Here we are in the last weekly round-up of the year. I am in the middle of a two-week break from work, which was long overdue, and not even remotely adequate. But the holidays are a break from work, not really a restful, relaxing time, except in the spare moments when not being sociable.
Reading
I just finished Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and it was wonderful and weird. This was my first Pynchon, and I may need to wait a bit before diving in again.
Writing
I don’t have much to report here. Maybe in the second week of my vacation I will have some energy and focus.
Traffic, “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys,” from their 1971 album of the same name. This song entered my head through a silly little meme which was fed to me by the Facebook algorithm. And it is beautiful!
And just like that, I am finished with work for the year.
This past week was hectic but fun. Last weekend my partner and I drove to Novi so that I could attend a ConCom meeting for Magical ConFusion. While I was in the meeting Z sat in the hotel restaurant working on her business Gallafe, which she is re-launching in January.
We arrived at the hotel Saturday and immediately set out looking for food, which we found in abundance at Bi Bim Bap inside the Atrium of Novi. The food overall was very good, and the kimchi was ferociously spicy and (assisted by a hot toddy back at the hotel) scorched my cold-ridden sinuses clean. Highly recommended.
On Sunday, after the meeting, we met up with a friend at the Basil Bowl on Haggerty, which is also excellent, and offers good food for when one is recovering from a cold or a hangover.
This past Wednesday, Z and I drove over to the Frederick Meijer Gardens to experience Enlighten, which was most excellent. Fortunately the outdoor temperature Wednesday evening was considerably warmer than the past few weeks, so the two-plus hours we spend wandering the mile-long path through the installation was comfortable and enjoyable. If you have a tolerance for being outside in the snow, I highly recommend attending.
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Reading
I am about three quarters of the way through A Sportsman’s Notebook, and should be able to complete it by the end of the year. Then on to the next thing.
This was another hectic week. The above photo is part of the hecticness.
The stumps are the remnants of a hackberry tree which was sending its roots under the floor of my basement, causing the concrete to heave and putting upward pressure on the poles under the floor joists. That upward pressure was causing a noticeable bulge in the floors above, and recently we have noticed some new cracks in the old plaster on the walls of the second floor.
I contacted Armand the Tree Guy (aka Armand Lawrence) a couple of weeks ago, after my next-door neighbor recommended his work. He and his crew arrived around 10:00 and were done with the tree at 12:30. And the whole forty-foot, double-trunk tree, chopped into pieces, fit into a single trailer.
Hopefully the damage will now stop, and the floor of the basement gradually subside as the roots of the tree decay over the next few years. I am sad to see the tree gone, but I would be more sad if, say, the plaster on the interior walls were to collapse and bury the cats.
Reading
I am still working my way through Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook, and still loving it.
Writing
Due to the afore-mentioned chaos, I have not had time to write.
Subject: Aliens, Fae Setting: Lost City Genre: Noir
Listening
On the evening of Wednesday, December 10, Jack and Julie Ridl hosted a virtual poetry reading in which a dozen poets read their work to an online audience of over a hundred. It was wonderful! I saw many names and faces which I have not seen in many years, several of them from the Caffeinated Press/3288 Review days, and some from more recent events involving the Grand River Poetry Collective and the Grand Rapids Literary Festival. I took notes, and I hope to retain this energy into the Christmas holidays, when I will have some time off and maybe will have the focus and energy to do something creative and meaningful.
The first week of December, 1984. I was nearing the end of the first semester of my sophomore year at Springport High School. When I wasn’t in class or attending wrestling practice, or band practice, or milking cows, I was holed up in my room with my Commodore 64, learning how to program and playing games. And learning how to program games.
I was also listening to the radio. I had a cheap clock radio thing at the time, which mostly brought in static and country music, but could be coaxed to pull in the oldies station or the contemporary rock station Q106 (“It may not be your favorite song, but it has a lot of the same notes!”). John Lennon had been murdered four years previously, and his son Julian Lennon was on the charts with “Valotte” and “Much Too Late for Goodbye.”
I bring this up because for the past few months I have been following “Charlie’s 80s Attic Radio Station” on Facebook, and recently made the mental leap that, if there is a Facebook page, maybe this Charlie fella has website.
And he does! Charlie’s 80s Attic is real! And he streams the music which is on his social media lists, along with a whole lot more.
In general, I try not to go nostalgia-mining when writing, but these tunes sure do bring back a lot of memories.
Reading
Having finished Invisible Work, I am now about a quarter of the way through Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook. I have the Everyman’s Library hardcover edition, which includes a bookmark ribbon attached to the spine. This ribbon is one of the greatest cat toys ever invented, and I need to be circumspect whenever I read this book anywhere near Poe or (especially) Pepper.
Writing
Not much of anything new this week. My brain was fried from an unexpectedly chaotic and busy Thanksgiving holiday.
“Why I Can’t Just Meet You for Dinner” (Fred Rossi, Center Left) – It’s good to be able to put a name to this feeling I have been enduring for about the last decade.
I spent the evening before Thanksgiving sitting in the living room under a blanket and therefore also under two cats, drowsily reading Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Eventually my brain couldn’t take more of this, so I looked up which streaming service offered Name of the Rose. It was Apple TV, one of the many channels which have replaced cable, which replaced channels.
I typed Name of the Rose into the search bar in the app, and the movie came up as expected. Next to it was a documentary, Umberto Eco – A Library of the World. Since my head was already in that space from reading about Borges and translation, I selected the documentary instead of the movie.
And that was very much the right choice to make.
One of my favorite moments was Eco’s comment in an interview that while the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch in Constantinople will never stop arguing about the filioque clause, they must both agree that Clark Kent is Superman.
Reading
After almost two months of working away at it, I finished reading Efraín Kristal’s excellent Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come, and will certainly revisit it from time to time.
This past week was the first week this year in which I didn’t put in a minimum of 45 hours at work. In theory this would mean that I could take that extra time and brain capacity and put it to good use. In practice, I took that extra time and started up a new game of Stardew Valley. Did I read much? Nope. Did I write much? Nope.
However, this mental down-time has done me some good, as my stress level is much-reduced. Stardew Valley doesn’t take a lot of brain power to play, and as a gaming experience it is peaceful and delightful, and emotionally in the same realm as having a cat dozing on my lap.
All of which is to say, this past week was for decompression and rest. Next week can be for more cerebral pursuits.
Reading
I didn’t read much this week. I looked at a couple of pages of Efrain Kristal’s Invisible Work, but will probably need to go back and re-read those pages, as nothing stuck.
In the past week I have picked up two new books – A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev, and Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life, the new biography written by Todd Goddard. I had ordered the Turgenev back in May, right before life became, er, complicated. The book was backordered at the publisher and I quickly forgot I had ever ordered it. The Harrison bio was published early last week and was also backordered at the publisher, but it arrived at Books & Mortar yesterday.
This is an interesting coincidence. I have been aware of the Turgenev for a long time, first thanks to my Russian Studies classes at Grand Valley State University back in the early 1990s, and more recently because Harrison mentions Turgenev’s book in several places in his fiction and non-fiction writing. So to have both books arrive in the same week was a nice boost to my mood.
And I had paid for the Turgenev when I ordered it six months ago, this felt like getting a free book!
Writing
I am just about ready to pound out a couple of thousand words using the following prompts:
Notice that I did not say “I will complete writing etc.” as I have not yet started this story, for reasons outlined above.
While I am following the same techniques for this year’s Month of Writing that I did two years ago, I am making sure I have a solid story idea before I begin writing, rather than just pounding out words five minutes after generating the prompt. And as you can see, this combination of prompts is a doozie. I have figured out enough of the story that I can begin writing, but considering the genre, “kaiju” and “fae” will be metaphorical.
“The Distance” by Cake, from their 1996 album Fashion Nugget. In 1996 I was living in Eastown, working at a bookstore, and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I think I was primed for “The Distance” to re-surface in my awareness because of a conversation I had with my partner a couple of weeks ago, discussing the music we listen to when we are in “the zone.” Also Cake has some similarities to one of my favorite bands back in The Day, Soul Coughing.
“Can “adversarial poetry” save us from AI?” (James Folta, LitHub) – Folta discusses the ARXIV paper “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models.” This is some crazy shit. It is well-known that the commercial LLMs have safety guidelines built in so that people can’t e.g. learn how to build a dirty bomb in their basement, etc. However, phrasing queries as verse seems to confuse the part of the model which guards against such queries. NOTE THAT I DO NOT RECOMMEND DOING THIS!
Here I am at the end of the last week of the Big Project which has consumed so much of my time outside of the normal boundaries of the work/life balance. I still have the Small Project, which is manageable now that the Big Project is in the rearview mirror. And I could use a little down time before the inevitable Next Big Project.
The first snowfall of the season hit West Michigan this past week, and made a beautiful mess of everything. Our property sits on the side of a gentle hill, and the placement of upwind houses and fences causes an eddy which pulls all of the neighborhood leaves into our back yard. These leaves will provide some much-needed nutrition for my yard, as most of the soil in this part of town is a very thin skin of soil on top of a huge pile of sand.
Reading
I have finally found enough consecutive quiet minutes to dive back into Invisible Work: Borges and Translation by Efrain Kristal. I can feel my brain humming in a way it seldom has since the heady days at the bookstore or, before that, college. Before college my brain didn’t so much hum as buzz, which is an entirely different, much less pleasant state of being.
Writing
I am writing! For the first time in months, maybe even in a year, I am consistently putting words to paper. Not enough words to “win” That November Thing, but enough that I feel as if I am accomplishing something. And most of those words are coming together in an order which I find satisfying.
As stated previously, this year I am doing what I did two years ago in the penultimate year of NaNoWriMo: Generating prompts using my custom-built Prompt Generator, then writing something which uses all of the parts of the prompts.
Previously overarching goal had been to write a minimum of 50,000 words, which I did easily by only working on a prompt until I ran out of steam and then immediately generating another prompt and immediately diving into it.
This year, when I generate a prompt, I let the prompt sit for a little while as I think through all of the possibilities until I come up with something which will be interesting to write and also (I hope) to read.
“Criminal Records and Reentry Toolkit” – Since approximately a third of adult Americans have a criminal record, and conservatives are determined to complete the resurrection of the Confederacy with prisons in place of chattel slavery, this is a good resource to have.
The year is winding down. I have gone from far too much work to fit in a week to just about enough to fill a week. And that feels like a vacation.
Speaking of vacations, Z scored us a night at the Gun Lake Casino hotel, which we will take advantage of in the very near future. I look forward to getting out of town for a day or so without having to drive hundreds of miles.
Reading
At the end of last month I picked up several of the poetry books published by the Grand River Poetry Collective, and immediately moved them to the top of my to-read stack.
Writing
November is the Month of Writing, so I am writing! I have fragments of a few stories, and home to complete at least ten by the end of the month. I originally hoped to do one a day, but already I am several days behind, due to some low-grade depression and a mid-grade bout of food poisoning. Still – as long as I write a little every day, I will be content.
One of the tactics I use in order to keep myself sane is to only work on one story at a time, and when I am finished with a story (which is not the same as finishing a story) I generate another prompt and let it stew until the next morning. That gives me more time to get my head in the necessary space to do some focused work.
“Everything I Know about Self-Publishing” (Kevin Kelly) This is an EXCELLENT resource for figuring out how you want to publish your work, and the benefits and pitfalls therein. I am a huge proponent of self-publishing.
This past week was calmer than most, so I completed several projects around the house and prepped for the Month of Writing. I also indulged in some retail therapy and am now the proud owner of several more books of poetry.
Reading
I have had more time to read lately, though that time has come in small, intermittent chunks rather than large, dedicated blocks. To match this, I have been reading through my back issues of genre magazines Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, New Edge Sword & Sorcery, and Dreamforge. When I have slightly larger blocks of time I dip my toes in the wonderful Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, by Efraín Kristal.
Writing
Today is the first day of The Month of Writing (formerly NaNoWriMo), and I am undoubtedly writing something at this very moment, as this post goes live.
October was a fantastic month both for reading and for acquiring new books. I had more quiet time than I have in any other month this year, and I also know that November will be exceptionally busy, due to it being the Month of Writing (formerly NaNoWriMo).
And this year has been very stressful, so I indulged in some retail therapy.
