Dear Friends,
Please excuse this subtitle’s appeal to a dumb marketing campaign (Cleveland is my Cleveland, thank you very much)—but I couldn’t resist the invocation as I update you about Cleveland-related matters from a conference at the Sorbonne (and more on that later).
I just wanted to jump on quickly and share that the Cleveland Review of Books has graciously published an excerpt from Big Feelings, chosen especially for the Ohioans in the crowd. There’s no outlet I’d rather see this work in, and I’m grateful that they were game.
Though CRB stays pretty strictly focused on the literary and poetic, its early days were marked by a certain brazen experimentalism, and in this atmosphere I snuck through two essays on music and film, respectively.
For whatever reason, their permission to go for it was exactly what I needed to take a chance on topics I felt ill-equipped to handle. The result in both cases was some of my favorite work ever, essays of which I’m the most proud insofar as I felt I had to really stretch myself to write them. I don’t usually write about film, for one thing. For another, the first Moten/López/Cleaver record completely flummoxed me, felt too dense to parse in any meaningful way. I’m amazed, in the end, I was able to say anything about it.
And now this book excerpt is an homage to my hometown, to CRB itself, and to the broader idea that they represent, where ambitious and creative people reach for something beyond themselves, working at the edge of a world that no one pays much attention to. This is a blessing for the work itself, even as we remain hypersensitive to the fact of our being continuously underestimated.
The excerpt is also about the Ophelias, of course, and their incredible new record (linked below). This is a band, again, that I still can’t figure out how to write about, even if I’ve figured out how to write around that problem. When Big Feelings was an inchoate, nascent idea, it was the Ophelias I first turned to in order to explore it. Six years later, it’s still the Ophelias who anchor the book, or at least my presence in it. They are—and live and represent and perform and love—everything this book tries to think through, everything that matters. They are a multitudinously queer band, an anticapitalist feminist collective, a community of political activists, cinematic dreamers, spellcasting witches, studious researchers, unrestrained punk rockers, and crafty homebodies alike, a band I look up to, and will continue to write about, whose music and spirit accompany me like friends.
Cry hard.
