow for the New York Times a few years ago. This is the interview where her ex, Chris Martin, shows up halfway through the interview to hang with her and her new husband. And she sneaks a cigarette outside halfway through the fucking press thing. It's just fun, light, good energy. Taffy wrote that. And a Taffy profile of Melissa McCarthy –

from 2018 stuck with me so much that I would find myself going back to read the profile again when I'd have a bad day. And during the pandemic, I would revisit that profile like once a month.

It is just a pretty straightforward profile of Melissa McCarthy, the movie star. But it talks about the philosophy of her work and the philosophy of her life, which is that she's there to be helpful and to try to have fun. And she's there to help you kind of have a good time and don't take this shit too seriously. And there's this metaphor of her flying.

like a starfish in the sky throughout that wraps up really beautifully at the end. The profile starts with Melissa McCarthy in one of those indoor skydiving rooms. Taffy uses this as a metaphor to the way Melissa McCarthy lives her career and lives her life. She's flying and she's above it and she's having a good time.

And so I would find myself rereading that profile whenever I wanted to feel that way myself. And eventually I started calling this Melissa McCarthy profile in the New York Times Magazine a modern scripture. In the same way that my mother and my aunties would go back to Bible verses for encouragement frequently, I was going back to this magazine profile frequently.

And I've just played with that idea ever since then. And I love the idea of modern scriptures, things you've read that stick with you and help you that you go back to a lot. And so I wanted more than anything to hear my two sisters share some of theirs. So I got to say, I'm excited to hear y'all's, but I'm really sorry y'all spiraled with it. The stress.

I mean, it's nice. It's good stress. Yeah, it's good. It also has been a like fun, I want to say act of self-care, but it's like this exercise of like going back in the past and mining things that really stood out to me. Like it took me back to the artist Cy Twombly who painted all these pieces about

peonies and I was a freshman in college I would go to the museum every Tuesday and look at them and I hadn't thought about that until you told us to do this and I was like what are the things I kept going to and it kept bringing up all these memories so I'm excited to hear what you all have picked but mostly I'm interested in the stories of why you picked them and I think that's going to be really cool yeah there's so much you are still flipping through books as you talk right now

Because just as an example of like, I'm holding a copy of the poetry collection by Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language, that I was pulling from my shelf because I think I was looking for Diving into the Wreck, one of her more well-known poems. And then I pulled it and there's the receipt from the day I bought it

It turns out on my birthday, November 26, 2012, I went to McNally Jackson bookstore and bought this. But I'm like, oh, wow. Like on my birthday, I decided to go to the bookstore. You know what I mean? So it's just for whatever you're the medium, it may not just be one, but whatever medium just is really important.

intertwined over the course of decades with your life, with your sense of self. It's not just about the books anymore. It's about the memories and where you were. I'm like, oh my gosh, Manali Jackson and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah. And for me, everyone has a song they go back to on a really shitty day. It's like, what if that idea can extend to things that we read, things that we watch, whatever? This idea of pop culture...

as sustenance. I love that. And this modern scriptures idea gets at that. Anywho, we're going to do it and talk about why and what they mean to us. Well, before we get into Saeed dragging Sam, I mean our modern scriptures, I want to say... No, it's life dragging Saeed. Life dragging Saeed, rather. Sam is the fallout. Sam is the trigger to the fallout. Well, before we get into all of that, we just want to say...

We just want to say, as always, thank you so much for the fan mail, for the messages, for the posts, all of it. We absolutely love hearing from all of you. So send us more notes at vibecheckatstitcher.com. So with that, let's jump in, shall we? All right. ♪

So here we go. What we're doing here is sharing, to a piece, modern scriptures. Any kind of text that we've read in the last few years that means so much to us that we go back to it again and again. Who wants to start? You go first because that will give me just a few more minutes to change my mind. All right. My first modern scripture is an essay that's only been out for a few months, but that I've already read four or five times since its release. Okay.

It is called The Inshitification of Everything. Oh, you've mentioned this. Yes, and it's an essay by Cory Doctorow. He's a tech thinker, and he writes a lot about commerce, capitalism, technology, internet, and how they all intertwine.

But this essay basically presents a unifying theme of how all social media has worked since social media began. And he basically urges people who read this essay and people who use social internet to never see these social platforms as a service, but to always see them as a business. And the first graph of this essay reads the following, quote,

Here is how platforms die. First, they are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die.

I call this insurification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of checking how a platform allocates value combined with the nature of a two-sided market where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

I love this essay because whenever I think of what's going on with Facebook, what's going on with Twitter, what's going on with Instagram and threads and all of the way social media works and has helped us or hurt us, even talking about TikTok and YouTube, this theory helps explain things.

it helps remind me that all of these things that we thought would change the world are actually just businesses. And I go back and read it whenever I want to think that any of these platforms or these things online are more noble than they really are.

They're companies who will eventually milk you dry. Keep that in mind. So I just recommend this essay to everyone who wants to kind of make some sense out of the last 15 plus years of social internet. This essay, it does that. And I go back to it a lot. I love that too, because I think particularly as millennials, I think we are the generation that...

As someone born in 1985, at least, I can say I remember life straight up before the internet was accessible. I remember my mom getting a cell phone and it was like carrying around a lunchbox. You know what I mean? I remember getting my first email address. And then now, also in the present, we're living through all of this calamity and earned cynicism.

And so it's almost like, yeah, it's helpful because I think we've had to reckon with like,

the awe and naivete of technology. Oh, this is so cool. This is going to change everything for the better. And then, of course, like you said, it is going to change everything, but it's rarely for the better. And most importantly, it's business. It's like so obvious, but it's been a journey for us to realize that. Because I remember the narrative around Facebook when it started. It was like, oh, this will heal the world. This will connect the world and fix everything. You know? It's interesting that like,

I haven't thought about this, which is weird because I used to work in a tech company and I think about the internet a lot. But we are of a generation that grew up in our adolescence in 1999 when we thought the internet was going to destroy the entire world. There was a whole big Y2K moment and we all were like, okay, it's going to be a big reset.

And it didn't happen. And we were kids. So we grew up. I do would argue that we did have a reset in our mind at that moment. And then it was us that fueled the growth of the internet. Because then we entered our teenage years and Facebook happened and Uber happened. All these companies happened. But then

They were literally grown off of our own childhood and our young adulthood. And so I think there is this moment in which you come to realize that these are just businesses extracting capital from you and using your emotions to build around you that you feel. I remember feeling really angry about it because I was like, I thought this was to help me. I thought this was supposed to save me. But at the end of the day, it was really about saving shareholders and making people a lot, a lot of money. You know, it's really hard to overstate the amount of trust people our age have.

put in Facebook in those first few years of Facebook do you recall how all of us just put our address on Facebook our address and our phone numbers and our phone number everything I don't remember the address of the phone number that's why you used to be able to reverse search people's profiles with their phone numbers so if you had someone's phone number you could type it in and it would pull up

the profile, but we put in all of our identifiable information into this machine that then used it to build one of the most aggressive advertising businesses in the world. And I remember, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think this was actually really slick marketing, frankly, on the part of Zuckerberg.

The way in which when we all first got Facebook in fall of 2004, the smugness of needing a college email address. Oh, yeah. The sense of being privy to this new thing. But the only reason I was able to access it was because I was a college student. I remember feeling, you know, like I looked.

back on that and I don't like the way I feel. Because it was only certain colleges. I mean, Facebook began with just the IVs and then it spread. So it was like immediately relying on a system of class. Took a minute to get to Western Kentucky University. There you go. There you go. But yeah, this essay makes sense of so much that we've experienced as consumers the last 20 years. It talks in detail about Amazon as well, which follows the same path. So whenever I'm feeling confused about the intersection of internet and commerce and business, I

This essay is a good reread. It's funny you bring up Amazon in the context of this conversation because Amazon began as a bookstore about literal book scriptures. And then it became what it is now. So that's my first one. It's very informative. My next one is just about feeling really good. It is a poem called Small Kindness.

It's by Dinusha Lamaris. I was going to just read a bunch of Saeed Jones poems for these scriptures because that's what they are to me, but I'm not going to do that. It's like you're just coming up with new ways to stress me out. Which poem would he pick? I discovered this poem during the pandemic and it gave me sustenance throughout that really rough time. And I still go back to it now when I'm feeling lonely.

This poem was first published in September of 2019. It's called Small Kindnesses. And I will just read it. I've been thinking about the way when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say bless you when someone sneezes. A leftover from the bubonic plague. Don't die, we are saying. And sometimes when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up.

Mostly, we don't want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot and to say thank you to the person handing it, to smile at them and for them to smile back, for the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other now, so far from tribe and fire.

Just these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy? These fleeting temples we make together when we say, here, have my seat. Go ahead, you first. I like your hat. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy? I love that. Beautiful. This poem got to me in deep pandemic lockdown when really all that we had was

to feel some sense of community were these small interactions when we left our home for half an hour a day. So it was extremely fortifying during that season. But even now, when I'm just itching for interaction or lonely, this poem reminds me that even the smallest interactions, even with strangers, can be proof of kindness and proof of life and proof that care exists in this world. I read this poem so much.

It's a really perfect thing to find in a moment of such deep isolation because I do remember in the beginning of the pandemic when New York went so quiet and no one, you literally couldn't touch people that you loved. That's when it became so painful that the little small moments of a coffee shop. I remember a friend told me, I miss standing in line. And I was like, I miss standing in line? Oh, wow.

And I think to your point, we do because the busyness of life and how fast it all moves that we forget that it's in these small moments of like getting on an elevator with someone or getting off as they get on that you have moments of intimacy and aliveness with each other. And that that's kind of what fuels you through the day. And that's what we really do want at the end of the day is just to know that we're all here. Yeah. Well, and like y'all know that I love the small talk with strangers. Yeah.

And I do it even more since the pandemic. And this poem reminds me that that is building community and that is showing love. And it's usually a good thing. Like this poem reminds me that it's okay to like,

Like, say nice things to strangers and talk to them. Yeah, I like the image early on when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull their legs to let you by because it's kind of like one of the pleasures and dignities of shared public life.

are these unspoken acknowledgements of our personhood, right? So you're walking down a crowded airplane aisle and people aren't going, "Hello, how are you?" But they're moving, they're shifting because they know you're there. They understand. - And they see you. - Maybe it's practical. It is practical, but it's also a simple acknowledgement. - An honor.

You're saying your body and your personhood and your space matters. Yes. It feels good. And you definitely, for example, and I think because all three of us are black,

I think so much about the absence of those moments of acknowledgement. For example, walking down the sidewalk, the frequency with which white people will not do that. They will bump right on into you. And my friend Morgan Parker is always like, am I a ghost? Like, what's going on? Because that's what we deserve and you yearn for it in its absence. Yeah. Beautiful poem. I love that. All right. Those are my two favorites.

When we come back from the break, more modern scriptures from my sisters. We might let Saeed go last because he's probably still thinking through them. Saeed will go last. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

This message is brought to you by McDonald's. Did you know only 7.3% of American fashion designers are Black? Well, McDonald's 2024 Change Leaders Program is ready to change the face of fashion. The innovative program awards a monetary grant to five emerging Black American designers and pairs each with an industry professional to help them elevate their brands.

I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z, but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors.

at events like the BET Awards and the Essence Festival of Culture. And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's Change Leaders on their Instagram page, WeAreGolden.

Here's an HIV pill dilemma for you. Picture the scene. There's a rooftop sunset with fairy lights and you're vibing with friends. You remember you've got to take your HIV pill. Important, yes, but the fun moment is gone. Did you know there's a long-acting treatment option available? So catch the sunset and keep the party going. Visit pillfreehiv.com today to learn more. Brought to you by Veve Healthcare.

All right, friends, we are back and it's now my turn because Sy Jones is Googling things. I think he is finding new scriptures to, to pull from. It's saying everything. I just want to like shout out random, like strange pilgrims, a short story collection by Gabriel Garcia Marquette, you know, like,

Small plug. Well, the two I'm going to share today are two pieces that I would say I think about daily. And I came to them in college, so a little over 10 years ago. And they just stay so current with me. And I think they're kind of evergreen. And I want to give them to you because they have a few lines that I literally talk about constantly. So the

The first is a book that probably everyone has heard of. It's called The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. The book itself is an incredible feat. It was her first book. I think it came out in 1970. It is about a young girl named Pukula who is very much obsessed with whiteness and beauty and feeling beautiful, but it's also an incredible story about family violence, a lot of things going on there.

But the book, how it opens has always really struck me. You know, there's a really amazing, when you see the opening, there's some interesting ways of prose that Toni Morrison works with where she repeats the story over and over in different ways that she writes it. But that's not where I'm landing with this. Where I'm landing is right at the end of that section of the beginning where Toni gives us this line that,

I have literally used in newsrooms to try to get journalists to go out and do their jobs and us to be more calm in how we approach the world. And it's this line that says, there is really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

And that for me has been whenever I'm dealing with anxiety, whenever I'm dealing with anything too big to handle, I always find myself taking refuge in how. Because why is this like really big thing that I think Toni Morrison in her book reminds us is like,

something that god has dealt us something that's bigger the universe has given us like why is not for us to really answer all the time but we can take refuge inside of the word how and use how to move us through something and i would use it so much in like these terrible stories i was having to do at the beginning of my career around crime and death where i was like oh how why did this happen to this person why why why why why and how is how i began to navigate it all and i feel like it applies to so much just kind of taking i love that when you're burdened just

Yeah, I love that line. But one, it's interesting because I hadn't really thought of it in the context of news, but you're right. That should be taught in journalism classes. But also, it was clearly very important to Toni Morrison herself because she uses that same narrative technique, not just in Bluest Eye, which is her first novel. She also uses it in Jazz, which is to say the what of the novel.

is on the first page, if not in the first paragraph of both novels. She tells you what happens. We know the tragedy and the violence that befalls Piccolo, like in the first paragraph. And then she's like, but let's get into the how. And then Jazz, she's like, yeah, there's this murder. It was really crazy in the first paragraph. And then she's like, so the rest of the book will be about the how, because the why is too difficult to handle.

And it does feel like why becomes a blocker for us to access humanity. You know, I've been thinking a lot about that show last call on HBO. That's getting a lot of good press these days, which is about, you know, a series of gay men in the seventies being murdered by a serial killer, but they don't really name the killer. They focus on the families that were impacted. So that would be like the, how, who these men were, why were they in the closet? Why did they go to these bars? What were they finding there? And that's where you find like a sense of humanity for you to,

kind of hang a hat on instead of the like violent why, which what I learned through covering crime for so many years was that the why being obsessed with why turn people off immediately. Why do black people keep getting murdered by the police? Why like these big questions would be thrown out into the world, but no one would ever sit with them, sit with the people and how you have to sit with these people. And I think that's why Toni Morrison does that.

device is to be like, yeah, we could focus on, you know, the story of blue side begins with knowing that a young girl has been raped and she is carrying the child of her rapist, which is her father. But like that could just reduce her whole life in a second. We should instead focus on how did we get there? How is she existing? How is she finding joy or hope in all of that? And that's where you find humanity. It's, it's interesting. Like I hear you both talking about this and like, for me, this why versus how is like,

existential and like a why are we here on earth kind of sense for me like so much of philosophy and religion is complicated with trying to figure out why we're here why we're here why are we here what am i supposed to do what is my purpose is there heaven is there hell what is any of this and that can make it really hard to live a life but the how can make it a lot easier

Let me not be so concerned about why all of this is, but let me think about how I might live a life. How? I don't know. I'm just thinking about it in like a...

life on earth sensibility. Yeah. Talk about it. I love it. It kind of that line that is like, to paraphrase it is that, um, not everyone who has life lives kind of that idea that just because you're here doesn't mean that you're actually being here, that you're living. And that's something you have to choose to do every day and engage with. Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting. I think so often humanity and I guess really like

thoughtfulness, like the attentiveness that that how demands like to really like, no, no, no, no. Set aside what you think, you know, and why you think, no, let's go through the step by step of how this happened or how you're living. Right. Because that requires that requires a step by step attentiveness. It's very like shut up and do the work as opposed to why, which allows you to go just kind of rush in with your judgment. How asks us to be present and to be active.

Yeah. Yeah. And we so often need that, especially, you know, these, the last few years of life,

in America have just fell off. We had four years of Trump and then three years of a global pandemic. You could sit in your house all day and just ask why. How is saying, get up, do something. I like that. I don't know. I like move. Okay. Well, I'm glad you like it. I'm so glad Sam, because I did this for you. I pulled up for you. I really want to, at some point when we're in the same room together over drinks, I want to unpack, um,

where this existential angst over this episode is coming from? Oh, that is... One of the most well-read men I've ever met in my life and this is the thing? You know, we like to be... There are a few things that will stress me out. Yeah. This especially was like, I knew this was a trap for Saeed. I was like, I can get there. Saeed may not. Dude.

All right. What's your second one, Zach? So my second one is a book. It is some queer theory. I talk about it a lot. I bought it because you mentioned it on a podcast episode. So I've read a bit. I bring it up a ton. I tell, I've like told painters about it. And like a painter, a friend of mine has painted some woods where men have sex because of this book. And it just has really, you know, the book does something to you when you read it. And it's a book called Cruise in Utopia by Jose Esteban Munoz.

He is a queer scholar. He ran the Tisch School of Performing Arts at NYU, but passed away in, I think, 2012. But this is his last work. And it's really similar to Toni Morrison. He begins the book by telling you exactly what he's going to talk about. And I'm going to read a few lines from what he's talking about and exploring.

And it's about queerness. And he writes,

Queerness is a longing that propels us onward beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.

And for me, I read this in undergrad when it came out and it just shook me because I think I was coming at it at a time where I thought being gay, being queer was a concrete thing, was a finite thing that you just get to and then you're done. And what he writes about and what he shows in his work and he brings in Kevin Avians, who is one of the samples in Beyonce's Renaissance, famously, he uses his performance work as an artist to show that we can look at how queer people have lived

to see how we ourselves can live in the future. And that queerness is never something that we ever hit forever, but it's always growing and changing. And the specialness of queerness is that it's like a star in the sky that you're always looking towards, but you're never going to get there. But that's part of the journey of queerness is that every day you're waking up and finding new things. And you find new things by seeing how people around you move and breathe and live and have

died and so he finds himself in this tension of a past and future and says kind of fuck the present we're always living in that kind of that tension of what was and what could be and for me that's been a queerness that I've really just found a lot of joy in because his book is very much focused on the philosopher Bloch's ideas around hope

So he was the first scholar I read that's like, being queer is hopeful. Like us surviving is hope every day. And the book really does a good job of talking about them. And I feel like we need that, especially right now. You know, the last few years...

have just seen rising attacks through our nation's politics against queer people and against trans people. And in the midst of that, so much of the way queer people are forced to talk about ourselves is to prove that we were always here and directly address the harms to us currently, right? So, so much of the conversation around queerness in our current political context is

is focused on the present and the past. And so to have this quote to remind us that queerness is also about the future, in fact, inherently about the future, I think that's beautiful. And it's something that we need, especially right now. Yeah. Yeah. This is what happens when you start reading Seeing Connections. Because a book that I'm reading right now that is not my modern scripture, but may well become one, is Christina Sharpe's In the Wake on Blackness and Being.

And as you were reading Munoz, and I know this is an assumption, but everything you just said, quoting about queerness not being here, being like a point in the future, it's not fixed, echoes something she quotes from Maurice Blanchot in the book. Maurice Blanchot published this in 1995. I'll just read a bit.

They write, quote, the disaster ruins everything all while leaving everything intact. When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come. The disaster is its imminence. But since the future as we conceive of it and the order of lived time belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn and dissuaded. There is no future for the disaster. They go on. So it's really interesting, the sense of queerness,

which to me feels like hope, hopeful expression, hope for self, hope for gender, is also kind of on the polar opposite, perhaps, of the disaster. And Christina Sharpe argues that for Black people, the wake is in the history of enslavement. That's the disaster that we're always kind of living around. So I just love this concept of whether it's this concept of disaster or white supremacy or queerness, that we have these ideas that it's less about

when it's happening, it's about like how it's always happening kind of around us to take it by the mores. No, yeah, I think that's so right. That reminds me of when I was talking to Jenna Wertham on that episode, Jenna brought up blue space and was talking about seas and said to me, you know, we have to be careful here, Zach, you know, not everyone wants to go into oceans because of what oceans have meant to us.

And I had never considered that in that way that, you know, we all move through spaces where certain histories of ours may come pressing up and rushing to the future and bring us to the past. And like, how do you deal with those tensions of living in two places at once? So I think what Munoz gives us is like,

this power and being like, yeah, you're not fixed. You were kind of existing all the time. You bring your ancestors and you are creating the ancestors at the same time. And that is a real beauty of being and that should hopefully give you, because I think, you know, there's this hope for all of us as queer people is that we have power and we can make change because we're making change every day by existing into the future. I love that.

All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, Saeed Jones will conquer his anxiety and share with us his picks. No, I won't. So stay tuned. Stay tuned. Stay tuned.

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I'm gonna close my computer and then stand up and then like lightning will strike me and I'll remember something. So...

We can. Oh, we're going to do another. It's going to be seasonal. We're going to do it. So to give myself some breathing room, I'm just going to have some, I'm going to throw out some, some runner ups that I'm not going to talk about. So runner up, um, uh, strange pilgrims. It's a short story collection by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. All of the stories are about people from the Latin diaspora. My favorite story in that collection is I only came to use the phone, a really good horror story. Uh,

Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh. Okay. Crush, a poetry collection by Richard Sykin. I really, really wanted to read, but I'm excited to talk about the poem I want to talk about. But the poem Scheherazade opens the collection. I read this when I was a sophomore or junior in college, and it changed my life. Richard Sykin's collection, Crush.

If you like my poetry, this is the book where I was like, "That's the temperature that I want in my own work. That's the heat I want." And so I had to acknowledge it. And then one more, oh my god, okay. Sarah Schulman's essay collection, "Ties That Bind: Familia, Homophobia, and Its Consequences," I think this is a book everyone needs to read. And I just want to point out, because just the title of one of the chapters will have you shook.

Basically, she argues that even if you don't experience direct violence from familial homophobia, like your family didn't straight up kick you out, a lot of us still deal with like kind of passive forms of homophobia. For example, she says like, okay, fine, your family doesn't use slurs when referring to you. But like when your straight brother and his fiance got married, your parents were so excited to pay for their wedding. Did they have that same enthusiasm with you and your partner? No.

you know what i mean that kind of thing and so just one chapter title is homophobia is a pleasure system and she has a chapter where she just explains she's like homophobia also just makes people feel good and we need to talk about that it's not people necessarily being scared yeah some people just like how it makes them feel okay also i got a shout out since you mentioned sarah shulman

Can't say her name without saying go read her book all about AIDS activism. It's called Let the Record Show. Woo, baby. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. I interviewed her about this book a while back and loved that conversation, but the book is just phenomenal. And I will say to add to this, and if you like these two books, you should also read Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of Mind, Witness to a Lost Imagination. It's...

amazing like she's just amazing she's incredible so anyway Saeed go for I see the book you have in your hand I'm not surprised I'm proud I'm proud that you're leaning in to your choices I'm just glad Saeed's still with us and not like running down the street screaming just like burst into flame and just jumped out of my window

Oh my gosh. So this was easy because when I thought of the concept of modern scriptures, which is to say, and I thought of my grandmother, Mildred, who very much was someone, she had her Bible in her lap. I mean, every day, every afternoon, it was always within reach. And so I was like, what would be a text that, if not literally...

metaphorically, existentially, is always within reach. And it's Sister, Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Oh, this book. I think I first encountered it when I was a college student. So that's part of it for me, modern Scripture. I wanted to at least have one book where I was like, "I've lived with this text. I've grown up with this text."

the meaning has changed color as I have taken on new colors. And this is certainly an example. And gosh, it was hard to choose a piece from the book because this has like, poetry is not a luxury. It has the uses of

anger, it has the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. A lot of, I would say, her seminal ideas. But the transformation of silence into language and action was a speech, a paper she gave at the MLA conference in 1977. She wrote this and delivered it after overcoming her first, I believe, cancer treatment.

She'd been diagnosed, and she ultimately died of cancer. Like, it would leave, it would come back, it would leave and come back. But she wrote this after going through, I believe it was something like three really, really difficult weeks of cancer treatment. And so I'll just read a few sections and try not to cry while reading it. Okay.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light. And what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain or death.

But we all hurt in so many different ways all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence.

And that might be coming quickly now without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said or had only betrayed myself into small silences while I planned someday to speak or waited for someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me a great strength. Yeah.

And then I'll just read just one more little section. "I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you." - Ooh. - It's just... - Beautiful. - I'm so glad you picked that, 'cause that book, I think there's a lot of us in the world that are Black and queer, that when you arrive to her, it really is like a seismic shift

And you realize like a lot of the pain, a lot of things you've been feeling, people have been feeling for a while, but also the fighting has been happening too. And hearing you read her work is amazing because you are such a poet that Sam and I both love, but we were even friends with you. But she, for me, was that change in the canon that said that poetry is a weapon too, that it can be a thing that really shows that power needs to be destroyed and challenged. And I feel like you, yourself, Sight, fit in that.

kind of that path that she blazed. You continue to move that forward. So I just love that you shared that with us so much. Well, and just hearing the way you read it, I can hear the through line between that work and you. And it's like, oh, of course. Of course. You know? It's beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I think Audre Lorde is a model for me, a personal model of someone who explicitly, as she is doing in this work, connecting art...

Poetry, essay, speeches to action. And she says it's a journey to action. I like that she doesn't say the expression or the poem or the speech is enough, but it's a part of the broader work. She even connects dreams. She's kind of like dreams, thoughts take us to the text and what we express takes us to action. And I just think...

Yeah, I think in encountering a beginning in high school and then into college and as a young writer It was just so important because it's not just about the craft It's also about the mission and I think I was kind of what I was going back to like when I was talking about the Canon I think this is why she's so important to my Canon because it was like I was so tired of reading well crafted work and

by predominantly straight white men whose mission was at best vacuous, but often straight up violent, even if the work, the craft was beautiful. And she changed that for me. Yeah. - I love it. What's your second one? - Oh my gosh. Okay, okay. We can do this site. We can do this. - While you pull it up, I have to ask, how many finalists were there, if you had to guess?

I think I have 12 books on my desk. Oh my goodness. I think I've kind of been able to... Okay, shout out to Terrence Hayes.

I love this. I see elite capture over there. Okay, okay. I love this because it's a poem. It's a very short poem. And I wanted to honor how special a short poem is because poetry already kind of, I would argue, exists outside of capitalism. It's very hard to make

a profit out of poetry and that's why I think it's a very special craft but then the short poems are like even harder right to sell because it's like what do we get out of this and what you get out of it is the transformation of silence into language as Audre Lorde said so this poem is titled Smokey

It's from a book entitled Imperial Liquors by Ahmad Jamal Johnson. Ahmad Jamal Johnson, I believe is from Southern California, from Watts, and then like writes a lot about that space. But here's the poem, Smokey. The most dangerous men in my neighborhood only listened to love songs. To reach those notes, a musicologist told me, a man essentially cuts his own throat.

Some nights even now I'll hear a falsetto and think I should run Such a short startling poem it's only I think three sentences. Oh my god, but so much happens

So much happens. And so one, I love that, right? Like it's a demonstration of the power of the line and of brevity. This could have been a whole personal essay. Frankly, it could have been a memoir. You know what I mean? But so much happens. But also this idea in the last year in particular, thinking of people weaponizing parental rights or cisgender people weaponizing the concept of womanhood, like this kind of gender essentialism

against trans women seemingly out of genuine concern, out of love, but what they're doing is very violent. Does that make sense? I've been trying to like make sense of that because I know how to deal with like loud, clear and present dangers. I think so many of us in our country, for example, we're like, it's not racism until someone's burning a cross on your front lawn. And it's like, that's usually not how it's going to manifest in your life. What if danger comes with someone listening to love music?

What if it comes wrapped in love or concern or, oh, I'm just worried about the kids or, you know what I mean? Concern trolling. Yeah. Concern trolling. And so it's though that poem obviously isn't about those politics. I think it's a good example of how, like, for me, a scripture is like, take me back to the kind of the spiritual core of this dynamic. And that's what it is. Dangerous men being the ones who love music the most.

I can't help but hear you read this poem and think about a conversation that listeners hearing this have heard a few weeks ago are talking about Barbie. And who is the man with the beautiful yet threatening falsetto, if not Ken, played by Ryan Gosling in the movie? Yeah. And he's like really the clown, right? And that's why Ryan Gosling's performance is so good. It's really hard to take...

Ken seriously, but then what Ken does in the movie is very serious. The government, like to the point of like literally the constitution, which is really scary. Yeah. And it's this reminder that many times the things that we love most about heteronormative man, this, uh,

the danger or make the danger look sweet. Love this poem. You did it. We're so proud of you. You did it. Listen, you made it.

you made it. None of the books were burned in the process. They were never going to be burned. How dare you? I am now like, so that's the issue is my, my particular is I'm, I'm always pulling books and then I, I kind of piled them up either on my desk or in the living room on the coffee table so that I can grab them as I'm kind of working through specific ideas. And then all the books get out of order and then I can't find them. So I'm going to need to like,

reorder my books. Seeing the way that y'all deal with, keep and organize your books, I feel so bad. So for years since I've been podcasting, publishing houses just send me books to read all the time. And I'll read a lot of them, but I won't read a lot of them. And I'm always trying to just like get rid of the extras. So my house is not full of books. But over time, my strategy was like, well, once you read a book, if you like it a lot, don't keep it. Give it to someone who you want to read it.

And so I never have a bunch of books in my house. And I'm like, should I change that? I'm always giving them away. But now I'm like, y'all keep books. That's cool. Maybe I should keep all the books in my goddamn house. - I mean, it's, you know, look, I have so many thoughts on this because first of all, books are heavy.

As someone who loves books, I do have to be very thoughtful about the books I keep because when it comes time to move, oh boy. The only thing probably more stressful would be keeping vinyl albums, which I know you do. The one thing I would tell people is when you buy a book, I always regret when I don't do this, but when you buy a book, like I'm looking at this copy of Strange Pilgrims.

Saeed Jones, September 2008, Brooklyn Book Festival with my friend Brandon Mazur. That's cool. If you don't keep the receipt at the front, write the date stamp or something. I just think that something years later, like gosh, 2008, is a real joy. I love that. Okay. Good to know. When I moved in with Craig, he was going through my books. He's like, you have so much stuff in all your books. And it's because I do similar where I put things. If I get at a book fair on a trip, I put something from the trip inside.

in the book so it becomes you know multifaceted around a memory so yeah i love that well i'm literally breathing easier now listeners we did it all three of us shared our modern scriptures what are yours share them with us at vibecheck at stitcher.com i feel like we're going to create an entire like podcast syllabus at some point i love a reading list this was really fun

Listeners, thank you for checking out this week's episode of Vibe Check. If you love the show and want to support us, make sure to not just follow this show on your favorite podcast listening platform, but also tell a friend, literally tell them to their face to check out the show. Maybe even after you do that, read them a poem.

That's fun too. That's really cute. Huge thank you to our producers, Chantel Holder, engineers Sam Keeper and Brendan Burns, and Marcus Holm for our theme music and sound design. Also, special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Ritchie at Stitcher and Brandon Sharp from Agenda Management and Production.

And as always, we want to hear from you. So don't forget, you can email us at vibecheckatstitcher.com and keep in touch with us on Instagram and threads, Twitter, if you're nasty. These are our handles for all of those places, at Zach Staff, at The Ferocity, and at Sam Sanders. And you can use the hashtag vibecheckpod wherever you can use a hashtag. And with that, stay tuned for another episode next week. We'll see you then. Read. Read a lot. Bye. Stitcher.

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