Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Category: Life

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.

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

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

 

Weekly Round-up, April 6, 2024

John Winkelman

[I took this photo when walking to the gym from work. One of the buildings attached to the Skywalk has a stairwell with windows facing west. The Skywalk connects to the building I work in, and runs from DeVos Place to the Van Andel Arena.]

It’s been another crazy week for work, leaving little time of brain space for creative endeavors. SO of course I have added a new creative endeavor to my schedule, explained under the Writing heading below.

Reading

I started the month reading The Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, but almost immediately became distracted by Ernest Hemingways’s A Moveable Feast. So I am bouncing back and forth between the two.

Writing

I started a new daily (-ish) writing exercise based on the weekly writing prompts: Each day, as part of my journaling, I jot down a story idea or fragment from the prompt. It can be a single sentence or the entire story. The prompt generator is just too damn useful and fun for me to not keep it central to my writing practice. If I come up with anything worth sharing I will post it here.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Revenge, Evolution
Setting: Outpost
Genre: Magic Realism

Listening

Being a programmer, I often listen to music when I work. And when working I need music that is both interesting and not distracting So I listen to instrumental music, or music with minimal lyrics, or non-English-speaking singers. St Germain performs house-flavored nu jazz, which fits my requirements perfectly.

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, March 30, 2024

John Winkelman

[The above photo was taken on March 30, facing west out of one of the windows in the second-floor gymnasium of the West Michigan YWCA, at the beginning of tai chi class.]

This was the second week of a hellish two-week sprint at work which had me putting in hours like I have not done in years. But the work is in the bag for the moment, at least until the QA people get their hands on my code.

Reading

In anticipation of National Poetry Month, I have started The Selected Prose and Poems of Paul Celan, which I purchased from Books and Mortar back in the autumn of 2023.

Writing

A lot of journaling. Not a lot of creative writing, except for snippets which sneak into the journals.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Artificial Intelligence, Dragons
Setting: Ship
Genre: Romance

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, March 23, 2024

John Winkelman

[I took this photo when walking home from work. The viewpoint is facing south down the connector from northbound Division Ave to Michigan Street, just west of the hospitals.]

We’re in the final stretch of the big project at work so I spent most of this week, well, working. Any time spent not-working was spent recovering from work. I suspect much of the rest of spring will be like this.

Reading

I finished Loaded, which was a good history of the Second Amendment, and its basis in, and magnification of, the built-in racist flavor of American culture. Now I’m reading a few shorter works, like last month, which is appropriate for my unfortunately limited time and attention availability right now. Right now I am working my way through “Bartleby, the Scrivener“, the short story by Herman Melville, in a collection of two(!) short stories published in 1995 as part of Penguin’s 60th anniversary collection “Penguin 60s”. Other than Moby-Dick, this is the only Melville I have read. I love it.

Writing

Bupkis.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Relic, Environment
Setting: Bar
Genre: Utopian

Listening

Interesting Links