I’ve got a story out called "The Wheelbarrow" in Rock Salt Journal. You can read it here if you would like.
On the forth floor of a building that’s had an empty storefront as long as I’ve lived here and that I’d assumed was completely empty, walking by it nearly every day, I attended a reading last night at a pop-up art gallery. There were five readers. There was a lot of art on the walls. There was wine, snacks, seltzer. The artists whose work was being shown, being sold, in the space were in attendance. People I do not know but recognized from other events and shows and galleries were in attendance. There was a lot of talking and mingling and connecting before and after the reading.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
Earlier in the day, on the walk that I take to avoid becoming too despairing at my desk job, I overheard two young women in the Public Garden — students at Suffolk, or maybe Emerson, no doubt — discussing the arts scene, culture. Decrying the ways in which people who want to start things start them in a vacuum, without looking out at what might be going on around them. And maybe this is true or maybe this is how we learn how to start things but in any case what I heard is that there is a desire, an interest, an investment in arts and letters and the local.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
Weeks ago I found myself in the basement of a building near the Somerville Market Basket for some other opening thing and there were recording studios and artist studios and cottage manufacturing studios and I heard the end of a music set played in what felt like a cave with oriental rugs thrown on the ground with the most perfect dim-orange lighting I have ever seen. I came home with my pockets full of business cards and fliers and candy wrappers.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
The reading itself was very excellent — for they had assembled a really good line-up of readers — and I got to hear work by folks who were new to me and enjoy getting to know further the work of folks whom I already knew and admired. It was a mix of new work and published work and everybody seemed so excited to be getting together to share it, to enjoy it. To be in a beautiful large room together, to flirt with plans for further events, further collaborations, further additions to the city’s landscapes of arts and letters.
There is a lot of art going on in Boston.
And this is a very exciting thing.
While I am secretly[1] focused on a new writing project, I’m still trying to get some of my finished writing projects, you know, published. It’s pulling teeth, jousting at windmills, and/or maybe I just suck at writing.[2] Either way, I prefer to submit to places that are (a) free (because cheap) and (b) on Submittable. I don’t really like Submittable. I liked it better a decade and a half ago when it was called "Submishmash" and, importantly, was free. But it’s convenient to submit to places on Submittable because — for lesser known titles — it signals a certain seriousness (i.e., they’re paying something for it), and because it keeps track of all the submissions for me. It’s not that I’m necessarily averse to keeping track of them myself, but if I don’t have to —
In general I don’t really bother with the cover letter for my submission, not in any real way, because I don’t think that it really does anything. I’ve read at a variety of literary journals and never, not once, had the cover letter any effect on publication. They do usually want a bio though, and so I’ll send that along. But if you use the same bio everywhere…
For the longest time I’ve just had an alias setup:
alias ,bio='echo "Bio: Daniel Elfanbaum lives near Boston and runs a reading
series called Two Page Tuesday." | pbcopy'This works fine. Very well, in fact. But the thing is that, for various
reasons I won’t go into, it might be nice to have a reasonably well-structured
and tested Python project pinned to my GitHub
Profile,[3] and we are looking at updating some of our old Python tooling at work,
and so I thought I’d take a half a day or so to get back up to speed on uv
packaging, typer, and poke at pydantic, although I can’t really say I used
hardly any of the useful features of the latter save the very simple validation.
Anyway, I made a tool I’m calling tmplcl ("Template to Clipboard"), and while
I eventually want to support string-formatted templates, it’s in good-enough
shape that I thought I’d get it up on pypi, so
you can now:
pip install tmplclThough I’d recommend using uv tool
install tmplcl instead.
It’s a very simple app, whose source code you can read here if you would like.
It was a nice thing to chew on a little bit while I slowly get back into the swing of working on this Rust app[4] I’ve had half-built and have been thinking about for a long time. So I suppose now back to that, back to the aforementioned writing project, and onward into September.[5]
asciidocr, which to be fair is a very good thing to have pinned IMO, as it actually has some stars, and my dotfiles, which, I don’t know, I want people to know I use Neovim, OK? Is that really so bad? (Yes: yes it is. But at least I’m not on Arch…)
Vol. 1 Brooklyn was kind enough to put out an interview I did with Bob a little bit ago, which you can read on their website. To wit (they picked this quote out for socials, and I like that one, too, so I’m going to use it also here):
…one of the cool things about living in New England is the pretty immediate and physical access to history and these historical places, so the narrative really started to make sense to me once I decided to visit some of the sites I was learning about."
It’s a real fucking good book, and you can buy it from the publisher here.
(Also I know, I know: I hadn’t posted since January and now it’s twice in a week? Well.)
Well, we’re in the Globe.
“I think it’s very important, especially in a city with a lot of academic establishments like Boston, to have a sort of DIY literary scene,” said [Nick] Roberts [who reads for us a lot]. “Poetry has become too corporatized in a lot of ways, and I view Two Page Tuesday, in some small way, as a step away from all that. It’s a group of people, not fighting for prizes or awards, who share a deep love of literature, art, and each other’s company.”
Pretty cool!