Ecce Sigum

Category: Life

  • Weekly Round-up, June 8, 2024

    A Thistle plant in the morning sunlight.

    [A thistle plant in our back yard, lit by the morning sun.]

    The schools are out and summer is in full swing for the next two and a half months. I have arranged some time off from work at the end of July, and now my partner and I can begin to plan an adventure of some kind.

    This past Wednesday was my fifth-fifth birthday, which means we are probably approaching the middle of the of the Age of John, or the Winkelcene (not to be confuse with the Winkelscene, which is my yet-to-be-created slam poetry/martial arts cafe, where any disputes between poets will be handled in the ring).

    Reading

    I’m bouncing back and forth between two books. My daytime reading, usually during breaks at work, is Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution by Maurizio Lazzarato. I have read other of Lazzarato’s works in the past – The Making of the Indebted Man and Governing By Debt. Both are excellent. And, so far, so is Capital Hates Everyone.

    The other book in my currently-reading pile is Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, a biography by Jason McBride. This book fits well with Twentieth-Century Boy, the collection of Duncan Hannah‘s journals which I read last summer, as well as John Giorno‘s autobiography Great Demon Kings. A lot of the same names pop up in these book.

    Writing

    Writing has gone surprisingly well this past week, thanks to a concerted effort to spend less time fucking around online and more time being of use to myself. I have a folder with a document for each of the weekly writing prompts here, and I have been going back through and jotting down story ideas for each of them, three or four or five a day. Some of the ideas resonate, and may well be turned into full stories when I get the time. But for now the ideas are captured.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Cryptids, Aliens
    Setting: Bar
    Genre: Fantasy

    Listening

    Interesting Links

  • 55, or 11×5

    Happy birthday to me! I am now officially part of the “55 and older” cohort, which both simplifies and diminishes the experience of no longer being young here in the 21st century.

    Saint Petersburg, 1994

    30 years ago, as of this post, I was in Saint Petersburg, Russia, celebrating my birthday with friends and classmates in the restaurant of the Hotel Rus. The above photos is from that trip, when we visited the prison where Dostoevsky was held just prior to his mock execution. I am just to the right of the window, with glasses, shaggy brown hair, and a black shirt.

    This trip, more than anything else at that time, seemed to be the dividing line between my young life and my adult life. I still pull out the photos once in a while, and I still have the dozens of books, all in Russian, which I picked up on that trip. Can I read them? Not really. Not any more. My Russian is almost nonexistent at this point. Had I time and energy to do so, I would start learning the language again. I know just enough Russian to be able to pick out the line from The Master and Margarita which became my first tattoo.

    If my fifty-third year was one of re-emergence, this past year was one of re-connection. I have made contact with a number of people I have not seen in years or decades. It has been a wonderful experience, and from what I have seen of the next several months, is a process which is likely to continue for quite some time. I have heard it said that as we get older it becomes progressively harder to make new friends. This may be true, but as we get older, if we are lucky, we have more and more old friends with whom we can both share old memories and make new ones.

    And now, off to work. Only ten more years to go until I retire, and I am counting the minutes.

    (If you are looking for my IWSG post for June, it is here.)

  • Weekly Round-up, June 1, 2024

    A flower and a bee outside our house.

    [A small bumblebee, laden with pollen, attending to a flower outside our house]

    Happy June, everyone. And happy Pride Month! This past week was, for lack of a better word, good. I had a productive and relatively stress-free (and short, thanks to the holiday) week of work. I read a lot. I wrote a little. I spent quality time with my girlfriend. I relaxed with our cats. And I put the finishing touches on our raised bed/container garden. Not bad for someone who will turn 55 in a few days.

    And best of all, Donald “Trouser Trumpet” Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump, being a coward, is crying foul and saying that it was rigged, and that he was the victim of a witch hunt, etc. To the surprise off nobody, his brownshirts are already threatening the jury, the lawyers, the judges, etc. Basically all the things he has been saying from the first time anyone ever told him “no.” Which was probably when he was about four years old, and that’s apparently when his personality stopped developing.

    Just to be clear: Trump has never been a victim of anything except delusions of adequacy (and possibly child abuse, considering the father was very much like the son). Not once. Not ever. There has never been a witch hunt. There has never been a conspiracy. Trump and his coprophages, bootlicks, and other assorted enablers have spun a wildly false narrative of being downtrodden fighters against overwhelming odds.

    MAGA behavior is textbook “predatory victimhood” which is part and parcel of the supremacist mindset (white supremacist, male supremacist, Christian supremacist, etc.) Anyone who is a member of an in-group, who tries to spin being a member of that in-group as really being part of an out-group (vis. the people complaining that there is no “straight people pride month” to counteract June being Pride Month), is a person whose every utterance, indeed their entire world-view, can be dismissed without further consideration. Ignorant cowards, one and all.

    And that’s all that needs to be said about convicted felon Donald J. Trump, and his ilk.

    Reading

    The Black Company by Glen Cook. This is a re-read. It is of a similar vibe to how I want one of the novels I am working on, so I wanted  to get my head into that space before I dive into a major re-draft this summer.

    Writing

    I spent some time moving the more promising of my NaNoWriMo drafts to new folders in preparation for re-writes and edits. So more prep for writing than actual writing.

    Weekly Writing Prompt

    Subject: Music, Addiction
    Setting: Library
    Genre: Weird Fiction

    Listening

    Back in 2000, when I worked at CyberNet Engineering at the beginning of my career as a web developer, I listened to “Flat Beat” a LOT! The rest of the album, Analog Worms Attack, is excellent as well. You can listen to the entire thing here.

    Analog Worms Attack was released in October 1999, just weeks after the official start of my career, which began when I volunteered to build the first website for my employer at the time. The fact that I only lasted about six months in that role should tell you how well that went.

    I only lasted about eight months at CyberNet, which should tell you everything you need to know about how THAT job went as well. Thus was my career born in pain and sadness.

    But at least I had Flat Eric to help me through the worst days.

    Interesting Links

  • Weekly Round-up, May 25, 2024

    Flowering shrub outside my house.

    [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

    Mother opossum with a baby

    [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.

  • Weekly Round-up, May 11, 2024

    Our raised-bed garden.

    [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

    A Mallard duck on a log at the top of the Sixth Street Bridge dam.

    [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

  • Weekly Round-up, April 27, 2024

    A small skunk wandering down the alley.[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

    Pear Tree Flowers In Our Back Yard

    [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

    Shadows of branches, seen during the April 8, 2024 Lunar Eclipse.

    [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