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Joel Calahan

@joelcalahan.com

1.4K followers 650 following 8.9K 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

Joel Calahan

@joelcalahan.com

we’ll do instrumental jazz for this, the real reason i ever got into side ones

title track from maiden voyage
title track from the sidewinder
hat and beard from out to lunch
india from impressions
so low from the jimmy giuffre clarinet

Patrick Bromley @patrickbromley.bsky.social · 1d

Top 5 Side 1, Track 1s

November 27, 2025 at 2:08 AM

Joel Calahan

@joelcalahan.com

My little book The Bees (a new translation of Book IV of Vergil’s Georgics) is still generating buzz.

A few copies left with the publisher at the link below, and I have a few myself. Query me if interested.

www.vergebooks.com#/joel-calaha...

November 27, 2025 at 1:11 AM

Reposted by Joel Calahan

Rabih Alameddine

@rabihalameddine.bsky.social

Grandma Moses
To Grandma's House We Go on Thanksgiving Day, 1942
oil and glitter on masonite
40.6 x 57.2 cm.

November 26, 2025 at 11:40 PM

Reposted by Joel Calahan

Ana Marie Cox

@anamariecox.bsky.social

People will die, and are currently dying, because RFK was granted one of the most powerful megaphones in the country. Two people who could have thrown barriers in front of his climb decided not to; there's a sex scandal here but it is not the biggest scandal.

November 26, 2025 at 11:30 PM

Reposted by Joel Calahan

Ned Raggett

@nedraggett.bsky.social

Hell with it, I'm just going to post the whole thing here via screencap and alt text. It's Kaleb Horton, man, his writing always deserves the second read, especially since it could have just easily been lost forever like so much else. Read it, share it.

A look at forgotten Hollywood landmarks
By Kaleb Horton

Let's say you come in from down south, and you're looking for an unsung movie landmark.

So you fly in to LAX, rent a car, blow right past Hollywood, leave Los Angeles county heading north, go over the Grapevine, gape at the monumental hills and, wow, there really is a Smokey Bear Road, then you turn off the air conditioner when the sign tells you. Once you come down the grade too fast and see the world's loneliest Denny's, you're well on your way to what you're looking for – the middle of nowhere.

You're going to Kern County to find the spot where Alfred Hitchcock filmed one of the greatest scenes in movie history, the crop duster sequence from "North by Northwest." It takes place in Indiana, of course, but the Indiana road sign and the imported corn field can't deceive this Bakersfield native. The parched and desolate heat of the scene feels too much like Kern County.

The scene people know off-hand — Cary Grant running from an airplane — isn't why "North by Northwest" is a classic. The film's greatness, as was often the case for Hitchcock, lies in its build-up, its suspense, its mood. The plane moment is almost anticlimax. It is those five minutes before Grant's desperate escape that constitute a mathematically perfect suspense scene. So expert is Hitchcock's hand that he creates suspense, a slow burning dread, with no camera tricks and no music in broad daylight.

Grant's character is a prototypical James Bond. His perfect suit, fast wit, high-alcohol tolerance and effortless charisma have got him out of every predicament so far. In the city, among people, he has powers. Take him away from people, put him nowhere, and he's just like us — totally helpless. He has no powers: His suit is no good out here; his million-dollar tailoring and perfect haircut is just vanity now. No amount of pretending can provide escape. Here, is the one place where he can die, and he gets by on the grace of God. All he can do is wait for what's coming.

So when you seek the lost landmark of this scene, you're looking for an idea as much as a place. You're on Highway 99 now, going 30 miles north of Bakersfield, looking for an unassuming patch of dirt that carries spiritual weight. The scene was filmed neart Garces Highway to the west of Delano. You'll think there's a handy exit for it. There's not. You'll probably get lost in Delano, counting on a connection. You're at once a million miles from Hollywood and a hundred miles away. It's lonely. The horizon sprawls forever like there's nothing past it. There are broken down trucks on the side of the road, plumes of smoke from faraway fires. You'll find Garces eventually.

You'll pass a bar called Rosy's Place, abandoned houses, an oil field, a prison, a cemetery, a sign that says "we clean headstones," and a whole lot of gold-on-brown punctuated by an occasional trailer or car going faster than you. You're looking for where Garces meets Corcoran Road. That's where this "North by Northwest" scene was filmed. You'll get a vague idea where it is but you'll never be exactly sure, since there's little impetus for clear signage 10 miles from a prison. Maybe Corcoran Road is unlabeled. Besides, that Indiana sign and the prop cornfield haven't been there in 56 years.

If you're anything like me, you'll lose the light and call it a day, unsatisfied with the route you took. You return to I-5 northbound. From the 5, you'll meet Route 46, and go through a place called Lost Hills, then back in to the location from Corcoran Road instead. That's how Hitchcock probably did it. More intuitive.

Still in the middle of nowhere, but on your way to Corcoran Road, you're right next to another Hollywood landmark: Blackwells Corner, James Dean's last stop. It's a glorified Texaco, and gas is 50 cents a gallon more than it should be. They sell Jelly Bellys and '50s kitsch artifacts — plates with Marilyn Monroe's face on them, and so forth. They really figured out how to cash in on death. You don't want to stop here.

But I stopped. I asked the kid at the Blackwells Corner counter how to get to Corcoran Road. He gave me a look that said "there's no reason to go there," and then wearily told me where to go anyway. I was about 8 miles from the destination.

Going there is a meditative experience. You're not just going to the middle of nowhere. You're going to the perfect nowhere. Going alone, in the hypnotic heat of the Central Calfiornia Valley, you might even forget what year it is. There is no reason to believe the road would be so well preserved for half a century, intimately tied to the career of an actor born in Bristol 111 years ago, but it has been.

There's an abandoned house. A barn with a cross on it. But almost nothing has changed in 56 years. At some point new lines were added on the road. There's overgrowth where there didn't used to be overgrowth. A couple discarded Budweiser cans from who knows when, but mostly it's identical. This is the same sleepy loneliness that Alfred Hitchcock used to make great art in 1959. And that may sound dull, but tranquility is the point. You stand on that dirt and there's no distraction from what's in your soul. It's an inner destination, not an outer one.

I told my grandma about it when I got back to Bakersfield. She told me her Uncle Harold thought it was the prettiest road in America. And she showed me a picture of a Corcoran grade school class posing in the dirt with Grant and Hitchcock. It's just a field trip picture. The kids are fidgeting, many with arms folded, some shielding their eyes from the sun, all with obedient smiles. They'd all be in their sixties now, but they'd remember where this road is.

It emphasized the ugliness of James Dean's last stop becoming a place to sell T-shirts. It's about what we preserve, and what we don't, and what we remember, and what we don't. It's easy to find shrines to morbidity and hard to find meaningful places. For those, you have to go looking.

November 26, 2025 at 9:52 PM

Reposted by Joel Calahan

Mags Online

@mags.colvett.online

Need everyone to see my purchase from the bookstore at the Emily Dickinson house

Postcard with illustration recreating famous seated portrait of Emily Dickinson but it’s Nancy. Her arm rests on a book of Sluggo Comics

Back text: Beloved poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), drawn in the style of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller (1905-1982). The transformation of Emily Dickinson to Bushmiller's fictional "Nancy" character perhaps demonstrates for some reductionism to the ridiculous, yet both creators have attracted deeply immersive examinations of their respective work, sometimes even cultish in nature. And an unresolved question for literary scholars remains: Who was the "Sluggo" in Emily's life?

November 26, 2025 at 8:07 PM

Joel Calahan

@joelcalahan.com

My wife elbowing me to shut up as I pass the creamed corn at Thanksgiving meal, whispering "garmonbozia" in a reversed speech inflection.

November 26, 2025 at 8:42 PM

Reposted by Joel Calahan

Paul F. Tompkins

@pftompkins.bsky.social

November 26, 2025 at 6:21 PM

Joel Calahan

@joelcalahan.com

A truly moving and beautiful essay about reading by an old friend. I couldn’t recommend it higher to begin your morning.

Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 20h

I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University

www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review

Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.

www.bostonreview.net

November 26, 2025 at 3:40 PM

Reposted by Joel Calahan

Willard

@climateball.net

Gavagaï!

drawing of a rabbit holding a medieval weapon, with "we must remain whimsical to survive the horrors of this world"

November 26, 2025 at 2:17 AM

Reposted by Joel Calahan

Tressie McMillan Cottom

@tressiemcphd.bsky.social

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 3d

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

November 23, 2025 at 11:16 PM