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joelcalahan.com
Joel Calahan
@joelcalahan.com
1.4K followers 640 following 8.4K posts
Apprentice philologist. Poetry translation and history teaching. Chair-leg hero. Emeritus: Signal to Noise, Chicago Review reader-in-chief of Caliber, an occasional newsletter of translation and reading [ask at calibernewsletter at gmail dot com]
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · Dec 17
Very proud to announce the publication of my chapbook The Bees, out now from Verge Books. It’s a translation of Book IV of Vergil’s Georgics, full of practical tips for beekeepers, and lovely lyric depictions of hive life.

Purchase, repost, spread the word!

www.vergebooks.com#/joel-calaha...
Verge Books
www.vergebooks.com
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joelcalahan.com
Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 1h
indeed. Just noting the weird dead air from the home crowd for a really big win lol
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 1h
To come back from a first-pitch home run to shut them down is really something, great outing
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 1h
Incredible steal win for the M’s. A little anticlimactic as a the away team but really important.
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baumann.bsky.social
Michael Baumann @baumann.bsky.social · 2h
It's cool that this series features all four kinds of mustache a white guy can have. From left to right: gravel cyclist, cop, Field Marshal Haig, Bruno Kirby
Bryce Miller Davis Schneider a very hangdog-looking Dan wilson Cal Raleigh mid-bat flip
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 3h
yes, I agree
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 3h
great choice, it’s a singular novel and really stays with you, I still think about it years after reading it during a dark Chicago winter in my 20s
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joelcalahan.com
Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 3h
Just finished two Annie Ernaux books, reading Thomas Meyer’s Fisher King, Osita Nwanevu’s book on democracy, and Phil Christman’s book on Christians and leftists
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 3h
omg I would just wither into a raisin why do they even try
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rocinante.bsky.social
Just some guy @rocinante.bsky.social · 4h
That stupid epic handshake meme I like just a bit too much: Left hand: “Why lookst thou so?" "With my crossbow I shot the albatross.” Right hand: “tonight’s ballgame” They meet: “mariner v bird”
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 6h
Eye-fucking Barry Gibb as sloppy as Barbra Streisand with Burt Bacharach
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mattnelsonart.bsky.social
Matt Nelson @mattnelsonart.bsky.social · 8h
This sounded cute so I drew it
A little mouse in a light colored suit. He holds a drink with a wedge of cheese in it. He says "now I may be just a simple country mouse attorney--"
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joelcalahan.com
Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 8h
The Unbearable Lightness of Peeing
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 8h
“Leaf blowers are a scourge and must be eliminated from the earth,” Tom said rakishly.
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 8h
Silver noon
A turntable with a record playing; Horace Silver’s The Trio Sides LP jacket is leaning against a lamp alongside
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 9h
Nwanevu’s conclusion to this impasse is helpful even if it is not yet prescriptive:
All of this should lead us to an important and hopefully clarifying conclusion. Democracy isn't about the will of the people winning out in a given collective decision. It's about the right of the people to govern themselves through collective decision-making in the first place. The rules that determine what collective decisions get made won't be perfect. The decisions made will rarely, if ever, satisfy everyone. And the notion that the decisions made will reflect the wishes of a definitive majority is, essentially, a fiction. But to believe in democracy is to believe that the people, nevertheless, should have the right to come together, in equal standing, and make collective decisions in systems designed to respond to majorities.
joelcalahan.com
Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 9h
The fact that no one wants a lot of these bad policies is problematic, but the solution isn’t to oversimplify that reaction (“the majority don’t want this”) as if it were more definitive a description of the voting public.
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joelcalahan.com
Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 9h
The idea that multiple majorities should lead to political paralysis, however, is just one possible outcome. What is happening in the authoritarian right is that they are exploiting the multiple majorities idea to just exercise their own power and call it “majority will.”
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 9h
And in so many elections you end up getting a majority for a type of guy (“strong leader with antagonistic style”) and then a smorgasbord of policy preferences that the guy in question doesn’t even really support
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 9h
It seems truer than ever that the concept of a “will of the majority” is specious—in so many issues, large majorities can found for overlapping and sometimes even mutually exclusive positions or beliefs.
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 9h
Reading Osita Nwanevu on democracy, and struck by his description of multiple majorities as one of the paradoxes of democracy.
…we can't say with confidence, given all we’ve just considered, that any individual democratic decision accurately reflects "the will ot the people" or even "the will of the majority" of the people. "The majority," as a single, stable entity, cannot exist. What a particular democratic decision can capture, imperfectly at best, are the preferences of a majority-perhaps one among others. You needn't know much about democratic theory to grasp this. We misht cheer rhetoric that says otherwise, but when one candidate in an election beats another 51 percent to 49 percent, for instance, we tend to understand it as an election that easily could have gone the other way rather than "the people" making themselves obviously and overwhelmingly heard. Even when candidates win out more decisively, it's often common sense to us that other alternatives might have won or made a difference had they been considered and that the winners of the contest aren't necessarily thinking as one— that they might not fully agree on all the issues at hand. These are the things that make democracy dynamic- a system of contests, none fully decisive on their own, between groups that can try forming different coalitions and attempting different strategies to win rather than a system of rigid dominance by a single majority.
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joelcalahan.com
Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 10h
“Get bent, you
A picture of a mushroom on a log with the caption “4. Hairy Curtain Crust (Stereum hirsutum)”
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 10h
entertainment is his middle name!
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 10h
Mushroom folk names often double as excellent creative epithets: “Get lost, you dung-loving birds nest!”
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Joel Calahan @joelcalahan.com · 11h
“John Adams found it and now and I are free” *nodding sagely and having a stroke at the same time*
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junlper.beer
onion person @junlper.beer · 11h
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