I am back home and in blissed-put recovery mode after four days of Monumental ConFusion. I will post a write-up in the near future.
Reading
I finished Speculative Whiteness, and am in the final stretch of Doctor Zhivago. Zhivago has been a very long project, due in large part to chaos in my day job and also chaos in the world at large. Concentration and focus have been in very short supply this year.
Writing
My brain is recovering from the past three months of *gestures at everything*, so not much writing this week.
With the crazy project finally mostly wrapped up, I finally have time and – more importantly – mental energy to dive back into reading. I am bouncing back and forth between Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, where I am well past the halfway point, and Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, which is a short but infuriating read, though now that I am well past the halfway point it is becoming amusing. The alt-right, in all their various facets, are a bunch of pathetic losers.
Writing
Not much writing happening right now, thanks to the afore-mentioned Crazy Project.
Subject: Empire, Genius Loci
Setting: Wilderness
Genre: Dystopian
Listening
“Father & Son” by Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens. My partner and I have been watching Ted Lasso, with is remarkable and joyous, and the final scene of the final episode featured this song.
Interesting Links
“The Curse of the Household Analogy” (Richard Murphy, Funding the Future) – Original of a post at Naked Capitalism. IMHO, people who compare government and household budgeting are irredeemably stupid, and also assume that their audiences are irredeemably stupid.
[A sprig of decorative purple kale peeking out of a pile of snow just outside of Martha’s Vineyard in Grand Rapids, Michigan.]
Another week in the hopper, and I am exhausted. This week I worked 51 hours and managed to avoid missing the evening classes by logging in between 6 and 7:00 in the morning. But we have two more days to go, though I am sure the project leads would love for me to work through this three-day weekend, that just ain’t gonna happen.
The next blog post – indeed, the next couple of hundred blog posts – will be sent from the newly-formed Fascist States of America, headed by several billionaires stuffed in a sagging, ugly, shit-stained Donald Trump costume.
This state of affairs became inevitable when the Supreme Court passed Citizens United, which codified into law the idea that money is exactly the same as speech, and that the richer a person (or corporation) was, the more deserving of free speech they were. It is no coincidence that these billionaire broligarchs consider themselves “free speech absolutists”, but only when it comes to the dissemination of white supremacist and other forms of hate speech. Note how quickly they close down any criticisms of themselves on their own platforms.
So in that sense, Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the other wealthy media outlet owners are the most cowardly men on the planet. They have gone to astonishing lengths to build up enough wealth to not only shield themselves from the consequences of any of their actions, but also to shut down most avenues of criticism of them and the members of their cohort. They are the living embodiment of Wilhoit’s Law: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Reading
I have passed the halfway point of Doctor Zhivago, but it is still slow going. Maybe the long weekend will afford me time to get in some pages.
Writing
I am giving up on writing anything substantial until February. This month has been a total wash.
[The Grand River, as seen at sunset from the Bridge Street bridge.]
Another week gone, consumed by the crazy work project. The end is nigh, but it is a combination of an abrupt cliff and a brick wall toward which we are racing headlong. So kind of like life in general.
I am winding down my interactions with Facebook, as Zuck has joined Musk in licking MAGA boots, so Facebook will not stop even the pretense that it isn’t a Nazi bar. Thus it joins Twitter/X, Gab, Rumble, and Truth Social as a safe space for fascists.
Most of my social media presence will now be on BlueSky (until it, too, follows Xitter into the shitter) and Mastodon, which has so far mostly avoided the problem of being owned by billionaire tech bros. We will see how that plays out in the next four years.
Reading
I have finally reached the halfway point of Doctor Zhivago, a month later than I originally expected. It is very, very good.
Writing
While sitting at a cafe yesterday morning before work I knocked out a rough draft of a poem about the Los Angeles wildfires. I might leave it at that, as the subject is so fucking depressing.
Subject: Empire, Aliens
Setting: Bar
Genre: Technothriller
Listening
Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” has been bouncing around my head lately, for no particular reason, other than that, fifty-five years later, it is still a hell of a song.
[A section of one of the shelves of books in the poetry section at Argos Book Shop. Taken because of the presence of issue 2.3 of The 3288 Review, of which I was the Managing Editor.]
This past week was blissfully quiet. I didn’t do much, and I would like to continue to not do much for the rest of my life, but alas – work started on Thursday, and though few members of our team were around, I had plenty on my plate to keep me busy, and fortunately few co-workers to disrupt my flow.
ConFusion 2025 begins in three weeks, and the tasks and obligations are quickly stacking up. I am the Head of Operations this year, which mostly means answering a lot of questions and wrangling volunteers. And I am very much looking forward to the event which is one of the two major highlights of my year.
Reading
I am close to halfway through Doctor Zhivago, and it just keeps getting better. This is a much easier read than any of the Dostoevsky I read over the past several years. Not that Pasternak is a better writer, just more readable.
One of my major reading goals for the year is to focus on nonfiction, and to that end I started Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll. It is quite good so far, and has reignited in me an interest in politics and political theory, which I am pursuing in my offline journal. You may ask, “didn’t the recent several elections keep your attention?” and the answer is yes, but also the last three elections, thanks to Trump and his strangle-hold on American conservatism, have been utter shitshows. This will likely not stop until he is biodegrading and all of his works pulled down and salt strewn where they once stood.
Writing
I have managed some short creative works – a sentence here, a paragraph there, and also the rough draft of a poem which came to me while I was reading Doctor Zhivago in a laundromat last week. So the year has promise, in this one small facet.
The Cars, “Moving in Stereo“. This song is of course most famous for That Scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but it was also one of the first songs I listened to on Pandora, back in the early 2000s, when Pandora was a web-based Flash application, and it actually downloaded the songs it played to a directory on the user’s hard drive. In case you are wondering, Pandora no longer downloads the songs it plays.
Interesting Links
Jevon’s Paradox (Wikipedia) – One of the many, many reasons why we can’t have nice things.
You know, as far as years go, 2024 was a great big nothing-burger. It was just kind of…there. I am sure that with the incoming fascist regime taking power in late January, we will look back on 2024 as the Last Good Year for a very long time.
Things were…decent. 2024 started rough with a surprise dental emergency, but after that the year was quiet. A sort of “keep your head down and focus on what is in front of you” year. I read some good books and some mediocre books. I wrote in my journal a lot, but managed almost no creative writing at all, beyond rough drafts of a few poems.
I worked out a lot, cooked a lot, ate a lot, played with the cats, spent a lot of quality time with my partner, and visited some folks.
2024 was the first year in a long time when there were no deaths among my friends and family, and for that I am grateful.
Now that 2025 is upon us, it is time to ground myself and reach out to the friends and family who will be in precarious and vulnerable situations, no matter who they voted for. The country going full-on Christofascist became inevitable the day Reagan was elected, and will not change until the power of both capitalism and Christianity, and particularly the obscene melding of the two, are utterly broken. So, no time soon, unless we have some Jackpot-style global catastrophes which sweep away the entirety of all dominant global power structures. And if that happens, we will have much bigger problems than the glorification of fascism by literally all conservatives in this country.
Happy holidays, everyone! My partner and I are practicing a delicate mix of laying low and avoiding people, and travelling to visit friends and family.
Reading
I have made some small progress in Doctor Zhivago, though I have a long way to go.
Autechre’s “Gantz Graf”. I listened to this kind of music A LOT early in my career as a developer, when cyberspace was a thing and the internet was new and cool and exciting. Now that we are living in a hellish cyberpunk dystopia built on that earlier iteration of the Online, returning to old tunes seems appropriate.
[ Interesting angles and some blue sky outside of the downtown YWCA. ]
Another chaotic week finally in my rearview mirror. And a chaotic year soon to follow, though what comes next will undoubtedly be much, much worse. So everyone in the United States should enjoy the last few days of what passes for a functioning country before it is stripped for parts by the oligarchs who were knowingly and purposefully elected by the unwashed hordes of inbred MAGA cannibals. I call them cannibals because on approximately February 1, 2025, MAGA will begin to eat itself. And nothing of value will be lost.
Reading
Slowly, so very slowly, working my way through Doctor Zhivago. At this rate I won’t be done until sometime in February.
For the first time, I am planning out my reading for the next year. I plan to read mostly long-form nonfiction and short fiction. And, of course, poetry. Not that I won’t read fiction, but given the political events of the past year, and the forty or so before that, reading up on totalitarianism, fascism, oligarchy, the police state, and late-stage capitalism seems to be especially important.
Writing
If I had time to write I would be doing more of it.
As the year winds down the panicked higher-ups at work are distributing the stress to their underlings, which includes Yours Truly. Therefore I have put in some exceptionally long hours this week which has left little time for anything else. I did manage to take my partner out for a nice dinner at MeXo. Highly recommended. Particularly the seafood.
Reading
I am still in the first hundred pages of Doctor Zhivago. I had hoped to be at least halfway through by now, but the day job has not left much time or mental energy for reading works which require focus and concentration.
[The vacant lot on the corner of 36th Street and Buchanan Avenue. ]
This was a quiet week. Some low-level work frustrations kept me distracted from the general state of the world, which was nice. But it also meant I didn’t have a lot of mental space for myself.
Reading
My long read for Dostoevsky December is Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. I read a couple of chapters back during my Russian Studies days at Grand Valley State University, somewhere around…1991. And I watched the movie a year or so ago. So now I am finally reading the book.
