[A section of one of the shelves of books in the poetry section at Argos Book Shop. Taken because of the presence of issue 2.3 of The 3288 Review, of which I was the Managing Editor.]
This past week was blissfully quiet. I didn’t do much, and I would like to continue to not do much for the rest of my life, but alas – work started on Thursday, and though few members of our team were around, I had plenty on my plate to keep me busy, and fortunately few co-workers to disrupt my flow.
ConFusion 2025 begins in three weeks, and the tasks and obligations are quickly stacking up. I am the Head of Operations this year, which mostly means answering a lot of questions and wrangling volunteers. And I am very much looking forward to the event which is one of the two major highlights of my year.
Reading
I am close to halfway through Doctor Zhivago, and it just keeps getting better. This is a much easier read than any of the Dostoevsky I read over the past several years. Not that Pasternak is a better writer, just more readable.
One of my major reading goals for the year is to focus on nonfiction, and to that end I started Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll. It is quite good so far, and has reignited in me an interest in politics and political theory, which I am pursuing in my offline journal. You may ask, “didn’t the recent several elections keep your attention?” and the answer is yes, but also the last three elections, thanks to Trump and his strangle-hold on American conservatism, have been utter shitshows. This will likely not stop until he is biodegrading and all of his works pulled down and salt strewn where they once stood.
Writing
I have managed some short creative works – a sentence here, a paragraph there, and also the rough draft of a poem which came to me while I was reading Doctor Zhivago in a laundromat last week. So the year has promise, in this one small facet.
Subject: Cryptids, Mutants
Setting: Ruins
Genre: Magic Realism
Listening
The Cars, “Moving in Stereo“. This song is of course most famous for That Scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but it was also one of the first songs I listened to on Pandora, back in the early 2000s, when Pandora was a web-based Flash application, and it actually downloaded the songs it played to a directory on the user’s hard drive. In case you are wondering, Pandora no longer downloads the songs it plays.
Interesting Links
- Jevon’s Paradox (Wikipedia) – One of the many, many reasons why we can’t have nice things.
- “The Truth About H-1B Visas” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism)