Immanentize the Empathy
These are photos taken during the evening of Friday, May 10, during an amazing display of the Northern Lights. I took these photos with my Google Pixel 7 Pro phone, from a back yard in the middle of Grand Rapids. This is only the second time in my life that I have seen the Aurora Borealis, and it was everything I could have hoped for.
[The above photo is the raised-bed garden Zyra and I installed in early May. Soon it will overflow with healthful vegetables.]
Reading
The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Writing
Not much, unless Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets counts as writing.
Subject: Reincarnation, Politics
Setting: Library
Genre: Steampunk
Listening
Interesting Links
[The above photo is of a pair of Mallard ducks resting on a tree trunk which is stuck at the edge of the Sixth Street Bridge dam just north of downtown Grand Rapids.]
This past Sunday, my good friend Christine Stephens-Krieger became the new Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids. Christine and I go way back. We worked together at Schuler Books and Music. We read poetry at several events. When I was part of Caffeinated Press we published Christine in our literary magazine The 3288 Review. I had the honor to be part of Christine’s project An Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids. And now I am part of the Grand River Poetry Collective, a local company which Christine created at the end of 2023.
For many years, Christine coordinated the Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition.
All of which is to say, I look forward to what she has planned for the next three years.
Reading
Still working my way through All that is Evident is Suspect. I love this book so much! I also started The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, based on its mention in the Cory Doctorow link at the bottom of this post.
Writing
Not much to show this week, though I finally got into the groove of writing at least five story ideas for each of the weekly writing prompts. Those ideas are now scattered across two journals, and when I have the time I will transcribe them into a Google doc.
Subject: Dreams, Cryptids
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Lovecraftian
Listening
This is the kind of music that is getting me through long sessions of writing code for ServiceNow.
Interesting Links
April was insanely busy, even by the standards of my already-overfull life, so this post will be brief.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2024 is: How do you deal with distractions when you are writing? Do they derail you?
Writing for me generally doesn’t start until after I have already dealt with most potential distractions. Therefore my writing time is fairly distraction free, aside from interruptions from the orange maniacs (one of which is pictured above).
And as for the internet-as-distraction (social media, doomscrolling, etc.), well, that is kind of the background radiation of 21st century life, and if I am not immune to the lure of arguing with strangers on FB, or whatever, I have become fairly good at compartmentalizing.
But don’t let me keep you from your writing. How’s YOUR focus these days?
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.
April was National Poetry Month, and I didn’t read as much poetry this time as I have in past years. Part of that was my specific choices for poetry books, and part was general business and mental exhaustion. As you can see from the list below, I have spent most of my reading time buried in All that is Evident is Suspect, a collection of writing from members of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “Workshop for Potential Literature”). The writing therein is frying my brain in the very best way. Highly recommended.
Acquisitions
Reading List
Books and Journals
Short Prose
[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.]
Ugh. This week was so busy I never even got around to filling in this post before it went live. So here it is, in all of its minimalist glory.
Reading
All that is Evident is Suspect
Writing
Nuffin’.
Subject: Espionage, Language
Setting: Urban
Genre: Weird Fiction
Listening
This is The Grass Roots singing their song “Let’s Live for Today.”
Interesting Links
[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.
Now I am reading All that is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963 – 2018, which I purchased from McSweeney’s a few years ago.
Writing
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.
Interesting Links
[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.
Subject: Aliens, Reincarnation
Setting: Ocean
Genre: Romance
Listening
Interesting Links
[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
Happy April, everyone! This is National Poetry Month, so I hope you-all are reading and/or writing some verses. My creative time so far this spring has been non-existent, so maybe I’ll listen to some lectures from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University while I am writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the twenty-fifth year in a row.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for April 2024 is: How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?
I built my first website in 1997. It had a tilde (~) in the URL, something like www.wmis.net/~jwinkelm. I used it to play around and learn just enough to get my first real web development job in 2000.
I started the first iteration of this blog in 1999, though the content thereof is lost in the mists of time. Once I had my own domain name, the contents became recoverable through the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and thus this blog has continuity back to August of 2000.
In the past 24+ years, Ecce Signum has gone through many changes.
The first few versions were created using static HTML and CSS, created locally on my hand-built desktop computer, and then uploaded via FTP to a directory at a web host, which I think was originally MissoulaWeb, which shortly thereafter became Modwest. Updates were intermittent, due to the many steps necessary to create a post, and also because of how easy it was to accidentally over-write existing content, rather than add to it.
The first version of my website which used content management was also hand-rolled. This version used PHP to generate HTML from hand-written XML files using an XSLT pre-processor. While not necessarily easier than using static HTML, it did allow me to create everything on the website rather than having to upload new files when I wanted to add a new post.
My career was just taking off at the time, so I was blogging frequently, mostly about web and game development topics. I also uploaded a great many Flash files and code examples, which just demonstrates the ephemeral nature of information technologies.
When I decided that what I wanted to do with my website was more complex than I had the time or energy to implement myself, I went looking for blogging software, and landed on TextPattern, a beautiful, simple software package created by the late Dean Allen. This change simplified my blogging practice to the point that I was making updates almost every day, and also created websites for friends using TextPattern, as well as creating a subdomain wherein I could post class notes and communicate with my students when I taught Intro to Web Design at Kendall College of Art and Design.
A few years later I decided that TextPattern was no longer sufficient for my needs, so I re-created this website in Drupal, hosted at the newly-created Drupal Gardens, a hosted service which had been inspired by the CSS Zen Garden, which was itself a huge influence on my career.
When Drupal Gardens closed down in 2016 it caught me by surprise, as I had my own website, as well as the websites for our martial arts class and others I had built for friends and their businesses which had to be migrated or rebuilt. This led me, finally, to WordPress, which is what I am still using today.
Here are some snapshots of previous versions of my site.
I mostly use my blog as an online journal. I post weekly updates about what I have been reading (lots!), what I have been writing (nothing!), and other interesting tidbits. When I have time and energy I post longer essays about various topics I find interesting. In that way, not much has changed in the 25 years I gave been running this blog. It’s where I post things which interest me, which I hope others will find interesting as well.
I have several social media accounts, but I am trying to dial back my presence thereon because, with few exceptions, social media platforms are a shitshow and a time sink and a place where creativity and attention spans go to die.
That being said, social media can be useful for marketing. When I publish new blog entries I will often make posts in my various social media accounts with links to those entries. I try to follow the principles of POSSE, which keeps my content in my own space and less subject to the whims of fascist billionaire manbabies like Musk and Zuckerberg.
If I had to make a distinction between the two, I would say that blogs are “this is me”, and social media is “look at me.”
Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you find it interesting.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.