Now I’m back to work, and figured it was time to start weeknoting again.
This week:
I listened to Chris Hayes interview George Goehl about what it’s like to do real progressive organizing in rural America, in what is usually called Trump Country (though they both talk in interesting ways about why that’s not a fair or accurate characterization. The episode was inspiring, both for its subject matter and for Goehl’s story–he is a recovering addict who discovered a political consciousness while getting sober.
Consensus is difficult to achieve and it takes time, but without consensus spurned developers will go off and create competing standards. The lesson here may be that if we want to see a better, more open web, we have to get better at working together.
I finally finished reading all 110 stories of Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s anthology “The Weird." My verdict is that it was absolutely fascinating and worth it for anyone with a passing interesting in the history and global scope of weird science fiction and fantasy. At 1100+ double-columned pages, it was quite a journey to get through, and I didn’t love everything in it, but I appreciated getting exposed to fantastic writers outside of the standard familiar American canon.
In which I list, in no particular order, things I experienced, worked on or enjoyed this year.
I read 37 books. Of these, 19 were written/edited by or primarily by women–a ratio I tried very hard this year to equalize after years of not being conscious of it. The most inspiring or memorable of these were
Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples, a graphic novel (of which I read volumes 8, 9 and 10 this year) that feels so simultaneously human and strange, and gives me that wonderful thrill of reading something modern that I know will be someday considered a classic;
I wrote a piece of fiction (something I hadn’t done in decades) and submitted it for publiciation to an upcoming anthology. It was not accepted, but the process of getting it together inspired me to write more fiction. I’m now working on a novel that I will hopefully finish next year. If you want to read the story (which is about two boys who fight a monster with a machine named for a Dead Boys song), drop me a line and I’ll send you a copy.
I watched a bunch of movies and TV shows. The ones that have stuck with me included:
A Dark Song, a subtly-shaded character study of a woman trying (and failing) to cope with tragedy masquerading as a horror movie.
Hereditary, a horror movie masquerading as a subtly shaded character study of a woman trying (and failing) to cope with tragedy.
Annihilation, a film where the movie was different enough from the (wonderful) book to make me not care that it was an adaptation, and whose last 30 minutes was perhaps one of the weirdest pieces of cinema released by a major studio since 2001.
Mohawk, a supernatural action movie set in colonial New York, with Indigenous protagonists and featuring Indigenous actors.
Hotel Transylvania 3, which honestly wasn’t that great, but which I watched at the Unadilla Drive-in with my wife and son. The experience, which was a first for him, was delightful.
Finally, if all goes as expected, sometime in the next two weeks I will be welcoming a daughter into the world. I remain in awe of and love with my wife’s strength, humor, and fierce intelligence through this whole process, as the rest of our lives have alternatively woven or crashed into it. Likewise, my son’s genuine enthusiasm for and curiousity about this new person joining our family has been both a relief and a wonderous inspiriation. These remain the best gifts that 2018 has given me.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 forward to hearing.
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.
I became somewhat obsessed with this moody, swirling piece of dark British neo-soul music. Digital Kids by Vicktor Taiwo (Feat. Solomon). [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dioa5RpgPEk&w=560&h=315] I first heard it on the Netflix show Dear White People, which my wife and I have been binge-ing when we have any spare time for such things.
The students in MUST250: Collectors and Collecting (the course I’m team-teaching this semester at Hartwick) started their last project, a Collection Analysis assignment. This is a project where they have to describe a collection of objects, usually by interviewing the collector, and analyze it for its social and symbolic role. We’ve cribbed and modified our version of this assignment from the one used by Professor Paul Mullins, who teaches it in his Modern Material Culture class at IUPUI.
I went to the Massachusetts coast with my family. We watched whales off the coast of Gloucester, wandered around Rockport, and then spent Sunday in Boston playing on the Common, eating at Durgin Park, and grabbing pastry at the other great North End bakery.
I read this interview with a political scientist named David Faris, who argues that after a long string of disappointing electoral and policy defeats, the democrats need to shift from a war of policy ideas to a war of procedure, which he argues is what the Republicans have been doing since the 1990s. Two of the major policies he mentions are breaking California up into several smaller states, and granting statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C. This would essentially pack the Senate and Congress with reliably Democratic votes for long enough to pass progressive legislation and install a more reliably progressive court system. It breaks precident, but not any actual rules. Corey Robin made much the same argument on Monday, arguing that we have to argue that “The principle to mount against that scandal of democracy is simple: one person, one vote. In a democracy, no one’s vote should count for more than any other person’s vote.” Doing so would require a radical re-shifting of the three anti-democratic pillars of the constitution: the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College.
I read 
seems to exist outside of anyone’s ability to comprehend, and may be either indifferent or malevolent to their presence.