Tag: sadism

IWSG, October 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

The question: In your writing, where do you draw the line, with either topics or language?

Back when Caffeinated Press and The 3288 Review were first starting up, the bunch of us met to discuss editorial policy. As I was heading up the journal, and intended it to include reviews of West Michigan arts and letters, the first points I introduced were “No poison pens. No punching down.” In other words, the performative sadism of the Hot Take and the Gleefully Nasty Review had no place in any publication to which I would contribute my time and effort.

That being said, I found this to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer with specifics. After much consideration, I think the line I draw is here:

No exploitation of, or punching down at, minority or marginalized or vulnerable persons or groups.

I say this as a middle-aged, straight, white, middle-class, cisgender, progressive, sort-of-Buddhist man whose political sensibilities have moved steadily leftward for the past thirty years. Any art which depends on stepping on necks in order to elevate itself is art which is on the wrong side of history.

While the stories I write may include instances of cruelty and People Doing Bad Things, those scenes will be in service of the story and not merely as gratuitous filler for increased views and sales. And, spoiler alert, those people will probably receive karmic justice by the end of the story.

There are many artists and writers who believe that there is nothing which is out of bounds, and while I do not state my position as a Rule Which Should Be Followed By All, the things I won’t write tend to also be things I won’t read. Write what you want. I ain’t the boss a’ you.

I will not turn this post into a detailed examination of “punching down” as it relates to dominant social structures here in the United States, though I think such a post would be useful for teasing apart the multiple threads of of privilege and power which permeate every facet of modern life. Perhaps I will write it to pad my word count during NaNoWriMo next month.

In closing, note the tagline for this blog.

 

Insecure Writer's Support Group BadgeThe Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

Halfway Through 2021

John Winkelman

Books which arrived in the week of June 27, 2021

For the first Independence Day weekend in the last decade, our block was not blown up by the obnoxious neighbor lighting off a thousand dollars of professional-grade fireworks in the middle of the street. I realize I may be jinxing the neighborhood by writing this in the early afternoon of July 4. After all, the day ain’t over yet.

To make up for the uninterrupted and quiet night, I had a bout of serious insomnia which had me sitting at the dining room table until 04:00, blearily browsing the internet in an attempt to get my head to quiet down. I was tired but not sleepy, which is a miserable state in which to find one’s self when there are no pressing issues the next morning and sleep should be abundantly available.

Two new bundles of words arrived in the past week. On the left is the latest issue of Poetry Magazine. On the right is the new delivery from And Other Stories, Keeping the House by Tice Cin, which according to the back cover blurb offers “…a fresh and funny take on the machinery of the North London Heroin Trade…” which I can only assume will create for me a sense of deja vu which will lead back to Trainspotting.

(Yes, I know, Keeping the House is set in London, England and Trainspotting is set in Edinburgh, Scotland.)

In reading news, I finished Jim Harrison‘s Dalva, and it was every bit as beautiful as the previous half-dozen times I have read it over the past 25 years. Harrison’s follow-up novel The Road Home is now sitting next to my bed, awaiting my attention. I picked up my copy of Dalva back around 1996 and it is falling apart. I think I will need to replace it before I read it again, and I don’t think it will be so easy to find another copy with a Russell Chatham cover which is in any sort of good condition.

I have just started Francesco Verso’s long novella or short novel Nexhuman, and so far it is really good! This was published by Apex Book Company and arrived a few months ago as part of my subscription to Apex’s catalog.

I also just started Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks, and only made it about five pages in before I was overcome with an incandescent rage at the state of the world. I have often said that sadism is the national pastime of the USA, and Eubanks is showing how sadism and racism, manifested as carceral capitalism and managed democracy, are actively embedded into the national psyche at a level not much removed from that of the weather or gravity. Currently I am about fifty pages in, and my mood has not improved.

Argh.

In writing news, now that we are in July, and I have some time off, I plan to get serious about my writing practice. Then again I have planned that every week since the beginning of the year and have only been partially successful.

A few walks in the woods and a few evenings on the Lake Michigan beaches may be what I need to clear space in my head.

Summer Done Gone

John Winkelman

This is a photo of Poe sunning herself in a west-facing window, atop a pile of curtains which coincidentally are the same color she is. Maybe she thinks I can’t see her. That would explain why she attacked my hand when I reached down to scritch her.

We had our first truly cold nights this week, with lows in the upper 30s, Fahrenheit. We have managed to not yet turn on the furnace, but those days are coming to an end. Fortunately the rest of the month looks to be bright and sunny during the days which means my big old house will store enough heat to last us through the longer nights.

No new books arrived this week, which is happening more regularly as I regulate my book-buying habits, what with a global pandemic and employment uncertainty bringing to the forefront of my attention the necessity of frugal behavior.

In reading news I finished Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow which left me feeling rage, sadness, depression, despair, and a sullen bitterness about the entrenched sadism which is one of the keystones of the American psyche. TNJC, along with Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism, and the first few essays from Captivating Technology, have me further convinced that complete prison abolition is the only equitable response to the overwhelmingly racist (by deliberate intent and design) carceral state which is one of the central, defining characteristic of American society here in the post-Civil War USA.

Anyway.

To cool my brain, I am reading Dyrk Ashton‘s magnificent Paternus: War of Gods, which brings to a close the Paternus trilogy which Ashton began with Paternus: Rise of Gods. I am a little over a third of the way through, an I am getting to the point where I may need to take half a day from work in order to get through the rest of the book, because I seriously don’t want to put it down. Ashton’s work is just that good!

On a related note, Dyrk has a Kickstarter running right now to print the second book of the series, Paternus: Wrath of Gods, in hardcover. In addition to being excellent reads, the artwork for the books is gorgeous and the books as physical artifacts are well worth owning.

In writing news, I ended the week just shy of 25,000 words in my work in progress. I have the current scene all sketched out and the first few hundred words written, but I hit a minor bout of writer’s block which, rather than trying to muscle through, I sat back and let it run its course and accepted that it might leave me a little shy of my goal for the month of 40,000. Better a blown deadline than burning myself out doing something I love. I can always make up the word count, and the schedule and deadline are mostly arbitrary, beyond that I would like to complete the first draft before November 1.

If you are curious, here are some of the things I am researching as I write my book:

labyrinths, memory palaces, traditional martial arts training techniques, phytoremediation, river ecologies, genetic engineering, mantras, mudras, mysticism, resonant frequencies, resource depletion, peak minerals, repressed memory, symbiosis, salvage, biomaterials, ceramics

With a little luck, when strung together by a narrative framework, it will make a good story.