Books and Reading

Gail Carriger recommends Black Authors Writing Queer Comfort.

“One of my reading wheelhouses, Gentle Reader, is queer comfort. These are books, mostly romances, featuring queer characters where trials might happen but things all turn out okay in the end. One of the reasons I like these books is because I see them as writing into existence the future we all want.”

Rachel Cordasco at SFRA recommends some SF in translation.

Jo Walton’s Reading List: April 2022

Adri at Birds of a Feather, Flock Together recommends some recent short fiction. (I wish they had linked to the stories where available, but you can copy and paste into Google for a search.) Questing in Shorts: Spring 2022.

Cartoons, Comics, and Humor

Bizarro by Wayno – Wayno’s weekly post of the week’s Bizarro cartoons.

Sarah Andersen – Sarah Andersen’s tumblr.

Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques – I love all these characters, and am amazed at the prolificity and quality Jeph Jacques brings every day.

Therapy Comics by Mardou – Mardou’s therapy comics help me feel less alone. I don’t think the RSS is updated anymore, but I read new comics on Instagram.

This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow – “The Absolutist”

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld

A blog by Bado about editorial cartoons.

Peyote Cowboy by Dan Piraro

Columns and Essays

Jem Bendell is the author of Deep Adaptation, which I have not read. The following essay, however, has prompted me to get it through the library’s interlibrary loan. I share his critique of ecomodernism, but I have no opinion on his solutions.

Telling Uncomfortable Truths to Progressives

“…it can be helpful when those of us freeing ourselves from capitalism’s diminishing ideologies also try to influence public understanding and public policies.”

“…it is obvious that ecomodernism is bullshit…”

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An entrepreneur finds a way to repurpose partially used hotel soap. The surprising afterlife of used hotel soap.

Horoscope

Free Will Astrology – All signs; May 5, 2022.

Music

Bandcamp Daily – If you watch “What We Do in the Shadows” you’ve heard Norma Tanega. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, Bandcamp has you covered.

“Tanega, who had a single hit in 1966 with her song “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” was unwilling to bow down to the pressure of the music industry. She dropped off the scene after releasing two records (in 1966 and 1971) and spent the rest of her life as a visual artist and ESL teacher in California, where she grew up.”

Secondhand Songs – Search engine for cover songs.

News

I assume you already have your preferred news source(s). Here are news sources I use to supplement my news diet.

Wonkette – I love the cursing and share their love of Molly Ivins.

Popular Information – independent investigative journalism.

WikiNews – Wikipedia has a news page. It can be kind of hit or miss, but I always use it when I’m following a big breaking news story.

Wikipedia Post of the Week

Remedios Varo – Spanish surrealist artist working in Spain, France, and Mexico.

Coda

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 098 of 100)

Yikes! The day slipped away. Have some Kenneth Fearing.

Aphrodite Metropolis

Harry loves Myrtle—He has strong arms, from the warehouse,
And on Sunday when they take the bus to emerald meadows he doesn’t say:
“What will your chastity amount to when your flesh withers in a little while?”
No,
On Sunday, when they picnic in emerald meadows they look at the Sunday paper:
GIRL SLAYS BANKER-BETRAYER
They spread it around on the grass
BATH-TUB STIRS JERSEY ROW
And then they sit down on it, nice.
Harry doesn’t say “Ziggin’s Ointment for withered flesh,
Cures thousands of men and women of motes, warts, red veins,
flabby throat, scalp and hair diseases,
Not expensive, and fully guaranteed.”
No,
Harry says nothing at all,
He smiles,
And they kiss in the emerald meadows on the Sunday paper.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 097 of 100)

So many typos! Every time I post I see a whole slew of typos. I’m not sure if I’m making more than I used to, or if I just didn’t notice before.

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Here’s a bit of a deep dive into Led Zep fandom. John Coulthart uncovers the source for some fonts used on the fourth album. Coulthart isn’t always about Zep. He’s mostly about art and design.

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I didn’t know Birds Aren’t Real was a thing. It is a thing. The Guardian explains where it came from.

McIndoe made a placard, and went out to join the march. “It’s not like I sat down and thought I’m going to make a satire. I just thought: ‘I should write a sign that has nothing to do with what is going on.’ An absurdist statement to bring to the equation.”

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“The purpose of education is to teach each of us to defend ourselves against the seductions of eloquence.” –Bertrand Russell (in Harper’s, March 1991, p. 47) [source]

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Terrific (albeit brief) interview with Josh Glenn. I’ve been a fan of Glenn’s since reading Hermenaut in the 1990s. Hermenaut was an awesome and influential zine, and Glenn’s current website is HiLoBrow. He also has the best ‘generation’ definitions around.

A reminder of my 250-year generational periodization scheme:

1755-64: [Republican Generation] Perfectibilists
1765-74: [Republican, Compromise Generations] Original Romantics
1775-84: [Compromise Generation] Ironic Idealists
1785-94: [Compromise, Transcendental Generations] Original Prometheans
1795-1804: [Transcendental Generation] Monomaniacs
1805-14: [Transcendental Generation] Autotelics
1815-24: [Transcendental, Gilded Generations] Retrogressivists
1825-33: [Gilded Generation] Post-Romantics
1834-43: [Gilded Generation] Original Decadents
1844-53: [Progressive Generation] New Prometheans
1854-63: [Progressive, Missionary Generations] Plutonians
1864-73: [Missionary Generation] Anarcho-Symbolists
1874-83: [Missionary Generation] Psychonauts
1884-93: [Lost Generation] Modernists
1894-1903: [Lost, Greatest/GI Generations] Hardboileds
1904-13: [Greatest/GI Generation] Partisans
1914-23: [Greatest/GI Generation] New Gods
1924-33: [Silent Generation] Postmodernists
1934-43: [Silent Generation] Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: [Boomers] Blank Generation
1954-63: [Boomers] OGXers
1964-73: [Generation X, Thirteenth Generation] Reconstructionists
1974-82: [Generations X, Y] Revivalists
1983-92: [Millennial Generation] Social Darwikians
1993-2002: [Millennials, Generation Z] TBA

LEARN MORE about this periodization scheme | READ ALL generational articles on HiLobrow.

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Happy Friday everyone! Hope the weekend’s a good one.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 096 of 100)

I don’t follow any traditional religious practices, so I’ve decided to create my own. In this new personal religion I’m creating I observe eight Solar Sabbaths (a term I just made up). The eight solar sabbaths are the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days. And today happens to be the point between the spring equinox, and the summer solstice.

I’ve also created four new seasons that overlap with the tradition seasons. These cover the time between the cross-quarter dates, and are:

• Spummer (spring/summer)
• Sutumn (summer/autumn)
• Finter (fall/winter)
• Winring (winter/spring)

That means today is the first day of Spummer.

Today’s also the first day of my Screenless Spummer challenge. I’ve been good at reducing my social media time, now it’s time to reduce the amount of time I spend in front of screens. I can’t completely eradicate screens from my life because I’m expected to use them for my job, and I use screens for creative expression, learning new things, and recreation. Nonetheless, I’m certain my life will be enriched by diminishing the amount of time I focus my attention on glowing glass. I won’t truly be screenless, but my intent is to be more mindful of how much time I spend in front of a screen, and shut them down more often than I have in the recent past.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 095 of 100)

I have LOTS of political opinions, and once upon a time I blogged frequently about politics. One of my favorite moments from the Re/Creating Tampa days was covering local political matters. I did summaries and explainers of city and county issues, and even did a live event giving background info on ballot items relevant only in the region.

In this iteration of my blogging life, however, I expect to keep my political comments to a minimum.

So, how about a poem.

Goodbye to Tolerance

by Denise Levertov

Genial poets, pink-faced
earnest wits—
you have given the world
some choice morsels,
gobbets of language presented
as one presents T-bone steak
and Cherries Jubilee.
Goodbye, goodbye,
I don’t care
if I never taste your fine food again,
neutral fellows, seers of every side.
Tolerance, what crimes
are committed in your name.

And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,
blood donors. Your crumbs
choke me, I would not want
a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped
by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality.

It is my brothers, my sisters,
whose blood spurts out and stops
forever
because you choose to believe it is not your business.

Goodbye, goodbye,
your poems
shut their little mouths,
your loaves grow moldy,
a gulf has split
the ground between us,
and you won’t wave, you’re looking
another way.
We shan’t meet again—
unless you leap it, leaving
behind you the cherished
worms of your dispassion,
your pallid ironies,
your jovial, murderous,
wry-humored balanced judgment,
leap over, un-
balanced? … then
how our fanatic tears
would flow and mingle
for joy …

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 094 of 100)

Perhaps ‘remembered’ is a better term. This 100 day blogging challenge reminded me of one reason I turned away from blogging, it takes a lot of my writing time.

There are only so many writing hours in a day. Whatever time I use for writing blog posts is time I’m not using for stories, or non-fiction essays, or writing exercises.

As I conjure up a new self-image I think I’ll be able to strike a better balance. Or care less about the balance (or care differently perhaps). As long as whatever I’m writing contributes to joy, happiness, or a feeling of satisfaction it doesn’t really matter what form it takes.

That said, one of the funnest times I had on the blog was when I posted a story a month in 2017 (the Full Moon Story series). So, while the daily regularity of posts will cease, I expect to start posting a story a month for the rest of 2022 starting mid-June.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 093 of 100)

I really like blogging.

I’m not sure what that says about me, or why it’s become such a laughable pasttime, but it suits me well.

Blogging helps me scratch that zine itch. Zines are typically small scale and personal, as is this blog. I loved making (and reading) zines in the 1990s, and blogging allows me the freedom to do all the stuff I enjoyed when making zines. I can opine, and joke, and fantasize to my heart’s content. And I can point to the stuff I think is cool.

One of the things I love most is that people choose to see it. I’m not randomly popping up in some social media feed. If you are reading this post it’s because you choose to read this post, not because I’m a friend of a friend, or an acquaintance of a relative.

For me, one of the early tipping points that moved FB from fun to no fun was when people I didn’t know started chiming in on some jokey or snarky FB post of mine. I have great friends, but some of their friends are… well, they see the world differently. And if I make some off-hand comment about the horribleness of Tim Burton, I don’t need some FoaF explaining to me how many ways I’m wrong.

I started weaning myself off FB four or five years ago, and I started radically reducing my Twitter consumption in 2021. At this point I think I’m ready to let them both go. Though, I suspect I won’t completely shut down my accounts because there are people on each platform where that is the easiest way to get in touch. I’ll probably continue using them as I do now. When some link sends me there I take a minute or two to look around, and then I click away to some other page/site.

So, what I’ve learned is that I like blogging more than social media platforms. It suits my temperament better. These 100 days of blogging have allowed a new blogging habit to start taking root, and I think I’ll probably keep this up, albeit not every day. My guess is that it will end up being 3 or 4 times a week. I will think of it as my virtual, sequential online zine. Frankly, I wish more people embraced wordpress/rss. Or, maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t done a good job of keeping track. Remember blogrolls? I should probably add a blogroll.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 092 of 100)

Happy International Worker’s Day!

Books and Reading

Comics Journal posts a long list of comics-related links every week. Including a link to LA Times book prizes. R. Kikuo Johnson won graphic novel category for No One Else.

Speculative Fiction Showcase Speculative Fiction Links of the Week for April 29, 2022.

Nicola Griffith’s new book Spear is out. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Cartoons, Comics, and Humor

Bizarro – Wayno’s weekly post of the week’s Bizarro cartoons.

Sarah Andersen – Sarah’s Scribbles is on Tumblr and so has a built-in RSS feed. https://sarahcandersen.com/rss

Questionable Content – Terrific series that comes through my RSS. https://www.questionablecontent.net/QCRSS.xml

Therapy Comics by Mardou – Mardou’s therapy comics help me feel less alone. I don’t think the RSS is updated anymore, but I read new comics on Instagram.

This Modern World – “Masks On”

Tom Gauld – Doesn’t seem to be a single home for Gauld. Appears in New Scientist and Guardian (and probably elsewhere).

Columns and Essays

Harriet Tubman was a total badass.

Horoscope

Free Will Astrology – All signs; April 28, 2022.

“They say a thing is holy if it makes you hold your tongue,” muses a character in John Crowley’s fantasy novel Engine Summer, speaking of the difference between his culture and another. “But we say a thing is holy if it makes you laugh.”

Music

Bandcamp Daily

Secondhand Songs – Search engine for cover songs.

News

I assume you already have your preferred news source(s). Here are news sources I use to supplement my news diet.

Wonkette – I love the cursing and share their love of Molly Ivins.

Popular Information – independent investigative journalism.

WikiNews – Wikipedia has a news page. It can be kind of hit or miss, but I always use it when I’m following a big breaking news story.

Wikipedia Post of the Week

The May Pamphlet

“The May Pamphlet is a collection of six anarchist essays written and published by Paul Goodman in 1945. Goodman discusses the problems of living in a society that represses individual instinct through coercion. He suggests that individuals resist such conditions by reclaiming their natural instincts and initiative, and by “drawing the line”, an ideological delineation beyond which an individual should refuse to conform or cooperate with social convention. While themes from The May Pamphlet—decentralization, peace, social psychology, youth liberation—would recur throughout his works, Goodman’s later social criticism focused on practical applications rather than theoretical concerns.”

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 091 of 100)

Not really time for an in-depth post, but in order to keep the 100 day streak alive, here are some songs I heard today.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 090 of 100)

I have never seen any of the Quartermass movies or tv shows. This BBC article makes me want to hunt some down asap.

“In spite of the television serials’ popularity, the Quatermass Hammer films had an even more impactful influence on culture, especially abroad and in the US. ‘The likes of Stephen King, Joe Dante, John Landis and Dan O’Bannon grew up watching them and adored them,’ Murray suggests.”

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Cory Doctorow has a nice rant about fixing advertising on the internet. I’m wholly on board.

“Back to online surveillance. The ad-tech industry (and, ironically, many of its critics) say that spying on you all the time and in every way makes ads vastly more effective. We shouldn’t take their word for it. Ad-tech is a giant scam, a vast accounting fraud of fake ads shown to fake users with fake billings producing trillions in real profits.”

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I really only know one Mountain Goats song, but reading this interview with John Darnielle in The New Yorker makes me think I should listen to more.

“Of course, you want to read the great writers, and you want to understand why they’re great, but I always wanted to know about the ones who are left off the list, the secondary and tertiary names.”

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Some good advice for me: How to take things less personally

“If you tend to take things too personally, it’s important to recognise your patterns of personalisation or mind reading before deciding what to do with them. This can be challenging, however, because the line between feelings and thoughts is often blurred. A good way to distinguish feelings from thoughts is to remember that feelings can often be summarised in one word – nervous, happy, surprised, scared – and thoughts are the ideas that drive or follow the feelings.”

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Here’s some spectacular art by a Ukrainian father/son team.

Happy Friday everybody! Hope the weekend is a great one.

(100 Days of Blogging: Post 089 of 100)