Tag: San Francisco

I Can Feel Autumn Approaching

John Winkelman

Books for the week of August 8, 2021

I think this is the beginning of the long tail of COVID stress in my life. Almost eighteen months in, and the new normal has let to assert itself in any permanent way. Though I have not made any plans for the autumn and winter I have let myself begin the process of becoming emotionally invested in events and plans which will now likely not come to pass. For instance, I expect ConFusion will be postponed again in 2022, which at this point seems wise, considering the spike in new cases thanks to the Delta variant and the ignorant, nihilistic, self-absorbed bumble-fucks who refuse both mask and vaccine.

Chekhov Clifford Odets wrote “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out,” but what if the crisis is the day-to-day living? And dying, of course, thanks to the previously-mentioned bumble-fucks.

The only new reading material this week is Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance, from a Kickstarter campaign run by the always-excellent PM Press. This was a spur-of-the-moment purchase (or pledge, as it stands), inspired by our recent visits to San Francisco, as well as the ongoing news reports about the plight and treatment of the homeless population of San Francisco, and their (let’s just go ahead and call it sadistic) treatment at the hands of the powers that be. Grand Rapids is seeing an increase in the homeless population as rents rise and wages stagnate, and as more capital flows upward toward Those That Have, gentrification increases, which exacerbates the housing problem. Rinse, repeat.

In reading news, I finished both Beradri’s The Uprising and Michael J. Sullivan’s Theft of Swords. The Berardi was informative and enlightening, but seemed to lose focus in the last quarter of the book, an opinion apparently shared by others. Sullivan’s book was loads of fun from beginning to end, and I recommend it highly to anyone who likes sword-and-sorcery adventures and buddy movies, though the sorcery is minimal in this one.

In writing news, I have a small but growing stack of outlines for short stories, though no new prose to speak of. I am feeling more anxious at the though of not writing than at the thought of writing, which I suppose is an improvement. We will see how much of an improvement it is at approximately this time next week.

The Long Tail of August

John Winkelman

No new books arrived at the Library of Winkelman Abbey this week, so here is a photo of Poe, sunning herself on the porch in the early morning of August 12.

Now that I am on a normal work schedule for the first time since late March, I have fully re-immersed myself in my morning routine, which looks something like this:

  • get out of bed when Poe wants food and attention, but in any event no earlier than 5:00 and no later than 5:30
  • feed the ricochet kitten
  • meditate, chi kung exercises, stretch, calisthenics, tai chi practice,etc
  • play with Poe
  • write until approximately 8:15
  • eat breakfast
  • if my partner is still in bed, go up and cuddle until around 8:45
  • log in for work at 9:00

If I stay focused, this gives me a solid 90 – 120 minutes of writing time, five days a week. I can’t say I necessarily spend all of my dedicated writing time actually writing, though I do try to stay focused. The current state of the world makes for a very fragmented and short attention span.

I finished this week with approximately 8,300 words written in my book. I had hoped to hit 10,000 total yesterday, but let myself get caught up in the shitshow of the world as represented in social media. It was like the opposite of writing – not only did I not write, the experience prevented me from writing after I had put my phone down. What I really wanted to do was walk around the block or neighborhood or city for a few weeks, but it was just too hot.

A comment on a post on Instagram turned me on to a series of videos which Brandon Sanderson has posted to YouTube – his 2020 Creative Writing lectures at Brigham Young University. These lectures are a gold mine! Sanderson is a brilliant writer with many years of experience, and his advice and lessons are spot-on. The advice has been a big help, and one lecture in particular, where Sanderson brought in guest speaker Mary Robinette Kowal to talk about short stories, has some of the best advice for writers I have found anywhere. Now I want to go back through all of my short story rough drafts and re-write them all with reference to these videos. It would certainly be worth the time.

Now the weather has turned and last night was the first comfortably night for sleeping in many days. So even though I only got about four hours of sleep (though given the realities of this year I should be celebrating the fact that I got four hours of sleep), I woke up refreshed and energized for excellent outdoor classes in tai chi and kung fu.

In reading, I finished one more of R.A. Salvatore’s Forgotten Realms book, The Ghost King, and can now put all of that behind me for the next few months and focus on nonfiction, poetry, and genre fiction books which feature characters not named Drizzt. I am still working my way through Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and as night-time reading I recently started Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, which is lush and beautiful and heartbreaking and disturbing and I am only two chapters in so far. For interstitial reading I pulled from the shelf San Francisco Beat: Talking to the Poets, a collection of interviews with beat poets edited by David Meltzer. As I said to my partner, the interviews make me want to go back to San Francisco, but to go back to San Francisco circa 1968, if such a thing were ever possible. I suspect that if I do return to San Francisco, it will be closer to 2022 than 1968.

If we still live in a world where such travel is possible.

 

Back From San Francisco

John Winkelman

Z and I returned home from our second annual trip to San Francisco early Sunday morning. Like, really early. 2:00 am, which was 23:00 San Francisco time. And since we had been staying up late there, our internal clocks were completely out of whack.

Of course we visited City Lights on one of our peregrinations around the city. How could we not? I was much better with my buying urges this time, as I didn’t want to be hit with the outrageous “heavy checked bag” penalty at the airport. I made it by one pound, too!

So. At top left is Rad Women A-Z, which I picked up because Grand Rapids recently commissioned 27 artists to paint 27 electric boxes around downtown. Many of these are in my neighborhood or on my route to work, and they are wonderful! I absolutely love public art projects like this, and I hope the city continues to commission work like this.

Top center is We the Resistance, a collection of essays and stories about nonviolent resistance, which is much needed, as, since the entrenched (e.g. Caucasian, male, conservative, christian, capitalist, etc) power structures default to violence in their enforcement of the status quo, it is easy to want to meet force with force, and that is by definition a limited and self-limiting toolset.

Top right is The Hammer by Adelade Ivanova, one of three books of poetry I picked up more or less at random, from the “recommended by the staff” shelves. The other two are Kamau Daaood’s The Language of Saxophones at bottom left and Lynn Breedlove’s Forty-Five Thought Crimes at bottom right. I have only started Daaood’s book, and it is superb! I have always loved jazz poetry, and my first forays in to the form were fun to read and write but, well, not good. These are extraordinary.

Bottom center is another impulse buy, this one based on the title alone: The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. This is some heady reading. I was not at all surprised, given the title, that I opened to a random page and found a quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It just seemed like that kind of book. And it is the third in a series, which means, once I finish it and scraped my brain off the ceiling, I will need to go back and read the previous two.

This visit reinforced my opinion that City Lights is the most finely curated bookstore I have ever visited, and bookstores nationwide could take cues from their selection and public engagement.

San Francisco was not all books, but the food and art will need to wait for additional blog posts.

Links and Notes for the Week of September 2, 2018

John Winkelman