"Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open." cover art

"Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."

"Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."

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 I’m thinking again of migrating this newsletter to another platform. It can be done. It probably ought to be done.People get angry about newsletters being on Substack because the management of the company Substack is awful. Strangers yell at me on the street about it. The department store manager kicked me out of the menswear department. The problem with their argument, their insistence that everyone must leave Substack because the people in charge of it are bad, is that the management of almost everything is bad. There are alternatives to Substack, but who manages those platforms? What do they believe? I don’t know. Even if I knew for sure that they were perfect, companies can and frequently are sold by good people to others who aren’t good. There’s no perfect platform for newsletters. The other platforms cost money to use, which is why I haven’t taken my Pig City Hoedown elsewhere.I am wearing my new reading glasses, though. Glasses are insane. I know that “insane” is a word that it’s best not to use. I know that the stigma of mental illness runs deep in our vocabularies, and that saying things are “crazy” and “nuts” may perpetuate it. Saying them is one thing, I think; writing them is another. It’s worse, because if it’s written down that means I reread it several times and didn’t change it. Still, I find the sentence “Glasses are insane” to be a justifiable use case. It further dilutes the meaning of the word “insane” in a way that I find funny. But I may never use the word again. We’ll see. I once defended my use of the word “lame” to describe something as boring to someone who pointed out that it’s been said to be ableist. After I defended it, I gave it some thought, and never used the word that way again. It’s easy to give up a word, it turns out. I don’t think I ever liked saying that one much anyway.But I’m not used to having glasses on my face. I’m not used to having anything on my face. Until recently, I was physically perfect. Doctors would ask me to undress even when it wasn’t necessary, so that they could take in the sights and smells of corporeal perfection. They had never seen it before, and here I was to show them all. Now I am aging fast, and there doesn’t appear to be much time left, because I have to wear glasses if I want to read Shakespeare.I have been reading Shakespeare. I have had the Norton Shakespeare—a large, green book that’s heavy—sitting out for a while, in case I felt like picking it up. Last week, I was in the middle of reading a novel, one I had looked forward to reading, but which turned out, once I started reading it, to be less a rollicking adventure than The Detailed Explanation of Non-Events That Aren’t Interesting. So I said what the hell. I read All Is True, a late Shakespeare play about Henry VIII. It had some great lines that I wrote down, but I could see why no one ever suggested I read it before, or required me to read it for a class I was taking. There’s not much that happens. I mean, I’ve heard that Henry VIII did some wild stuff, like ripping the heads off of women, but that doesn’t make it into the play. His wife gets replaced by Anne Boleyn, and dies giving birth to a child? It seems like a fairly sanitized account of someone who is notable for having a lot more women executed than almost everyone in human history.I read All’s Well That Ends Well. I read The Merry Wives of Windsor.I am reading the plays people don’t really talk about. I’ve read MacBeth before; I’ve read King Lear. I’d like to read them again, and I might, but for now I am having the time of my life taking a long look at these other plays people don’t talk about, at least not to me.There are people I have known in my life who, if I told them what I was reading, would tilt their heads in my direction and say, “The Bard? You are perusing the work of the Bard? His genius was staggering.”I’m going to order a glasses case to put my glasses in. But it has to be one that was designed for men. I know I don’t have to tell you why. It should also be leather, because leather is the hottest kink there is.This leather glasses case has a lot of online reviews. But there’s no review online that tells me what I need to know, which is whether the glasses case will be enough to save me. I read The Murmur of Everything Moving, the most recent book by Maureen Stanton. Maureen once directed my dissertation, but that’s not why I read it. I read it because I wanted to, and because her books are good.It got me thinking about the suspension of disbelief, and what it means in autobiography. In fiction it means that you are willing to believe what you’re being told for the sake of the work of art. You are taking the ride that the author has invited you to take, despite whatever reservations you might have. Something like that. I don’t care.I don’t know that I have heard anyone talk about disbelief suspension in ...

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