Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Tag: Jorge Luis Borges

Weekly Round-up, October 18, 2025

John Winkelman
Carp at the bottom of the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan.

This was another exceptionally busy week, but relief is on the horizon. And no, I don’t mean the inevitable heat death of the universe or the more imminent fascist takeover and destruction of the United States. I have some breathing room, and I intend to spend that time breathing, and also reading and writing.

Reading

I pulled the first issue of New Edge Sword & Sorcery off the shelf and am reading my fill of, well, sword and sorcery stories. They are quite good! Widely varied in tone and voice, and all are fun. I found a couple of editing issues, but no more than in any other first issue of a magazine.

In more in-depth reading, I am a few pages into Efraín Kristal’s Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, which I picked up on a whim after reading a Metafilter thread about, well, Borges and translation. I loves me some Borges, and I love reading works in translation, so this book is my catnip.

But John, I can hear you thinking, What about all the other books you were reading a few weeks ago?

I am still reading them. They are still on the “currently reading” pile. They just are not currently at the top of the pile.

Writing

For That November Thing, I have settled on a repeat of what I did a couple of years ago, being a pile of flash fictions and short story fragments. This format seems to work for me in times of uncertainty.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Revenge, Environment
Setting: Subterranean
Genre: Procedural

Listening

The Kinks, “Destroyer,” from their 1981 album Give the People What They Want.

Interesting Links

  • “ICE Raids Are Only Half The Story” (Farm to Taber, YouTube) – Brief overview of how MAGA farmers are using the H2A visa as a legal form of slavery. This is an open secret among MAGA, and is so endemic that the basic assumption must be at any farmer who voted for Trump did so because they want slaves to work their farms.

October 2024 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

October was quite busy so I didn’t read as much as I would have liked. But what I did read was most excellent!

Acquisitions

Books acquired in the month of October 2024.

  1. Morgan Talty, Fire Exit (And Other Stories) [2024.10.02]
  2. Michael J. DeLuca, The Jaguar Mask (Stelliform Press) [2024.10.06]
  3. Dave Klecha and Tobias J. Buckell, The Runes of Engagement (Tachyon Publications) [2024.10.06]

Reading List

Books

Books I read in October 2024.

  1. Jorge Luis Borges – Conversations [2024.10.10]
  2. Dave Klecha and Tobias J. Buckell, The Runes of Engagement [2024.10.14]
  3. Jack Ridl, All At Once [2024.10.17]
  4. Norah Lange, Notes from Childhood [2024.10.25]

Weekly Round-up, October 12, 2024

John Winkelman

Poe and Pepper, living their best life.

[Lazy Cats]

Once again I was cruelly and unjustly snubbed for both a MacArthur Genius Grant and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fact that I have done nothing noteworthy should not disqualify me from the selection process.

Reading

I just finished the collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, and will likely soon start browsing my collections of his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. So many brilliant ideas. So much brilliant writing.

I am now reading All At Once, Jack Ridl‘s new collection of poetry which was just published by CavanKerry Press.

Writing

I am ramping up my note-taking and world-building for the November Project. Since I am not officially participating in NaNoWriMo until they de-shittify the organization, I am instead working with

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Robots, Death
Setting: Bar
Genre: Cyberpunk

Listening

A little something different here.

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, October 5, 2024

John Winkelman

Poe, woozy from the drugs.

[Poe, woozy from the drugs.]

This past week was hectic. We had to take our cat Poe to the vet to have three of her teeth extracted. She is recuperating nicely, but caring for her as she recovers has thrown off the daily and weekly routine. Therefore I didn’t manage to accomplish as much as I had hoped.

Reading

I am still reading through the collected interviews of Jorge Luis Borges. He is currently at the top of my list of “If you could spend a day talking to one author, living or dead.” The interviews are all excellent, but there is a notable difference the interviews where the interviewer is almost as smart as Borges, and the ones where the interviewer is nowhere near as smart as Borges. Actually, “smart” isn’t the right phrasing. “Well read” and “erudite” work better.

Writing

I am still planning what I will tackle in November, since NaNoWriMo, having both become enshittified and having shit the bed, is off the table. Probably a re-write of my novel-in-progress Cacophonous.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Colonization, Economics
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Mystery

Listening

Kris Kristofferson died a few days ago. I am posting this video because “Casey’s Last Ride” appeared in an intense scene in the first season of True Detective.

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, September 28, 2024

John Winkelman

Hot peppers, tomatoes, a large pile of string beans, and many acorn squash, displayed on a small table.

[The latest, and possibly the last, harvest from our small garden this year.]

Suddenly here we are in the last week of September and the first week of Autumn. We finally have something approaching seasonal weather, though the weather we are having now would have been considered unusually hot only a decade ago. So it goes.

Reading

I have set all of my other reading aside so that I may focus on reading the collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges. I picked this book up back in June 2016 and it has been gathering dust for the past eight years.

Writing

Thought it isn’t necessarily creative writing, I did stay up late a few nights ago and write a long blog post for the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop. The post will go live on Wednesday, October 2. The question for the month was about our favorite classic ghost stories. I chose “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce. For why this was the story which most affected Young Me, check back in a couple of days.

Reading the interviews with Borges has helped me sort out a few problems in one of my longer (and older) works-in-progress. I am taking notes and rearranging a few things, noting where I can remove characters who are now extraneous and adding one or two who will be central to the revised work. Though I will not be officially participating in NaNoWriMo this year I do plan to spend much of November (and October, and December) writing, and perhaps complete a first draft by the end of the year. This will only be possible because I will be able to use more than half of the previous version essentially unchanged, or only lightly edited. And if I can’t complete a draft by December 31, I would like to have it done by the end of the Year of the Dragon.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Revenge, Music
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Mystery

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, September 21, 2024

John Winkelman

Early evening sun shining down an alley.

[The early evening sun, shining down our alley.]

This past week was my last week of work for the fiscal year, which ends at the end of the months. I am taking next week off in order to burn some unused vacation days and also to just…not work. I have taken some days off here and there over the preceding twelve months, but those days were filled with chores, errands, travel, and the ten thousand other things which tend to fill in the days, hours, minutes, and seconds of a day when we allow them to. Or rather, when we don’t take sufficient care to guard our down time.

Reading

For the past two weeks I have been working my way through my back issues of DreamForge magazine, to which I have had a subscription since 2019. Unfortunately I was so inundated with reading material at the time that I never got around to browsing more than a handful of stories out of any of the issues. So I am making up for lost time.

I also, on a whim, pulled down Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, and am slowly working my way through an assortment of interviews with Borges, which start in 1965 and run through 1985, the year before Borges died. I think this will lead to me pulling my down my Borges collections and reading them through the rest of the year.

Writing

Not much this week. Brain was full of mush.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Precursors, Super Powers
Setting: Labyrinth
Genre: Technothriller

Listening

Miami Vice premiered 40 years ago this past week. I can’t overstate the impact it had on my rural outsider psyche, sitting in front of the television on Friday nights all through high school.

Interesting Links

  • “The Subprime AI Crisis” (Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At) – It’s time to start shorting OpenAI stock.