Well that was certainly a hell of a week.
Reading
Nothin’
Writing
Nothin’
Subject: Colonization, Economics
Setting: Academia
Genre: War
Listening
Ingrid Laubrock, “The Last Quiet Place”
Interesting Links
Immanentize the Empathy
Well that was certainly a hell of a week.
Reading
Nothin’
Writing
Nothin’
Subject: Colonization, Economics
Setting: Academia
Genre: War
Listening
Ingrid Laubrock, “The Last Quiet Place”
Interesting Links
[ The view north along the Grand River. ]
What would have been a productive week turned out not to be after I had an attack of what felt like bad allergies, after the outside temperature here hit 80 degrees earlier this week. Now that more seasonable weather is back I feel better, but have no energy or drive to do anything.
Reading
Slowly working my way through Elvira Navarro‘s A Working Woman. Not making much progress because my brain is mush.
Writing
No writing this week. Barely even any journaling. Between the looming election and the illness my brain is mush.
And I find myself remarkably unmotivated for the Month of Writing. I certainly am not going to hit 50,000 words. I made a goal of a completed first draft of a book I started two years ago, but I don’t think I will even have the focus to complete the ~20,000 words necessary to do so.
Maybe I just need to take this year off.
Subject: Evolution, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Ship
Genre: Science Fiction
Listening
The Gyuto Monks, Freedom Chants From the Roof of the World. I have listened to the album possibly more than any other.
Interesting Links
October was quite busy so I didn’t read as much as I would have liked. But what I did read was most excellent!
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
[ Just before sunrise, facing east down Michigan Street at the Union Avenue intersection. ]
This past week was one of the busiest and most hectic weeks of my year, so I didn’t accomplish much that wasn’t work or class or home maintenance.
Reading
Currently reading Norah Lange‘s Notes From Childhood, and it is gorgeous!
Writing
I have changed the name of the MC in my WIP to Thomas, because “Cacophonous Thomas” rolls off the tongue so nicely. Bob, as a protagonist name, is just a little too generic.
Subject: Empire, Politics
Setting: Labyrinth
Genre: Literary Fiction
Listening
This year I created a playlist for my novel, and the soundtrack to The Naked Lunch was the first addition.
Interesting Links
[Painted stones found beside the Dragon Trail at Hardy Dam.]
This past week was hectic. Far more hectic than I would have expected on a week off. But my week off coincided with the kickoff of a new project, which I am leading, so I had to pop in to a couple of meetings when I would much rather have been walking in the woods or otherwise not staring at a computer screen or listening to other people talk.
But I did manage to accomplish some of the things I set out to work on for the week. My house is slightly improved. Our cats are verified healthy. I am too, as of my first physical in over a decade.
Reading
I finished the Borges interviews, and for a change of pace picked up Runes of Engagement by Dave Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell. I know Klecha from the ConFusion science fiction convention, where we are both volunteers and occasional members of the ConCom, and he has been most helpful as I learn the ins and outs of helping to manage a science fiction convention. I met Buckell at ConFusion several years ago. He is a Righteous Dude.
Runes of Engagement was a fun read, and light, and I finished it in a couple of days. Next I read Jack Ridl’s new poetry collection All At Once, which was absolutely beautiful. Some of the poems moved me to tears, which almost never happens. Ridl is a treasure.
Now I am reading Norah Lange‘s Notes from Childhood, which I acquired several years ago from my subscription to And Other Stories. I might have missed this one, except that Lange is mentioned more than once in the Borges interview collection, and so was floating near the surface of my subconscious.
Writing
With my little extra free time I began organizing my notes for the upcoming Month of Writing. Since I am no longer participating in National Novel Writing Month, I am instead participating in “That November Thing”, an event coordinated by the West Michigan Author Alliance, that which used to be the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids region for NaNoWriMo.
Subject: Apocalypse, Precursors
Setting: Battlefield
Genre: Lovecraftian
Listening
Interesting Links
[Lazy Cats]
Once again I was cruelly and unjustly snubbed for both a MacArthur Genius Grant and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fact that I have done nothing noteworthy should not disqualify me from the selection process.
Reading
I just finished the collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, and will likely soon start browsing my collections of his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. So many brilliant ideas. So much brilliant writing.
I am now reading All At Once, Jack Ridl‘s new collection of poetry which was just published by CavanKerry Press.
Writing
I am ramping up my note-taking and world-building for the November Project. Since I am not officially participating in NaNoWriMo until they de-shittify the organization, I am instead working with
Subject: Robots, Death
Setting: Bar
Genre: Cyberpunk
Listening
A little something different here.
Interesting Links
[Poe, woozy from the drugs.]
This past week was hectic. We had to take our cat Poe to the vet to have three of her teeth extracted. She is recuperating nicely, but caring for her as she recovers has thrown off the daily and weekly routine. Therefore I didn’t manage to accomplish as much as I had hoped.
Reading
I am still reading through the collected interviews of Jorge Luis Borges. He is currently at the top of my list of “If you could spend a day talking to one author, living or dead.” The interviews are all excellent, but there is a notable difference the interviews where the interviewer is almost as smart as Borges, and the ones where the interviewer is nowhere near as smart as Borges. Actually, “smart” isn’t the right phrasing. “Well read” and “erudite” work better.
Writing
I am still planning what I will tackle in November, since NaNoWriMo, having both become enshittified and having shit the bed, is off the table. Probably a re-write of my novel-in-progress Cacophonous.
Subject: Colonization, Economics
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Mystery
Listening
Kris Kristofferson died a few days ago. I am posting this video because “Casey’s Last Ride” appeared in an intense scene in the first season of True Detective.
Interesting Links
Happy Fall, y’all! We finally have some seasonally-appropriate weather. And some seasonally-appropriate animals, like this young opossum which stopped by for a visit a few days ago.
The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for October 2024 is: Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What’s your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.
Maybe it is because I have recently been reading a collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, but the first story which came to mind when I read this month’s question was Ambrose Bierce‘s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” While not a ghost story in the traditional sense, nor supernatural in character, it is the story which most disturbed me when I first read it as a teenager. I had read many more immediately frightening stories – Jaws, the Stephen King collections, and scores of others from books and magazines of the 1980s. Those stories bothered me for days or weeks (lookin’ at YOU, The Shining!) after reading them, and caused many a sleepless night. But they eventually faded into the background radiation of the larger horrors of my childhood. Eighth grade, for instance.
But it was Bierce’s story which threw me off-kilter in the long term. In fewer than 4,000 words, Occurrence cast into doubt the entirety of my lived experience. I had no way of knowing if I was not experiencing something of the kind at any given moment. Maybe I had been hit by a car and the past week was all a hallucination as I slowly slipped off this mortal coil. Or maybe I had been crushed in the barnyard as I tried to coax recalcitrant cows into the milking parlor. I couldn’t be certain if that which felt real was actually real, or if it was some combination of dream, memory, and imagination.
[At the time, I was unaware of Samuel Johnson’s “appeal to the stone” and likely would have broken my foot trying to prove that this was, in fact the really real world, even though the pain of a broken foot is experienced by the same mechanism that tells us we are in reality in the first place, and thus this would have been a pointless experiment. Reality may not be subjective but it is often contextual.]
Like all the other scary stories of my childhood, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” slowly dissolved into the larger morass of my teenage years, leaving me with a continual sense of existential angst long before I had heard either of those words.
Then I read the story in college. And again after college. And as the 1990s became the 2000s and The Real suddenly found itself in competition with The Virtual, “An Occurrence” made its way back to the surface. People began asking interesting and uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, perception, and the mind. If we had a sufficiently lifelike Virtual Reality environment, could we fool someone into believing that it was the real world? And if something is indistinguishable from the real world, does it matter that it is not, in fact, real? Are we all just brains in jars hooked up to something like The Matrix? Is the entire universe really just a simulation running on a vast computer network? Barring obvious and unambiguous breaks in causality, such things are impossible to prove or disprove.
A few years ago I began reading essays by the late Mark Fisher, particularly those concerned with hauntology – the ghosts of lost futures which haunt the present. The protagonist of “An Occurrence,” Farquhar, is experiencing the ghost of his lost future in the time between when he is dropped and when the noose snaps his neck. Objectively the rest of his life lasts about a second. Subjectively it lasts several days. Which is the real future? In a sense, both and neither. For an infinite moment he is neither alive nor dead. Schrödinger’s protagonist. Solipsism and nihilism fistfight in heaven.
And that’s not even getting into the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Somewhere out there is a version of reality where Farquhar slipped the noose off of his neck and dove into the river, alongside another version where he never traveled to Owl Creek Bridge in the first place.
So to sum up, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” did a serious number on my head, and continues to do so to this day. Reality may not be real. The most useful thing we can do is choose to believe and behave as if it is.
After all, what are ghosts, but restless spirits mourning their lost futures?
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In contrast with last month, September was an excellent month for short fiction. I have dozens of issues of various magazines and journals lying around my house unread, as well as probably close to 100 anthologies and short story collections awaiting my attention. Any progress is better than no progress.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books
Short Prose
[The latest, and possibly the last, harvest from our small garden this year.]
Suddenly here we are in the last week of September and the first week of Autumn. We finally have something approaching seasonal weather, though the weather we are having now would have been considered unusually hot only a decade ago. So it goes.
Reading
I have set all of my other reading aside so that I may focus on reading the collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges. I picked this book up back in June 2016 and it has been gathering dust for the past eight years.
Writing
Thought it isn’t necessarily creative writing, I did stay up late a few nights ago and write a long blog post for the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. The post will go live on Wednesday, October 2. The question for the month was about our favorite classic ghost stories. I chose “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce. For why this was the story which most affected Young Me, check back in a couple of days.
Reading the interviews with Borges has helped me sort out a few problems in one of my longer (and older) works-in-progress. I am taking notes and rearranging a few things, noting where I can remove characters who are now extraneous and adding one or two who will be central to the revised work. Though I will not be officially participating in NaNoWriMo this year I do plan to spend much of November (and October, and December) writing, and perhaps complete a first draft by the end of the year. This will only be possible because I will be able to use more than half of the previous version essentially unchanged, or only lightly edited. And if I can’t complete a draft by December 31, I would like to have it done by the end of the Year of the Dragon.
Subject: Revenge, Music
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Mystery
Listening
Interesting Links