Subject: Espionage, Language
Setting: Urban
Genre: Weird Fiction
Listening
This is The Grass Roots singing their song “Let’s Live for Today.”
Interesting Links
“Hoisted from Comments: The Colonialist and Anti-Semitic Origins of Modern Israel” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – Most comments on social media are utter garbage, as are most comments on popular blogs. But there are some blogs which, through good moderation policy, have a generally excellent comments section. Naked Capitalism is one of those places. This blog post takes as its core a comment (from user “vu”) attached to previous blog post. The article/comment is worth reading, as are the comments within this post. To sum up, the Israel/Palestine situation is both terrible and inevitable, and the roots of the conflict were laid by Western powers well over a hundred years ago.
[The above photos is of a blossom on one of the pear trees we planted in our back yard last summer.]
It’s been an even crazier week than usual, which for this year is really saying something. In the coming days I might make a long post about the intersection of homelessness, carceral capitalism, and West Michigan Nice. But for now I need to keep my focus narrow.
Reading
Back in October I bought Jean Daive’s book Under the Dome, which was a memoir of sorts of Daive’s friendship with the poet Paul Celan.
Last week I finished Celan’s Selected Poetry and Prose, and found it…underwhelming. Perhaps my mind was not in the right place to appreciate his work, or perhaps I am simply not the target audience for his poetry.
A few days ago I finished Daive’s A Woman With Many Lives, and also found it not to my taste. I’m not saying the poetry was bad. Daive is a talented writer. I just…didn’t vibe with it.
All of this is a little confusing for me, because Under the Dome was one of my favorite reads of the past several years.
Subject: Super Powers, Fae
Setting: Ship
Genre: Slipstream
Listening
I picked up Bowie’s album Never Let Me Down on cassette tape, and listened to it A LOT on the ride to and from the Eaton Rapids pickle factory during the summer of 1987. This was my holding pattern between the end of high school and the start of my extended stay at Grand Valley State University. This is the first time I have seen the video for “Time Will Crawl”, despite having listened to the song for literally decades.
[The above photo is the shadow of branches, cast on a sidewalk in Grand Rapids during the April 8 solar eclipse.]
Reading
I finished reading the Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, and I realized realize that I don’t really care for the poetry of Paul Celan. This is not a criticism of the quality of his poetry. It’s just not to my taste. Now browsing random short books, deciding which one will be next.
Writing
I finished a journal I have been writing in since August of last year. Now that I have a new journal I find myself bouncing back and forth wildly between inspiration and ennui.
[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.
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.
[The above photo was taken on March 30, facing west out of one of the windows in the second-floor gymnasium of the West Michigan YWCA, at the beginning of tai chi class.]
This was the second week of a hellish two-week sprint at work which had me putting in hours like I have not done in years. But the work is in the bag for the moment, at least until the QA people get their hands on my code.
“Small Press Distribution Shuts Down” (Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly) – I ordered many, many books from SPD back when I was the Special Orders Manager for Schuler Books, back in the 1990s before Amazon began to devour the world. And in the Caffeinated Press days we looked into distributing through them, but the press closed before we could build up a catalog large enough to need a distributor. The service they provided is sorely needed, and they will be sorely missed.
[I took this photo when walking home from work. The viewpoint is facing south down the connector from northbound Division Ave to Michigan Street, just west of the hospitals.]
We’re in the final stretch of the big project at work so I spent most of this week, well, working. Any time spent not-working was spent recovering from work. I suspect much of the rest of spring will be like this.
Reading
I finished Loaded, which was a good history of the Second Amendment, and its basis in, and magnification of, the built-in racist flavor of American culture. Now I’m reading a few shorter works, like last month, which is appropriate for my unfortunately limited time and attention availability right now. Right now I am working my way through “Bartleby, the Scrivener“, the short story by Herman Melville, in a collection of two(!) short stories published in 1995 as part of Penguin’s 60th anniversary collection “Penguin 60s”. Other than Moby-Dick, this is the only Melville I have read. I love it.
[The photo this week was taken from the fish ladder on the west side of the Sixth Street Bridge dam, facing east into the sunrise.]
This past Sunday, feeling exhausted and also nostalgic, I dusted off an old Lenovo ThinkPad 11e, fixed some issues it had with continually dropping its internet connection, and turned it into my retro gaming machine. I have scores of games purchased over the years from GOG.com, so I installed a few of them – Hammerwatch, Ultima IV, and others.
One of my favorite games from back in the 1980s was Telengard, a sort of graphic roguelike which I played A LOT on my Commodore 64. There are a few ports and remakes available now, but while I found a few that could be played online, I didn’t find any which I could successfully install on the ThinkPad. No big deal; there are ways to get around this, including porting the Commodore BASIC source code to Javascript and having it run in the browser. It wouldn’t take long; anything that could run on a C64 is miniscule compared to even the most rudimentary of games available now.
But my research turned up one interesting bit of trivia: Back in 2005 someone released an updated version of Telengard, which I had downloaded and played once upon a time. That person was Travis Baldree, who wrote the absolutely wonderful book Legends and Lattes. Baldree is one of the developers of Torchlight, also one of my favorite games, and one which I played A LOT back around 2012 – 2015.
Another week with little writing, though I do have a plan to start some deep worldbuilding for the rewrite of my 2022 NaNoWriMo project Cacophonous. Just too much noise in the world right now.
I’ve been a fan of John Zorn since I first heard his album The Gift while sitting in Common Ground Coffee House in the early 2000s. “Baphomet” is a single track and also an album, prog rock by way of avant-garde jazz, and a fantastic listen. I think the theme music for writing Cacophonous, when I finally get around to it, will be Zorn’s oeuvre, mixed and randomized and on heavy rotation.
Another super-busy week. The only time I had to myself was on the walk to and from work on Monday and Wednesday. That’s when I took this photo of the entrance to the Keeler building on Fountain Street.
Reading
I am close to done with Babel by R.F. Kuang, and loving every page of it.
Life is still busy, leaving little time for relaxing and sinking into the state of mind where reading and writing is frictionless. Since the previous update we had a record-breaking warm day, then a sudden drop in temperature which broke the record for the largest 24-hour drop in temperature (50+ degrees F). The maple trees started budding a week ago, and spring peepers are making their little noises in the swamps, and mosquitoes are beginning to swarm around porch lights. And all this in February.
This reminds me somewhat of the previous Year of the Dragon in 2012, when the outside temperature reached almost 80° on St Patrick’s Day. That’s only a couple of weeks from now, and the odds of something like that are looking better every day.
I am attempting to re-start a writing exercise I practices before the COVID lockdowns – on those days I walk to work, pay attention to the small details of the world, and when I get to work, jot down five things which captured my attention. So far I have managed to do that exactly once. It’s been a busy year. But I am adjusting.
Subject: Fae, Artificial Intelligence
Setting: Ship
Genre: War
Listening
“Eyeball Kid” is on Tom Waits‘ 1999 album Mule Variations. I listened to this a lot when I worked at Cybernet Engineering, my first “real” web development job, and the second of several terrible web developments jobs. It’s a fantastic album and well worth a listen, particularly when laboring under a bout of existential angst.
I know you can’t speak,
I know you can’t sign;
So cry right here on the dotted line.
This was another extremely busy week, so not many updates to report, unless ServiceNow debugging is interesting. Managed to read quite a bit in the spare moments in the mornings, and worked out a lot, so as I finish this post I am tired and sore.
A little creative work this week. A poem and some world-building for the story I wrote most of during NaNoWriMo 2022. So that idea, at least, still has legs.
“The Growing Environmental Footprint Of Generative AI” (David Berreby, Naked Capitalism) – Generative AI, like cryptocurrency, has externalities which are much more costly than any actual benefit they bring to the world.
[The above photo is a small skunk which wandered down the alley while I was building a raised-bed garden. They are cute, from a distance.]
