Jacob McArthur Mooney
LightNews LightNews
banner
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Jacob McArthur Mooney
@mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
520 followers 310 following 130 posts
Poems, jokes, and fiction.

Recently: Frank's Wing (poems, 2023).
Next: The Northern (novel, 2025).
Occasionally: The Beaverton, others.

https://mcarthurmooney.carrd.co/
Posts Replies Media Videos
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's goodness is sponsored by my wife, who thrifted me this shirt someone made.
Me wearing a red and navy baseball shirt with a picture of Darryl Strawberry and the team name "The Sobbin' Strawberries"
August 29, 2025 at 1:20 AM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
I can't decide if I like this or I think it is Dr Seuss for grad students.
53. It is fall. Are we falling Those trees lose leaves. That is why foliage is called foliage And leaves are called leaves. leaves. Who calls your falling. Is it your calling. Is your calling leaving Is your leaving calling Is your coming going. Is your leaving leafing That is, in leaf. It is fall. Are we filing Leaves of absence. Are we in freefall. Do we feel it. Are we following. That is, filing after Will we too be filed after In a book
August 23, 2025 at 5:56 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's read is from The Feeling Sonnets by Eugene Ostashevsky
22. Berlin is green. It is made up of old growth and new growth. A fire took place here, a conflagration. It's called conflagration because it started with flags. A flag is a mark. If there's a mark, there's a market. I come from the market, make dinner, and en- gage in struggle It is a struggle to get my daughters to sleep. They sleep on bunk beds The bunk beds are contemporary. They come from Ikea. They were transported by trucks. My daughters are transported. There is a herd of unicorns on the rug below them. They come from developing markets In markets that are already developed, philoso- phers say that unicorns do not exist.
August 20, 2025 at 7:34 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's read is Zeroville by Steve Erickson, which is mostly about the movies but contains the best paragraph about punk music.
176. It was never the Music at all, it was always the Sound; and though there's no way for him to under- stand this, perhaps the Sound moves him now be- cause, a little more than twenty years after its birth, the Sound has become about itself, the Sound is about its own truth and corruption in the same way that, a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies: Sunset Boulevard, Singin' in the Rain, The Big Knife, The Bad and the Beautiful. When the Sound has circled to swallow its tail, it becomes a world of its own, god or no god, or in which Vikar is god--or in any event a god that kills fathers rather than sons.
August 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
from Existing Music, the new Nick Thran.
YOUR BIRTHDAY IS OUR BIRTHDAY Everyone remembers the nightmare of being born, the raging maelstrom of turning one and the emotional meat-grinder of turning two. Or the abject terror upon waking that first morning of our sixth year, peeling the curtains like some awful scab as parents' footsteps down the hall mix with that bone-chilling, barely whispered Happy Birthday song. It's terrifying, turning ten- so many vultures. And there's the dumpster fire of fourteen. The crocodile aquarium of twenty-one. The pain at twenty-five we must not name. And yet, I've said nothing at all of the ghost rave of thirty-three the quivering stem of fifty-eight, or even the lonely moonlit loon of seventy-five, out there on the dark water of the years to come, who calls and calls and calls. Happy birthday! As per uszh stay three metres away from the nearest balloon. Nobody ordered a sad clown but alas, he is here, hunched by the punch bowl, with bells on.
August 6, 2025 at 2:11 AM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Happy to have a poem called "Fields & Arenas" up at @bookninja.bsky.social 's famously minimalist New Poetry today.

newpoetry.ca/2025/06/09/f...
There is no calmer thought than a locked and trusted door. A room lit such that shadows cast elective patches on the walls you've hung with children's faces. Focus: the news is not your father. You can be bereaved and also hated But you were called to understand, not alliterate. You decorous asshole don't you count your dead? Remember: it's only gallows humor if it's you that's in the gallows Or if you own the gallows Or if you own the gallows, but it's also you that's in them. Wouldn't that be weird? The antidote to mourning is loneliness, friends We take it from each other.
June 9, 2025 at 10:36 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Happy birthday to The Northern. Would be great to see friends and neighbours at @anotherstoryto.bsky.social tonight for books, beverages, and entertainment from myself, Lex, and @utilityofboredom.bsky.social .
May 26, 2025 at 1:12 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Referring to my kids' school mascot as "Trogdor" and he's looking at me like he's already shopping for rest homes.
Logo of the Davisville PS Dragons
May 15, 2025 at 11:51 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
The earnest young gentlemen arrived today.
Unboxing photo of the novel "The Northern"
May 2, 2025 at 9:41 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
When it's Wrap Yourself in the Flag Season, and the donors have been commenting on how many American remounts you've done...
April 30, 2025 at 7:40 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Whose got two thumbs and purchased the love of his child??
April 24, 2025 at 4:46 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Black Thursday for my fellow Nintendo Dads.
April 24, 2025 at 1:25 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's read is Forecast: Pretty Bleak by Chris Bailey, which manages the trick of being generously emotive while every speaker and subject in its poems remains tongue-tied by nature.
LITTLE BITTY At 12 you learn about death and lobster traps in the south building. You don't focus on your father saying, I'm worth more dead than alive, but on instruction: angle that saw, boy. A hammer demands confidence. Spoke-shave squared posts to save your hands in spring. You hate to rig them, hate the melted plastic stink of twine cut so much the hot knife's smoulder has you give your guts to a snowbank. The good air follows you back to where your father is, head down, saying nothing. Alan Jackson on the radio he found at the dump. This song has everything there is in a life, he says. This is what I want played at my funeral. And you wish you were 5 again. That your father would hold you, kiss your cheek. Place a hand on your shoulder before wishing you goodnight. FORECAST: PRETTY BLEAK
April 20, 2025 at 12:29 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's read is the unerringly bleak The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, trans E. Dale Saunders.
WITHOUT THE THREAT OF PUNISHMENT THERE IS NO JOY IN FLIGHT "When the water's hot, shall I wash your back?" Suddenly a sorrow the color of dawn welled up in him. They might as well lick each other's wounds. But they would lick forever, and the wounds would never heal, and in the end their tongues would be worn away "I didn't understand. But life isn't something one can understand, I suppose. There are all kinds of life, and sometimes the other side of the hill looks greener. What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to. But obviously you can never know no matter what sort of life you live. Somehow I can't help but feel it would be better to have a little more to keep busy with. 22 "Shall I wash you
April 19, 2025 at 2:11 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's book is Wellwater by Karen Solie
PARABLES OF THE RAT The rat and I, we are like brothers. He, with his knowledge of causes, the elder, and my weakness the burden he shoulders. I see him in shadow, a drink in his hand, retreating to his rooms with a bad sandwich, slipping in at all hours, his brown coat's collar turned up, somewhere between a soldier and a criminal. In the eyes of God and society. which are the same eyes, he's succeeded wildly, but not properly: and one day, in the house of his labour, he*ll ingest the poison of the family order, and everything he's seen and heard me do will die with him.
April 16, 2025 at 1:09 AM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's book is total by Aisha Sasha John.
GIVE ME WHAT I WANT AND DO WHAT I SAY (YOU LITTLE BITCH) Sex: let loose Time: control Body: control Dance: let loose Stretch: let loose Money: control Let loose: let loose Control: control
April 11, 2025 at 2:16 AM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Hoo boy was this ever made for me! Andrew Forbes is Canada's Baseball Spokesperson and the interest in labour history in his newest is so rich and complex. He's such a world builder too, you'll notice how well the book-length motifs work with the episodic essay topics. @utilityofboredom.bsky.social
Cover image of Field Work: On Baseball and Making a Living by Andrew Forbes
April 9, 2025 at 2:25 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
April 7, 2025 at 11:22 AM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's book is Familial Hungers by Christine Wu.
The Frequency of Sichuan Peppercorns is 50 hertz. That tingly sensation can be measured in micro-vibrations, a scientific breakthrough ill uminating paresthesia and other abnormalities Scientists say Sichuan peppercorns light up touch receptors--actually replicate touch They can't wait to order dan dan noodles and spicy eggplant. A slurp of pins and needles Chinese families dislike physical displays of affection--1 wish this stereotype weren't true but I freeze when my mother tries to hug me. Sichuan peppercorns aren't peppers at all-they're berries from the prickly ash tree doing their best to ward off predators and failing, garnering instead a global fan base for málà, the spicy numbing that burns away the pain of mapo tofu, constantly on the menu at my mother's house, never in my bowl. I pushed it away, but I get it now. l'm sorry to fail at hugs and other abnormalities, but 1'Il keep eating at 50 cycles a second
April 2, 2025 at 11:00 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Appropriate entertainment for Winter 2025's coda.
Credit sequence for the Nat Theatre Live presentation of Dr. Strangelove.
March 30, 2025 at 6:51 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Nosferatu (1922 d. F.W. Murnau)

#canpol
A photo of Mark Carney with a long creeping shadow like the famous scene in Murnau's Nosferatu.
March 29, 2025 at 3:02 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Window shopping for new local providers and considering how much I'd enjoy sharing a dentist with Darth Vader and also Gru from Despicable Me.
A photo of a very scary looking dental office with blackened windows and a high turret, called "Imperial Dental".
March 26, 2025 at 1:18 PM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's book is Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes.
The shame they felt at their lack of self- control was really a failure on their part to adapt their thinking to the changing environment. They still thought of their days in terms of a central activity- -work-and a constellation of distractions. But on closer inspection, this jumping from screen to screen and from window to window was actually more of a flow state. The very idea of a "distraction" assumed a separation between the personal and the professional- between news stories and banter, project pitches and catchy pop hooks. If ever there had been such a distinction, it had long since evaporated. They would drift from one thing to the other because one thing was the other. On social me- dia, just as on InDesign, time disappeared.
March 25, 2025 at 2:12 AM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
All the #USMNT is missing this weekend a surprise L to Greenland.
March 24, 2025 at 12:49 AM
mcarthurmooney.bsky.social
Today's book is You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer.
I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can't imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flow- ers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year's festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn't place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex's "Monolith." The priest was also up to his ears in whatever he had taken to carry out his temple duties, so he bent his magic powers of hearing to the mu- sic and caught the sexy crooning of Marc Bolan. He smiled. That's good stuff, he said. Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat. It's nothing I've ever heard before, he replied, but " like it. He pulled his elbows in tight and shim- mied, moving his head gravely from side to side, transfixed by pleasure. The priest, sway- ing his own ass to the beat - he was nearly eighty, but on mushrooms he was a jaguar- said, I was thinking about you, believe it or not; look at this. He carefully lifted the clay basin in which the blood of doves sacrificed that after- noon had yet to coagulate- their decapitated bodies sensually dancing to "Monolith," all around the priest and emperor- and showed him the image forming in it. It took Moctezuma a while to bring it into focus because it came from very far away. When it was finally sharp and clear, it made no sense to him: It was me writing this novel in a yard on Shelter Island Uh, he said, strange, and he was seized by laughter. Is that what will happen if I wait for the new year, or if I don't wait? The priest shrugged. The calendar says you should wait, but the calendar has been wrong lately; let me ask the boss. Moving to the beat of the emperor's internal music, he walked to the gi- ant sculpture of Huitzilopochtli that loomed over the place. His skull-embroidered cape swished like the train of a contented queen. As always, the god was covered with a veil. On the temple's lower level, the Spaniards stood. They began to climb, taking it easy now and not speaking, to save their breath and their strength.
March 21, 2025 at 2:08 AM