Tag: Deleuze

A Cautious Anticipation of Success

John Winkelman

Books from the week of November 14, 2021

As of today I am past 40,000 words in National Novel Writing Month. This is not as much as I had hoped, but, well, I am 52 and don’t have the burning energy and contempt for sleep and other healthy lifestyle choices that I had in my 40s.

Four new books arrived at the house in the past week.

The first three are purchases from Books and Mortar bookstore here in Grand Rapids.

First up is Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, a collection of the central texts of CRT, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and several others. With all of the white supremacists squealing and crying about how their children are being taught to be ashamed of being white, I thought that becoming well-informed on the subject was a necessity. And frankly, white supremacists should be ashamed of themselves.

Next up is Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I picked up A Thousand Plateaus a couple of year ago, and it has been slowly warping my brain. I look forward to diving into this one, probably sometime this spring.

Third is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. I only recently became aware of this book, in a thread somewhere on Metafilter. It came up again, in another thread, and since I was heading to Books and Mortar to pick up the previous two books in this post anyway, I grabbed it from one of their tables.

Books and Mortar is just the best!

And last is Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, from a recently completed Kickstarter run by PM Press.

In reading news I am still working my way through David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I had thought to be done by the end of the month, but I have had almost no time at all to do anything besides write, thanks to several unexpected time sinks popping up this month.

In writing news, as stated above I am just past 40,000 words into my text, and should hit 50,000 by mid-week. After that, we will see. I have a short story I would like to complete, as well as the story to which the current effort is a sequel. But as long as I keep writing, it’s all good.

A Big Book in a Small Stack

John Winkelman

It was a quiet week for the acquisitions department here at Winkelman Abbey. But what it lacked in the X axis it more than made up for in the Y. From left, we have A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, followed by the most recent issues of Jacobin, Willow Springs, and Poetry Magazine. On the right is To Leave with the Reindeer by Olivia Rosenthal, the latest from my subscription to the catalog of And Other Stories.

All of which is to say, one deliberate purchase this week.

I feel like I have been orbiting Deleuze and Guattari for a very long time. Back in my Angry Young Man days in the late 1990s I amassed a collection of titles published by Autonomedia and Semiotext(e), publishers of very wild and far-out titles from a wide variety of unconventional, leftist and radical writers and thinkers. One of those books (unfortunately lost in a long-ago purge) was Nomadology: War Machine, from the chapter of the same title in the then-unknown-to-me A Thousand Plateaus. I understood very little of it at the time, but it haunted me. These were words from thinkers operating on a plane of existence so far above my own that they might as well have been performing magic.

Over the years I forgot their names but the sense of the conversations stuck with me. It felt like peeling back a layer of reality and seeing some of the inner workings of the universe.

This past summer my girlfriend and I traveled to San Francisco where we made a pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore, which had been a goal of mine for some decades. Wow, what a store – probably the best-curated bookstore I have ever seen. The Philosophy section held scores of titles and thinkers which were new to me, or which I had only ever seen as references in other places. And of course. A Thousand Plateaus was one of them. That brought Deleuze and Guattari back into my awareness.

Shortly thereafter I borrowed Plateaus from the Grand Rapids Public Library, attempted to make sense of it, and made almost zero headway. Then I did so again, a month later. Then I resigned myself to the fact that I will be forever haunted by D and G if I did not add this book to my personal library, and so here it is.

In the reading side of things, I finished The Black God’s Drums by P. Djeli Clark this past Thursday, and absolutely loved it. Probably my favorite read of the year so far. Clark’s use of language and patois in world-building is wonderful and, though this is not precisely the New Orleans so near and dear to my heart, it is close enough to make me feel some serious longing and wanderlust.

Currently I am a little over halfway through Scarborough, by Catherine Hernandez. I picked this one up several months ago and attempted to read it while on a business trip to Las Vegas. Reading that book in that city made me want to burn everything to the ground. So I set it aside. Now that I am not in the worst city in the world I am able to read and enjoy this beautiful, heartbreaking book.