Month: November 2024

Weekly Round-up, November 30, 2024
[The last of the Thai chili peppers in my back yard, covered with the first snow of the year.]

This was a quiet week, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday. My partner and I stayed home and did quiet things like binge-watching season 2 of Physical: 100 on Netflix. If you ever want to feel inspired and humbled at the same time, this is the show for you.

Reading

I finished William Gibson’s Spook Country, which was most excellent, and now am looking at two books for December.

The first is Eva Baltasar‘s Permafrost, a short novel I received a few years ago from my subscription to And Other Stories

The other is Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, which is most assuredly not a short novel. I chose this for Dostoevsky December, because I have read all of the Dostoevsky I have in the house and don’t want to tackle his Writer’s Diary with anything less than an entire season in which to enjoy his wit.

Writing

Not much to report. No brain capacity available for writing.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Apocalypse, Cyborgs
Setting: Academia
Genre: Steampunk

Listening

Rob Zombie, “Dragula”. ‘Tis the season.

Interesting Links
- “The far right grows through “disaster fantasies”” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic)
- “The Invisible Man” (Patrick Fealey, Esquire) – Fealey is homeless. He once wrote for the Boston Globe.
2024-11-30
Weekly Round-up, November 23, 2024

[ A medallion, awarded by the Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids. ]

This past Sunday I visited the main branch of the Grand Rapids Public Library to attend Grand Rapids: A Poetry City, an event created by Grand Rapids Poet Laureate Christine Stephens-Krieger. At the end of the event Christine called up a few people from the audience and presented them with medallions. Much to my surprise, one of those people was me!

Stephens-Krieger has many plans for the three years of her term, including a couple in which I am involved. I have talked previously about the Grand River Poetry Collective and An Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids. The Poetry Collective has several books in progress, and another Oral History project is underway, which might even be completed by the end of 2025. So, exciting times.

Reading

I finished Somebody Loves You, and have started on William Gibson’s excellent Spook Country. Somehow the Blue Ant books seem appropriate, here in late 2024.

Writing

A pass at the first couple of paragraphs of the re-write of Cacophonous. Nothing much else.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Environment, Super Powers
Setting: Small Town
Genre: Horror

2024-11-23
Weekly Round-up, November 16, 2024
Well my head is in a slightly better place this week than it was last week. Not that things are good. No, things are not good at all. Trump was re-elected, despite being a close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Or really, because he is a Friend of Epstein. After all, he is very popular with conservative Christians. Its re-election was no real surprise; this type of outcome has been inevitable since Reagan’s second term, and accelerated by Citizen’s United.

Reading

Reading went a little better this week than last week. I finished Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman, which was beautiful and strange. Now I am reading Mona Arshi’s Somebody Loves You, which sits in the boundary between novel and prose poem.

Writing

I have put some more thought into The Book, and taken down some notes around setting and character traits, but the story itself still eludes me. I suspect that what was originally intended as a re-write will instead be a re-draft.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Politics, Death
Setting: Subterranean
Genre: Literary Fiction

Listening

Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, “Something About John Coltrane”, from the album Journey in Satchidananda.

Interesting Links
- “Why the Enthusiasm for Mass Deportation, A Hard and Likely Largely Losing Way to Deal with Illegal Immigration?” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – Why the enthusiasm for mass deportation? Racism. Why will it fail? Capitalism. Will the deportees be blamed for the lack of success in deporting them? Yes.
- “Pluralistic: Boss politics antitrust” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic) – When it comes to Trump vs. corporate corruption, the enemy of my enemy is very much my fucking enemy.
2024-11-16
Weekly Round-up, November 9, 2024
Well that was certainly a hell of a week.

Reading

Nothin’

Writing

Nothin’

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Colonization, Economics
Setting: Academia
Genre: War

Listening

Ingrid Laubrock, “The Last Quiet Place”

Interesting Links
- What the Fuck Just Happened Today
2024-11-09
Weekly Round-up, November 2, 2024
[ 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.

Weekly Writing Prompt

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
- “The American Housing Crisis: A Theft, Not a Shortage” (Blair Fix, Economics From the Top Down)
- The entire run of Dragon magazine, available at the Internet Archive.
2024-11-02
October 2024 Books and Reading Notes
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
1. Morgan Talty, Fire Exit (And Other Stories) [2024.10.02]
2. Michael J. DeLuca, The Jaguar Mask (Stelliform Press) [2024.10.06]
3. Dave Klecha and Tobias J. Buckell, The Runes of Engagement (Tachyon Publications) [2024.10.06]
Reading List

Books
1. Jorge Luis Borges – Conversations [2024.10.10]
2. Dave Klecha and Tobias J. Buckell, The Runes of Engagement [2024.10.14]
3. Jack Ridl, All At Once [2024.10.17]
4. Norah Lange, Notes from Childhood [2024.10.25]
2024-11-01