Weekly Round-up, August 3, 2024

Chicago, from Fisherman's Wharf

[Chicago, seen from Fisherman’s Wharf.]

At the beginning of this past week my partner and I drove to Chicago for a few days of visiting friends, sightseeing, and eating a wide variety of amazing food. Travel and prep for travel didn’t leave time for much else.

Reading

Having finished M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, I dove into, and completed, Wholly Esenin. It was BRILLIANT! Now I have in front of me Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. I picked this up based on a recommendation by Jeff VanderMeer somewhere on social media. I am not far enough in to give a report more detailed than “I like it so far.”

Writing

Vacation travel left little time for more than some brief journaling, though I did write the beginnings of a poem after returning home from Chicago. We’ll see if anything comes of it.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Addiction, Death
Setting: Wasteland
Genre: Dystopian

Listening

Pink Floyd, “The Dogs of War“, from their album A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Seems appropriate, given the state of the world.

Interesting Links

  • Israel: Armageddon?” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – This is a good article exploring the possible reasoning behind Israel’s latest tactics, specifically political assassinations. However, the real meat of this link is in the comments, where many Naked Capitalism readers are filling in more details, history, motives, and possibilities around Israel’s ongoing conflict/genocide with Palestine.

July 2024 Books and Reading Notes

July was not my best reading month. Too much work, plus prep for, and participating in, my first vacation of the year. But what my monthly reading lacked in quantity it more than made up for in quality. Plus, Viriconium was a long, extremely dense book. But well worth the effort.

Acquisitions

Paperback edition of Wholly Esenin, resting on a stone slab

  1. Sergei Esenin (Roger Pulvers, translator), Wholly Esenin: Poems by Sergei Esenin (Balestier Press) [2024.07.17] – Ordered from Books and Mortar, after reading Jim Harrison’s Letters to Yesenin, and watching this documentary about Esenin, created by Pushkin House, and finding the title in the comments.

Reading List

Books I read in July 2024

Books

  1. Jim Harrison, Letters to Yesenin (re-read) [2024.07.02]
  2. M. John Harrison, Viriconium [2024.07.23]
  3. Sergei Esenin (Roger Pulvers, translator), Wholly Esenin [2024.07.31]