[I took this photo when walking to the gym from work. One of the buildings attached to the Skywalk has a stairwell with windows facing west. The Skywalk connects to the building I work in, and runs from DeVos Place to the Van Andel Arena.]
It’s been another crazy week for work, leaving little time of brain space for creative endeavors. SO of course I have added a new creative endeavor to my schedule, explained under the Writing heading below.
Reading
I started the month reading The Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, but almost immediately became distracted by Ernest Hemingways’s A Moveable Feast. So I am bouncing back and forth between the two.
Writing
I started a new daily (-ish) writing exercise based on the weekly writing prompts: Each day, as part of my journaling, I jot down a story idea or fragment from the prompt. It can be a single sentence or the entire story. The prompt generator is just too damn useful and fun for me to not keep it central to my writing practice. If I come up with anything worth sharing I will post it here.
Subject: Revenge, Evolution
Setting: Outpost
Genre: Magic Realism
Listening
Being a programmer, I often listen to music when I work. And when working I need music that is both interesting and not distracting So I listen to instrumental music, or music with minimal lyrics, or non-English-speaking singers. St Germain performs house-flavored nu jazz, which fits my requirements perfectly.
Interesting Links
- “Suicide Mission – What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane” (Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect) – In which Boeing deliberately murders its passengers and flight crews in pursuit of quarterly profits.
- “Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic) – All capitalism is rooted in, and a magnifier of, sadism.
- “A World Without Insurance: A Climate-Future Look at Property Values” (Thomas Neuburger, Naked Capitalism) – A follow-up from a link I posted a couple of weeks ago. We need to nationalize insurance. All insurance. The entire industry, across all sectors.