Word 84 (Natural Causes)

I spent my Labor Day weekend in the Jemez Mountains, roaming the San Pedro Parks Wilderness and reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes. It was a wild ride! She’s rhetorically unruly and charmingly cantankerous, and all told it’s a fast-paced 200-page polemic in which you’re pretty much guaranteed to high-five in agreement at some points while furrowing your brow at others. Among other things the book contains a feminist critique of medical culture, a Marxist critique of fitness culture, a general heaping of disdain toward Silicon Valley, a crash course in cell biology of the immune system, and a brief essay on the history of the notion of the “self.” She attacks mindfulness meditation and defends cigarette smoking. She’s good company and the bottom line is, you’re going to die, and so am I, and we’re not going to optimize our way out of this fact or work our way past it.

All of that aside, I do have a lot of new work coming out over the next few months — work work work — a couple of them recently announced on the newsletter. The thirteenth Golconda, Ghost Stories, will release September 27, and the fourteenth, The Lost Forest, hits October 25. These two document the songs I wrote at PLAYA, in the high desert of central Oregon, last summer. Check out the beautiful cover art by Derek Chan:

Keep an eye on Two Labyrinths Records, which is keeping it rolling for the rest of the year and into 2020 with these and other new things.