My last Thubrina post (in which I talk about just about everything but Sabrina)

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First, apologies, Thubrina was blocked from Overdrive for reasons I’m told I received an email about but . . . did not. So you’ll have to wait for Hoopla if you want it from your library. Anyway. It’s still on Apple Books if that’s your thing. The print version’s still in utero.

Anyway, thanks for letting me blab about Thubrina this week. I realized a day or two ago that the experience of working on it was a lot like After Chadwick (obvious) but also like Dorian: A Peculiar Edition with Annotated Text & Scholarship, especially its endnotes.

(Incidentally, the link to Amazon is still sketchy after all these years!)

After Chadwick was inspired by Tyler Chadwick’s Field Notes on Language and Kinship, an excellent little book I can recommend without hesitation. I couldn’t read it without a notebook near me to write a few notes and many poems in response to Tyler’s language. I couldn’t help myself. His book inspired so many pieces from me I decided to make a little book of my own. Then I published it and didn’t write a single post about it. So in the last ten years at least I’ve gotten better at self-promotion?

But that was loose riff. While I suppose Thubrina too is “loose riff” it’s much more structured. Whatever Sabrina did, Theric had to follow. I have as many pieces in my book as she has in her album and they have the same titles.

Maybe that’s why Thubrina reminds me of Dorian’s endnotes? Those were determined by Nephi’s novel. Anything I felt justified an endnote became an obsessive little research project for me. And I learned fascinating things about the names of horses and pats of butter as I grew more and more obsessed with explicating aged facts to a new audience. I danced Nephi’s dance and thus the dance became my one.

Little obsessive projects (here’s an old one I just bumped into) are great delights. But do they have value for the reader?

I often say no. A lot of surrealist and dadaist and absurdist stuff offers waaay more pleasure to the creator than to the consumer. And while, in Thubrina, you’ll find an original short story about middle-aged people dealing with things like “business” and “death,” and a science-fiction sestina, you’ll also find things like this, the first stanza of “Sugar Talking“:

Put your lowboy where your mouthwash is
Your sugar tallboy isn’t working tonoplast, oh
Put your lowboy where your mouthwash is
Yeah, your paralinguistics mean shiver to me
Get your sorry assay to mine

I wrote this using the classic dada game n+7 in which all you need is an original text and a willing dictionary. The nonsense that results is certainly a pleasure and a joy, but is it art? Is it something someone should pay for? And, having paid for, should they read it? I can’t answer those questions.

But there is value in the process regardless.

I think of Tom Stoppard who has thubrinaed plays like Hamlet, Earnest, and Macbeth. And while some are masterpieces and some are good (one of these features a dadaist!), some are just . . . dada.

There are excellent reason Dada and Surrealist poems are remembered more for the ideas behind them than for the work themselves. And that’s because they get old real fast. The concept is better than the piece. And while that may work for grad school (screw you, James Joyce), the works themselves do not deserve immortality.

Thubrina has value right now in 2025 but it’s never ending up in my obituary and I’m not sure any its pieces will get collected in later collections of Thericonia. The value it has in the future is permission to play.

You all have permission to play.

Don’t wait.

Just play.

Especially play with what is big and popular because that stuff’s not special and it deserves to be kidded. And in a moment where certain powerful people are experimenting with curtailing your freedom to speak, now is an excellent time to write thubrinas all your own.

Back in the first Trump presidency, I wrote some “orange shovels”—golden shovels based on Trump tweets. I never did see any of them published (my hope was to publish three or four then publish a book’s worth, but finding a home for none meant I never wrote enough to make a book, more’s the pity), but lemme go find a short one to share now….

Orange Shovel #2: May 4, 2018

My sister stood by the door, holding her bag. “Going
somewhere?” She nodded. “Today, finally, to
stay with Dave.” I set down my phone and looked at her. “Dallas
again? Already?” She laughed and shook her head (the
only way, really, to respond to my, as she calls them, GREAT
LAFFS). The truth is, I don’t even know who she’s with. “State
his name!” is not the sort of thing a brother should ask after months of
on again off again (even he were too from Texas)
—a brother should know. Yesterday, tomorrow, today.
And now all I can do is look at her half smile. Leaving
me and afraid to confess she’ll see me—soon!

Another reason I never made a full book is because that much time with Trump’s nonsense ain’t good for the soul, but my point is:

The words of the powerful belong to us.

Do what you will with them.