Tag: racism

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.

It’s Warm, It’s Cold, It’s Warm, It’s Cold

John Winkelman

We are now well into April, and the normally turbulent weather of this time of year is being exacerbated by a healthy dose of global warming which makes the highs and lows more frequent and more extreme. At present we have no expectation that this trend will reverse itself in the lifetime of any human currently living. Come to that, we have no expectation for things to change in the lifetime of any animal at all currently living, with the possible exception of extremophile critters somewhere around a deep-sea thermal vent in the Pacific Ocean.

No new reading material arrived at the Library of Winkelman Abbey this week. I expect the rest of April will be slow for the acquisitions department.

In reading news, I just finished Ibram X. Kendi‘s How to Be an Antiracist, and it blew my mind open in ways I did not expect. It wasn’t the subject, which was was very much in line with The New Jim Crow, Caste and Carceral Capitalism. Rather, it was the way Kendi drew the distinction between “not-” and “anti-“. For me (straight, white, middle-aged dude), this made me extremely uncomfortable in a positive way, as it pointed out a large blind spot in my interactions with the world. It’s not enough to simply not contribute to the problem. One must actively work to fix the problem, or by virtue of the inertia of the zeitgeist of the world, the problem persists. Any way of living that is not explicitly anti- is implicitly pro-. In matters of oppression and equity, there is no middle ground.

As April is National Poetry Month, I have been working my way through my back issues of Poetry Magazine, instead of the (surprisingly small) number of my poetry books which I have not read. The variety of poetry in Poetry is keeping my mind in the writing space, and I have managed to write a poem a day so far for every day of the month. I won’t copy them out of my journal or type them up until May, most likely, and then we will see if I have managed to put any of the many words I know together in some kind of meaningful order.

Here in the third week of Spring the world is turning green and some of the nights are warm enough to keep the windows open. The fresh air and smell of earth and grass and rain, and the soft sounds of the city at night make for a more restful sleep than I have know in months, and though I am not getting any more sleep than at any point in the past year, it is of better quality and therefore when I wake up I don’t resent being out of bed.

Back From a Brief Break

John Winkelman

No blog post last week, obviously. I was on vacation from work, during which time I got caught up on about six months of household tasks, chores and errands. I finally finished my taxes, and (more important!) I replaced one of the air chambers in my bed. Now I no longer go to sleep on a near rock-hard surface only to wake up in a bed as soft as one in the worst budget motel in Miami Beach the week after Spring Break. Not that I would know what those beds are like.

No books came in the previous week; these are all from the week of August 9. On the top left is the latest issue of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine. In the top middle is the latest issue of Dreamforge Magazine. On the top right is the latest issue of Jacobin.

On the bottom left is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. I have been meaning to pick this up for some time, after a series of conversations with my partner and several friends involved with equity and social justice. This title fits in nicely with the other books I have been reading about the carceral state, prison abolition, and reforming the police.

In the bottom center is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which I also learned about through various conversations with various friends involved with equity and social justice.

On the bottom right are two books by Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man and Governing by Debt, published by Semiotext(e) as part of their Interventions series. I am sure i will have many things to discuss as I dive into these books.

In reading news, despite my best efforts I was unable to pull myself away from R.A. Salvatore’s Forgotten Realms books, and am still working my way through the series. I have just started The Orc King, the first of the series which is not a re-read for me. There are two more books after this one in the trilogy, and that should get me to the end of August, which is a good place to set aside fantasy novels for a while and focus on reading some nonfiction.

In writing news, I just finished the second chapter of my fantasy novel, tentatively titled Up the River to the Mountains. I expect it will weigh in at between 80,000 and 100,000 words when I am done. I really, really hope to finish the first draft before November, so I can concentrate on other things for National Novel Writing Month. If that doesn’t happen, then I will finish it during NaNoWriMo and split the final word count between the novel and few short stories. Or something. I don’t know. Writing is complicated.

Links and Notes for the Week of October 21, 2018

John Winkelman

Links and Notes for the Week of August 5, 2018

John Winkelman

Links and Notes for the Week of July 22, 2018

John Winkelman

Links and Notes for the Week of May 20, 2018

John Winkelman

* Happy 21st Century, from Charles Stross.
* The files of the SCP Foundation should be good for writing prompts and nightmares.
* The one Trump scandal which encompasses all the rest.
* Emasculated president Donald Trump, who is terrified of everyone who is not white and rich, believes all Mexicans are part of MS-13. When this was pointed out, he called it “fake news,” which is actually verification of the charge, since literally every time Trump squeals “fake news,” is it because something true was printed and he didn’t like it.
* Metafilter has posted a new catch-all politics thread. Many good links and comments therein.
* If you have a few minutes and you like simple adventure-type games, give Dicey Dungeons a try.

Links and Notes for the Week of April 22, 2018

John Winkelman

* How Shareholder Primacy Hurts Jobs and Wages – Shareholders who are not also stakeholders are parasites, by and large.

* Incel, the misogynist ideology that inspired the deadly Toronto attack, explained – Now that they have Emasculated President Trump as a role model, the incels (of which Men’s Rights Activists, GamerGaters and Three Percenters are notable subsets) are able to overcome some of their cowardice and unleash their daddy issues upon the rest of the world. Just like Trump.

* I Joined the Tea Party to Drain the Swamp. Trump Isn’t Helping. – To the surprise of literally nobody with more than two working brain cells, Trump is like King Midas, except everything he touches turns to shit. See also: the entirety of the Alt-right, of which the Tea Party (and by extension, the KKK) is a subset.

Links and Notes for the Week of April 15, 2018

John Winkelman

* The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners – Congratulations to everyone on the list.

* Apropos of something or other, What is a Kakistocracy?

* 100 Years of Tax Brackets – Note that there is a direct correlation between rich people dodging taxes and the rise of fascism in any given country. See, for instance, United States of America, particularly during the Trump presidency.

* The Fall of the “Alt-right” Came From Anti-fascism – The alt-right is synonymous with the mainstream right in the United States. Thus Antifa is de facto the most patriotic way to be an American.

* Investigating Pathways to the Alt-Right – or, how racist trash becomes racist trash.