I traveled to Chicago for a project kickoff this week, so this will be a light update.
I have traveled a lot in the past six months. About as much as the previous five years combined. I realize here in the post-quarantine era that doesn’t mean much, but I find it to be exhausting. Travel like this would have been fun a decade or two ago and, more importantly, when I was single. Now it is tiresome and more than a little depressing, even when visiting cities like Chicago and Dallas. Most of what I see is through an office window, and at the end of the day I am too tired to go out and enjoy myself.
At least the food is good.
Reading
David T. Courtwright’s The Age of Addiction. Limbic capitalism, baby! It is interesting and well-written, and is giving me ideas for some of my own writing, both fiction and non-fiction.
And it must be said, it is a good wake-up call for how capitalism exploits human vulnerability. Then again this wake-up call has been shouted from the rooftops since the invention of advertising.
Writing
Little to no creative writing, but lots of code. Lots and lots and lots of code.
I am at the end of two weeks off from work. This is the first real break I have had in well over a year. I have had time off, certainly, but most of that in 2025 involved some intensive travel, either for vacation or family obligations. And while fun and worthwhile, such vacations are not restful and restorative.
This one was. I didn’t realize how exhausted I had become from the events, personal, national and global, of 2025, but instead of accomplishing the mountain of goals I had made for myself, I slept.
A lot.
Like, going to bed at 22:00 and waking up at 11:00. Repeatedly.
It’s good that I had this break because when I return to work in a couple of days I will be travelling for much of the week. I haven’t had to travel for work since before the COVID lockdowns. When I was younger, this would have been exciting. Now it is just exhausting.
Not that I won’t have the opportunity for a couple hours of fun here and there. Chicago is a city where Things Happen.
Reading
I started off the year by finishing A Fading Sun by Stephen Leigh, and now I am reading The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, by David T. Courtwright. If I get nothing else out of this book, I am indebted to Courtwright for introducing to my lexicon the phrase “limbic capitalism.”
Writing
When I finally pulled myself out of bed for long enough to accomplish anything, I finished transcribing a large-ish pile of poetry from the last couple of my journals.
I am re-creating my writing-editing-submitting pipeline in my spare moments. Since I have been writing poetry off and on for over 30 years, I have a lot of old work to review and organize. Not that I really expect the world to still exist come this time next year, but it would be nice to release some more poetry into the wild.
Subject: Death, Mutants Setting: Wasteland Genre: Western
Listening
Sick Dick and the Volkwagens, “Flame Flows Down,” from their album Interference. Recorded somewhere around 1980. Yes, I just read The Crying of Lot 49.
Interesting Links
“AI and systemic risk” (Stephen Cecchetti, Robin Lumsdaine, Tuomas Peltonen, Antonio Sánchez Serrano, VoxEU/CEPR)
December was a surprisingly book-heavy month, fueled in large part by me taking a full two weeks off from work. This is the first vacation in a long time where I didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything for the entire break. So I read. A lot. And I wrote in my journal. And I slept a lot.
I didn’t set out to pick up so many books in December, but opportunities to increase my collection just kept appearing.
If you look at the dates where I completed reading books, you will see that they start at the beginning of my time off. And they continue right through to the end of the year. I am still reading, and will likely complete at least one more book before I return to work on Monday.
One additional note: Two of the books i read – The Crying of Lot 49 and The Poppy War – I picked up from the Grand Rapids Public Library. One of my goals for the new year is to spend a lot more time at the library. I love acquiring new books, but collecting is expensive and the library is only a few blocks from my house.
Acquisitions
Reading material I acquired in the month of December, 2025
While I can’t say I expect 2026 to be a better year than was 2025, I feel better prepared to weather the slings and arrows. Things may improve, or they may not. It is clear that the upcoming year will be interesting.
As Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is always the case, everywhere, all the time, simply because our ideas of “new” look a lot like the old with a new coat of paint.
Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful New Year, and that 2026 is more gentle and nurturing than was 2025.
Here we are in the last weekly round-up of the year. I am in the middle of a two-week break from work, which was long overdue, and not even remotely adequate. But the holidays are a break from work, not really a restful, relaxing time, except in the spare moments when not being sociable.
Reading
I just finished Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and it was wonderful and weird. This was my first Pynchon, and I may need to wait a bit before diving in again.
Writing
I don’t have much to report here. Maybe in the second week of my vacation I will have some energy and focus.
Traffic, “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys,” from their 1971 album of the same name. This song entered my head through a silly little meme which was fed to me by the Facebook algorithm. And it is beautiful!
And just like that, I am finished with work for the year.
This past week was hectic but fun. Last weekend my partner and I drove to Novi so that I could attend a ConCom meeting for Magical ConFusion. While I was in the meeting Z sat in the hotel restaurant working on her business Gallafe, which she is re-launching in January.
We arrived at the hotel Saturday and immediately set out looking for food, which we found in abundance at Bi Bim Bap inside the Atrium of Novi. The food overall was very good, and the kimchi was ferociously spicy and (assisted by a hot toddy back at the hotel) scorched my cold-ridden sinuses clean. Highly recommended.
On Sunday, after the meeting, we met up with a friend at the Basil Bowl on Haggerty, which is also excellent, and offers good food for when one is recovering from a cold or a hangover.
This past Wednesday, Z and I drove over to the Frederick Meijer Gardens to experience Enlighten, which was most excellent. Fortunately the outdoor temperature Wednesday evening was considerably warmer than the past few weeks, so the two-plus hours we spend wandering the mile-long path through the installation was comfortable and enjoyable. If you have a tolerance for being outside in the snow, I highly recommend attending.
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Light show at the Enlighten event at the Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Reading
I am about three quarters of the way through A Sportsman’s Notebook, and should be able to complete it by the end of the year. Then on to the next thing.
This was another hectic week. The above photo is part of the hecticness.
The stumps are the remnants of a hackberry tree which was sending its roots under the floor of my basement, causing the concrete to heave and putting upward pressure on the poles under the floor joists. That upward pressure was causing a noticeable bulge in the floors above, and recently we have noticed some new cracks in the old plaster on the walls of the second floor.
I contacted Armand the Tree Guy (aka Armand Lawrence) a couple of weeks ago, after my next-door neighbor recommended his work. He and his crew arrived around 10:00 and were done with the tree at 12:30. And the whole forty-foot, double-trunk tree, chopped into pieces, fit into a single trailer.
Hopefully the damage will now stop, and the floor of the basement gradually subside as the roots of the tree decay over the next few years. I am sad to see the tree gone, but I would be more sad if, say, the plaster on the interior walls were to collapse and bury the cats.
Reading
I am still working my way through Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook, and still loving it.
Writing
Due to the afore-mentioned chaos, I have not had time to write.
Subject: Aliens, Fae Setting: Lost City Genre: Noir
Listening
On the evening of Wednesday, December 10, Jack and Julie Ridl hosted a virtual poetry reading in which a dozen poets read their work to an online audience of over a hundred. It was wonderful! I saw many names and faces which I have not seen in many years, several of them from the Caffeinated Press/3288 Review days, and some from more recent events involving the Grand River Poetry Collective and the Grand Rapids Literary Festival. I took notes, and I hope to retain this energy into the Christmas holidays, when I will have some time off and maybe will have the focus and energy to do something creative and meaningful.
The first week of December, 1984. I was nearing the end of the first semester of my sophomore year at Springport High School. When I wasn’t in class or attending wrestling practice, or band practice, or milking cows, I was holed up in my room with my Commodore 64, learning how to program and playing games. And learning how to program games.
I was also listening to the radio. I had a cheap clock radio thing at the time, which mostly brought in static and country music, but could be coaxed to pull in the oldies station or the contemporary rock station Q106 (“It may not be your favorite song, but it has a lot of the same notes!”). John Lennon had been murdered four years previously, and his son Julian Lennon was on the charts with “Valotte” and “Much Too Late for Goodbye.”
I bring this up because for the past few months I have been following “Charlie’s 80s Attic Radio Station” on Facebook, and recently made the mental leap that, if there is a Facebook page, maybe this Charlie fella has website.
And he does! Charlie’s 80s Attic is real! And he streams the music which is on his social media lists, along with a whole lot more.
In general, I try not to go nostalgia-mining when writing, but these tunes sure do bring back a lot of memories.
Reading
Having finished Invisible Work, I am now about a quarter of the way through Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook. I have the Everyman’s Library hardcover edition, which includes a bookmark ribbon attached to the spine. This ribbon is one of the greatest cat toys ever invented, and I need to be circumspect whenever I read this book anywhere near Poe or (especially) Pepper.
Writing
Not much of anything new this week. My brain was fried from an unexpectedly chaotic and busy Thanksgiving holiday.
“Why I Can’t Just Meet You for Dinner” (Fred Rossi, Center Left) – It’s good to be able to put a name to this feeling I have been enduring for about the last decade.
November is ostensibly the Month of Writing, and to be fair I did more writing this month than in all of the past year including last November. However life, as usual, had its way, so the amount of time and energy I had available for writing dwindled away to nothing. Unfortunately so did my time for reading, though I did manage to finish two books.
Ivan Turgenev (Charles and Natasha Hepburn, translators), A Sportsman’s Notebook [2025.11.15] – I ordered this book from Books & Mortar back in May of this year, and then promptly forgot about it when life suddenly went sideways. Turns out the book had been on back-order with the publisher for months. I had recently ordered another book from Books & Mortar, and on a whim stopped in to see if it had arrived yet. The clerk said it hadn’t but this one from six months ago had suddenly appeared. And the best part was I had already paid for it!
Todd Goddard, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life [2025.11.20] – purchased from Books & Mortar. I had no idea this book was even in the works until about the end of September, and since then I have been awaiting it eagerly. And here it is.
Reading List
Books I read in the month of November 2025.
Books
Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation [2025.11.26] – I will straight-up say I loved this book! Kristal discusses Borges’ approach to translation – his own translations, translations of his works, and translation as a subject in his fiction and nonfiction. I came out the other side of Invisible Work feeling compelled to re-learn Russian so I could finally read some of the books I picked up in Saint Petersburg back in 1994.
Barbara Saunier, There is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy [2025.11.28] – One of my recent acquisitions from the Grand River Poetry Collective. The poetry within is excellent, and – perhaps because like the author I too grew up on a farm – made me feel a sense of nostalgia.
I spent the evening before Thanksgiving sitting in the living room under a blanket and therefore also under two cats, drowsily reading Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Eventually my brain couldn’t take more of this, so I looked up which streaming service offered Name of the Rose. It was Apple TV, one of the many channels which have replaced cable, which replaced channels.
I typed Name of the Rose into the search bar in the app, and the movie came up as expected. Next to it was a documentary, Umberto Eco – A Library of the World. Since my head was already in that space from reading about Borges and translation, I selected the documentary instead of the movie.
And that was very much the right choice to make.
One of my favorite moments was Eco’s comment in an interview that while the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch in Constantinople will never stop arguing about the filioque clause, they must both agree that Clark Kent is Superman.
Reading
After almost two months of working away at it, I finished reading Efraín Kristal’s excellent Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come, and will certainly revisit it from time to time.
