Quentin's Weeknotes 11/17/18-11/23/118

This Week

• I read Cory Doctorow's short, creepy story "Sole and Despotic Dominion" published on Reason.com. It's quick and worth your time, as it focuses on the increasing atempts of companies to limit "interoperability to manufacturer approved items".
• I read "Three Feet from God: An Oral History of Nirvana 'Unplugged'". These kinds of oral histories are catnip for me, and particularly so since 'Unplugged' remains one of my favorite records of all time. That album did what Nirvana did best-siphon the most interesting and wonderful aspects of American independent music and underground culture into the brains of teenagers like me who would have otherwise never heard it. I still remember when Ryan Phelan, Ben Franklin and I sat around the television and watched a VHS copy of the performance that Phelan had taped off the TV. The gasp and wide-eyes at the final words of "Where did you sleep last night?" remains one of the most haunting and powerful things I have ever witnessed.
• I listened to Ana Marie Cox and Rebecca Traister's searing post-election commentary on the With Friends Like These Podcast. They mainly take aim at the hedging by (mainly male) figures in the mainstream media that the recent election was not a "Blue Wave." They argue that this ignores the largely unpaid and unheralded labor of millions of women who worked to make it happen, the significant structural disadvantages that the Democratic party faced, and the ways in which such language will embolden an already regressive administration to become even moreso. They also put such hedging in the context of other attempts to diminish the productivity of women's fury, a subject about which Traister has recently written a book.
• I read this reminder that one of the biggest barriers to the Democratic party enacting progressive policies is the head of the Democratic party in the US Senate.
• I read this amazing story documenting the life and career of Harry LaForme, the first Indigenous Appellate Judge in Canada. Judge LaForme's life mirrors the moder history of Canadian First Nations people and other Indigenous people. He was born on a the Mississaugas of the New Credit reserve (where I used to work in the Consultation and Accommodation office, for his brother Mark, who is quoted in the story), but left at a young age due to economic opportunities and to avoid local racism. He figured out that law was a route in which contemporary Indigenous rights would be fought, and took every opportunity he could get to travel that route. And he discovered the limits to that route, when, despite every appearance that he would be appointed to Canada's Supreme court, he was denied for a combination of political and unwritten reasons. It was a powerful and frustrating story of opportunity and the limits that long-term racism and colonization put even on brilliant and committed people.

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/10/18-11/16/18

This week:

• I read with great joy that both the soon-to-be New York State democratic legislature, and the soon-to-be democratically controlled US congress are starting their agendas with voter reform. New York State election law is particularly archaic and anti-democratic, and I hope that the signs on the horizon will lead to greater turnout and engagement.
• I read this creepy, unsettling story about a family in Westfield, New Jersey that received a series of mysterious, strange, and ultimately threatening letters. It's bordering on urban-legend territory, with its bizarre poetry, strange historical connections (both Silence of the Lambs, and the band Sha Na Na make an appearance) and the way in which it ultimately refracts to broader social processes like housing the housing market, concepts of privacy, and neighborhood tension.
• I read this guide to decolonizing Thanksgiving in schools. Turkey day has never been one of my favorite holidays--I'm not partial to the traditional food, and as I've gotten older and more aware, the ways in which it undergirds some nasty pieces of American nationalism has bothered me more and more. This guide has lots of great on-line and brick-and-mortar resources for thinking differently about Thanksgiving, and I found some fascinating stuff in here, including letters to send to schools, books for kids, and more.
• I read this long and detailed interview with Ralph Bakshi about his attempt to make an animated version of the Lord of the Rings in the 1970s. It's a crazy story about a movie that's famously interesting but kind of confusing (the movie ends halfway through the trilogy), and both aspects come through in this interview. There's Mick Jagger, Spanish Communists, Hollywood horsetrading, and more.
• I listened to Marc Maron's interviews with John Cleese and Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame. Maron's deep search for humanity underneath celebrity and artistry was in rare form here, as he discussed with both men the experience of growing up during the reconstruction of Britain after WWII, the radical free-form nature of the 1960s era BBC, and how comedy promotes and grows the human spirit.

Quentin's Weeknotes 11/3/18-11/9/18

This week:

• I read volume 9 of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' brilliant and poignant graphic novel "Saga". The only question I have is whether we'll see Ponk Konk again...
• Just in time for election day, I finished political scientist David Faris' new book "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics". Faris argues that the Republican party has spent the last two and a half decades waging a war of procedure on government--rather than running and governing based on a political philosophy, they have exploited ambiguities in the constitution and law, as well as previous reliance on governmental 'norms' to entrench conservative governance throughout Washington D.C. Faris' prescriptions to combat this are quite bold, and include no-brainer policies like a national holiday on election day, and statehood for the 4 million US citizens who live in Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. However, he also advocates for more radical inteventions, including splitting up electoral behemoth California into 7 states, and packing the US Supreme court with additional jurists, as well as retiring existing jurists after a period of service on the court.
• I voted in NY-19, a tight race where the newcomer Antonio Delgado ultimately prevailed. I also drove a van from Hartwick to take students to the polls, and helped the Otsego County Democratic Party with last minute Get-out-the-vote efforts.
  

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/27/18-11/2/18

This week:

• I read Pitchfork's history of Outlaw country in 33 songs. The list opens with an interview with Steve Earle, with whom I've recently gotten acquainted through his classic album Copperhead Road and his more recent political rager Jerusalem. Earle went to Texas, and then Nashville as an acolyte of older country stars, before joining their ranks, and then losing a battle against drug and alcoholism that eventually led him to prison. The list includes many people I knew (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Earle, Townes Van Zandt) but lots of other folks I didn't know and am looking for
  Save & Close
  ward to hearing.
• I read The Baffler's article about how Facebook's aging demographics have made it a hub for racism, xenophobia, violence, and vitriol that will hopefully, someday, mercifully, disappear into history.
• My kid and I went out to Oneonta's Halloween parade.

Quentin's Weeknotes 10/20/18-10/26/18

This week:

• I read Andrew Bacevich's Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren. Bacevich is a former professor at my alma mater, Boston University, and a scholar and thinker whose deep humanism and broad historical perspective on American foreign policy I find genuinely fascinating and engaging whenever I read it. His basic argument in the letter is that a progressive domestic policy needs to be matched by a difficult but necessary conversation about the limits of American intervenionist foreign policy. He says that any president must engage with the reality of climate change and its geopolitical consequences, the redistribution of global power from the America and Europe to other places (largely China), and the growing threat of State and non-State cyber warfare.
• I read the socialist historian Mike Davis' interview in Jacobin, where he addresses some of the specific population issues he laid out in his book Late Victorian Holocausts (which I must confess that I own, but have yet to read). In this interview, Davis argues that the deaths resulting from the coercive pull of profit-making, imperialism, and modernity rival or even exceed the routinely (and rightly) discussed atrocities of socialist and communist states in the 20th century. These morbid numbers games are useful only rhetorically, but are worth remembering, particularly as we stare down a climate catastrophe, caused by untrammeled capitalist growth and already causing extreme suffering.
  
• As part of my on-going masochistic exercise of reading all of Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's edited tome "The Weird", I read the cult-novella "The Other Side of the Mountain" by Michael Bernanos, printed in its entirety therein.  It's a strange and wonderful story of an unnamed young boy who joins up with a sailing ship, whose journey starts with tragedy and horror, and ends on an island with something much more bizarre and wondrous. I don't want to spoil it, but it's a wonderful piece of eco-fiction, where the characters are encreasingly enveloped by an alien landscape that seems to exist outside of anyone's ability to comprehend, and may be either indifferent or malevolent to their presence.
  
• The Yager Museum held it's annual storytelling even "The Horror in the Museum." Every year, students, faculty, and staff read or perform their favorite pieces of spooky fiction and drama, and its always a blast. This year we had fantastic readings of Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King, folktales, and original works by students and staff. I coordinate this event and it's one of my favorite things in the year. Fun fact: the event is named for a story that Lovecraft ghost-wrote/revised for Somerville, MA native Hazel Heald.