Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Author: John Winkelman

Weekly Round-up, May 25, 2024

John Winkelman

[Above photo: The landscaping is filling in nicely.]

‘Twas another busy week with naught to show for it except continued employment. So I have that going for me.

Reading

Still plugging away at The Reactionary Mind, which is still very good if unpleasant reading. I also pulled Moonbath by Haitian author Yanick Lahens off the shelf for some fiction to read in my evenings before bed. It is excellent so far, if heartbreaking.

Writing

Not much to show, writing-wise. I feel the urge to write, and the ideas are all lined up and ready to go, but I have not yet bridged the gap between wanting to write and actually sitting down and writing. I chalk that one up to burnout.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Death, Possession
Setting: Bar
Genre: War

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, May 18, 2024

John Winkelman

[Pictured: A mother opossum carrying a baby, photographed on Mother’s Day while walking to Kaffeine Place for breakfast.]

I am not quite as busy as I have ben in past weeks, but that just leaves space for stress to creep into my life. So it goes.

Reading

I finished Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and it was wonderful! I will definitely be looking into more of her work in the near future. I am still working my way through Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. It is slow going not because of the writing, which is excellent, but because the subject matter makes me feel…guillotiney. In my spare moments I read Joäo Gilberto Noll’s short novella Atlantic Hotel, which was decently good and weird.

Writing

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Evolution, Cryptids
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Solarpunk

Listening

Hot Chocolate, “Every 1’s a Winner”. I heard this song – possibly for the first time every – when Z and I walked into Bobcat Bonnie’s for dinner this past Wednesday. I didn’t recognize the song but I knew the voice, though it took some time to remember that it was the same voice from “You Sexy Thing,” which received much airplay after The Full Monty was released.

Interesting Links

  • “The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?” (Peter Watts and Dan Brooks, The MIT Press Reader) – Watts interviews Brooks about the inevitable, human-caused, ecological collapse, and what we may do to increase our chances of surviving, since mitigating is no longer on the table. This link comes via a post on Watts’ blog, where one of the commenters pointed out that the path up the technology mountain, post-collapse, will not look like the path we took to get where we are currently, because the availability and distribution of resources will be much different than it was last time. Food for thought.
  • “AI ‘art’ and uncanniness” (Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic) – A long article exploring the short- and long-term implications of banning the training of LLMs on copyrighted works. To sum up: There are nuances. It’s complicated. And the real bad actors are probably not the most obvious bad actors. Well worth the read.

Aurora Borealis, Spring 2024

John Winkelman

These are photos taken during the evening of Friday, May 10, during an amazing display of the Northern Lights. I took these photos with my Google Pixel 7 Pro phone, from a back yard in the middle of Grand Rapids. This is only the second time in my life that I have seen the Aurora Borealis, and it was everything I could have hoped for.

Weekly Round-up, May 11, 2024

John Winkelman

[The above photo is the raised-bed garden Zyra and I installed in early May. Soon it will overflow with healthful vegetables.]

Reading

The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Writing

Not much, unless Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets counts as writing.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Reincarnation, Politics
Setting: Library
Genre: Steampunk

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, May 4, 2024

John Winkelman

[The above photo is of a pair of Mallard ducks resting on a tree trunk which is stuck at the edge of the Sixth Street Bridge dam just north of downtown Grand Rapids.]

This past Sunday, my good friend Christine Stephens-Krieger became the new Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids. Christine and I go way back. We worked together at Schuler Books and Music. We read poetry at several events. When I was part of Caffeinated Press we published Christine in our literary magazine The 3288 Review. I had the honor to be part of Christine’s project An Oral History of Poetry in Grand Rapids. And now I am part of the Grand River Poetry Collective, a local company which Christine created at the end of 2023.

For many years, Christine coordinated the Dyer-Ives Poetry Competition.

All of which is to say, I look forward to what she has planned for the next three years.

Reading

Still working my way through All that is Evident is Suspect. I love this book so much! I also started The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, based on its mention in the Cory Doctorow link at the bottom of this post.

Writing

Not much to show this week, though I finally got into the groove of writing at least five story ideas for each of the weekly writing prompts. Those ideas are now scattered across two journals, and when I have the time I will transcribe them into a Google doc.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Dreams, Cryptids
Setting: Lost City
Genre: Lovecraftian

Listening

This is the kind of music that is getting me through long sessions of writing code for ServiceNow.

Interesting Links

IWSG, May 2024: Squirrel!

John Winkelman

April was insanely busy, even by the standards of my already-overfull life, so this post will be brief.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2024 is: How do you deal with distractions when you are writing? Do they derail you?

Writing for me generally doesn’t start until after I have already dealt with most potential distractions.  Therefore my writing time is fairly distraction free, aside from interruptions from the orange maniacs (one of which is pictured above).

And as for the internet-as-distraction (social media, doomscrolling, etc.), well, that is kind of the background radiation of 21st century life, and if I am not immune to the lure of arguing with strangers on FB, or whatever, I have become fairly good at compartmentalizing.

But don’t let me keep you from your writing. How’s YOUR focus these days?

 

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April 2024 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

April was National Poetry Month, and I didn’t read as much poetry this time as I have in past years. Part of that was my specific choices for poetry books, and part was general business and mental exhaustion. As you can see from the list below, I have spent most of my reading time buried in All that is Evident is Suspect, a collection of writing from members of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “Workshop for Potential Literature”). The writing therein is frying my brain in the very best way. Highly recommended.

Acquisitions

  1. Lauren T. Davila (editor), To Root Somewhere Beautiful: An Anthology of Reclamation (Outland Entertainment) [2024.04.10] – Purchased through a Kickstarter campaign run by Outland Entertainment.
  2. Frantz Fanon (Richard Philcox, translator), The Wretched of the Earth [2024.04.20] – Purchased from a fantastic new store which opened the weekend of 4/20: Black Dog Books and Records. I see myself shopping there a lot.

Reading List

Books and Journals

  1. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast [2024.04.07]
  2. Paul Celan (John Felstiner, translator), Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan [2024.04.12]
  3. Kirk Jones, Aetherchrist [2024.04.16]
  4. Jean Daive (Norma Cole, translator), A Woman With Several Lives [2024.04.18]

Short Prose

  1. Raymond Queneau, “Slept Cried”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963 – 2018 [2024.04.18]
  2. Jacques Duchateau, “Lecture on the Oulipo at Cerisy-la-Salle”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.19]
  3. Latis, “The Atheist Organist”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.20]
  4. Marcel Duchamp, “Correspondence With the Oulipo”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.20]
  5. Albert-Marie Schmidt, “Letter to the Oulipo”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.21]
  6. Claude Berge, “Letter to Jacques Roubaud & Georges Perec”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.21]
  7. François Le Lionnais, “Idea Box”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.21]
  8. Jean Lescure, “The N+7 Method”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.21]
  9. Georges Perec, “Alphabet for Stämpfli”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.22]
  10. Italo Calvino, “How I Wrote One of My Books”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.22]
  11. Luc Étienne, “Bilingual Palindromes”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.22]
  12. Stanley Chapman, “Letter to Valérie Guidoux”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.23]
  13. André Blavier, “Literary Lunatics”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.23]
  14. Jean Queval, “Circular Reflections from an Immobile Insect”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.24]
  15. Michèle Métail, “Fifty Oscillatory Poems”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.25]
  16. Marcel Bénabou, “Ebony Cup and Ivory Ball, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.25]
  17. Jacques Bens, “How to Tell a Story”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.25]
  18. Paul Braffort, “Invisible Libraries”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.26]
  19. Noël Arnaud, “The Last Minutes”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.26]
  20. Michelle Grangaud, “Gesture”, All That Is Evident Is Suspect [2024.04.26]

Weekly Round-up, April 27, 2024

John Winkelman

[The above photo is a small skunk which wandered down the alley while I was building a raised-bed garden. They are cute, from a distance.]

Ugh. This week was so busy I never even got around to filling in this post before it went live. So here it is, in all of its minimalist glory.

Reading

All that is Evident is Suspect

Writing

Nuffin’.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Espionage, Language
Setting: Urban
Genre: Weird Fiction

Listening

This is The Grass Roots singing their song “Let’s Live for Today.”

Interesting Links

  • “Hoisted from Comments: The Colonialist and Anti-Semitic Origins of Modern Israel” (Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism) – Most comments on social media are utter garbage,  as are most comments on popular blogs. But there are some blogs which, through good moderation policy, have a generally excellent comments section. Naked Capitalism is one of those places. This blog post takes as its core a comment (from user “vu”) attached to previous blog post. The article/comment is worth reading, as are the comments within this post. To sum up, the Israel/Palestine situation is both terrible and inevitable, and the roots of the conflict were laid by Western powers well over a hundred years ago.

Weekly Round-up, April 20, 2024

John Winkelman

[The above photos is of a blossom on one of the pear trees we planted in our back yard last summer.]

It’s been an even crazier week than usual, which for this year is really saying something. In the coming days I might make a long post about the intersection of homelessness, carceral capitalism, and West Michigan Nice. But for now I need to keep my focus narrow.

Reading

Back in October I bought Jean Daive’s book Under the Dome, which was a memoir of sorts of Daive’s friendship with the poet Paul Celan.

Last week I finished Celan’s Selected Poetry and Prose, and found it…underwhelming. Perhaps my mind was not in the right place to appreciate his work, or perhaps I am simply not the target audience for his poetry.

A few days ago I finished Daive’s A Woman With Many Lives, and also found it not to my taste. I’m not saying the poetry was bad. Daive is a talented writer. I just…didn’t vibe with it.

All of this is a little confusing for me, because Under the Dome was one of my favorite reads of the past several years.

Now I am reading All that is Evident is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963 – 2018, which I purchased from McSweeney’s a few years ago.

Writing

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Super Powers, Fae
Setting: Ship
Genre: Slipstream

Listening

I picked up Bowie’s album Never Let Me Down on cassette tape, and listened to it A LOT on the ride to and from the Eaton Rapids pickle factory during the summer of 1987. This was my holding pattern between the end of high school and the start of my extended stay at Grand Valley State University. This is the first time I have seen the video for “Time Will Crawl”, despite having listened to the song for literally decades.

Interesting Links

 

Weekly Round-up, April 13, 2024

John Winkelman

[The above photo is the shadow of branches, cast on a sidewalk in Grand Rapids during the April 8 solar eclipse.]

Reading

I finished reading the Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, and I realized realize that I don’t really care for the poetry of Paul Celan. This is not a criticism of the quality of his poetry. It’s just not to my taste. Now browsing random short books, deciding which one will be next.

Writing

I finished a journal I have been writing in since August of last year. Now that I have a new journal I find myself bouncing back and forth wildly between inspiration and ennui.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Aliens, Reincarnation
Setting: Ocean
Genre: Romance

Listening

Interesting Links