Month: June 2023

IWSG, June 2023: If Not This, Then What?

[2023.06.10 NOTE: This post was written several days later than was originally scheduled.]

Hi Everyone! I am just returned from a whirlwind trip around Lake Michigan where my partner and I stopped to visit friends and family in Madison WI, Marquette MI, and Sault Ste. Marie MI. Thus the lateness and brevity of this post.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for June 2023 is: If you ever did stop writing, what would you replace it with?

Good question! I would probably increase my practice time at Master Lee’s school. Then again that is something I should do anyway. Honestly, I can’t fathom what it would be like to stop writing, so a safe answer is that if something were to stop me from writing, it would probably be the kind of circumstance or event which would prevent me from doing almost everything else too.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

2023-06-07
54, or 3x3x3x2

Happy birthday to me! I have made it to 54, which now officially places me in my mid-fifties, and also firmly in middle age. One more year and I will get to choose from the next tier in the “your age” dropdown menus when e.g. signing up for a new social media platform.

This past year felt like coming out of a long hibernation, and I expect the upcoming year will continue that trend as we continue to adjust to whatever the new normal is, assuming enough stability for any one narrative to assert itself as “normal”, which frankly is asking a lot of the world at this point in time.

The last book I read as a 53-year-old was Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth, and the first book I am reading as a 54-year-old is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Collected Novellas. Thus do years end and start on high notes.

Not much else to report at this time. Life is busy, and enjoyable more often than not.

2023-06-05
May 2023 Books and Reading Notes
May was a slightly better month for reading than April, if only because there was more daylight to be had and I had the occasional opportunity to sit on the porch with a glass of wine.

Acquisitions
1. Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes [2023.05.07]
2. China Mieville, The City & The City [2023.05.07]
3. Kaja and Phil Foglio, Girl Genius vol. 20: The Exorcism Engines (Studio Foglio) [2023.05.30]
Reading List

Books
1. Alexander Darwin, The Combat Codes (ebook), self-published [2023.05.06]
2. Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes [2023.05.07]
3. Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich (editors), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Part 1 [2023.05.24]
4. Sayaka Murata (Ginny Tapley Takemori, translator), Earthlings [2023.05.28]
5. Angela Boord, Fortune’s Fool (ebook), self-published [2023.05.29]
Short Prose
1. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Mind’s We: Morphogenesis and the Chaosmic Spasm, Social Recomposition, Technological Change and Neuroplasticity”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.08]
2. Jason Smith, “Soul on Strike”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.08]
3. Tiziana Terranova, “Ordinary Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.13]
4. Jodi Dean, “Collective Desire and the Pathology of the Individual”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.14]
5. Arne de Boever, “‘All of us go a little crazy at times’: Capital and Fiction in a State of Generalized Psychosis”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.15]
6. Jonathan Beller, “Pathologistics of Attention, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.19]
7. Bruce Wexler, “Neuroplasticity, Culture and Society”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.22]
8. Warren Neidich, “Neuropower: Art in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, part 1 [2023.05.24]
2023-06-01