Quentin's Weeknotes 3/9/19-3/15/19
This Week:
- I read, with great delight, Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up big tech companies, particularly those that are attempting to organize themselves as markets. I’ve always liked Warren and am hopeful that she will continue to push the Democratic party to do right.
- I read Ryan Walsh’s nuanced take on the Blurred Lines decision, in which he argues that it is a dangerous precident to make musicians pay for consciously referencing another artist. Not only does this force artists into an untenable creative position (because everyone learns about music as a fan before they learn about it as a craft), but as Cory Doctorow noted in an article I liked last week, certain kinds of borrowing is considered culturally acceptible (particularly if it’s from historically marginalized communities) while other kinds requires resititution.
- I started listening to the Odyssey Workshop Podcast. The Odyssey Workshop is an annual and very selective fantastic fiction seminar and course that brings in world-class writers, editors, and agents to talk about how to have success as a writer. They also do a podcast that provides excerpts from the classes and I’ve really enjoyed listening to Jeff Vandermeer and Elizabeth Hand’s contributions.
- I finished Rober Aickman’s Cold Hand in Mine. It was exactly the kind of horror/weird fiction I love–stylized, ambiguous, and subtle.
- I read Joe Kennedy’s incisive essay on authenticity and class politics in The Baffler. I’m really fascinated by authenticity, which I’ve always thought of not as a real thing, but as a historically specific attempt to freeze something in the flow of time, and usually with material things (objects and spaces). Thus, as Kennedy notes “real” working class voters are purported to live only in rural areas while “fake” leftists come from cities. Likewise the constant evocations of coffee in his essay as a marker of a certain kind of class identity. I additionally like this essay for Kennedy’s evocations of his hometown of Darlington, U.K. I know Darlington well–it’s the next town over from the one where we lived, and was the site of some of the first political protests I saw against austerity in the UK.
