Bing Crosby Did What
I Am Exhausted
About a week ago, I turned in the final round of revisions on Kalyna the Cutthroat! Mostly!! There's still the copy edit and, knowing me, I'll end up making other small changes then as well.
But, for now, I'm relearning how to live a life that isn't beneath a deadline—to enjoy free time without the constant nagging feeling that I should be working on something. Not 100% there yet!
Events
January 12-15, 2024, Boston, MA: Arisia 2024
Resources
Verso and Haymarket each have free bundles of ebooks on Palestine currently available. I haven't personally read any of these (yet), but I like both of these publishers a lot and, hey, they're free.
Verso Books: Solidarity with Palestine
Haymarket Books: Free Ebooks for a Free Palestine
What I'm Reading
The beautiful thing about being A. done with the bulk of the book I've been writing, and B. back on certain brain medications, is that I can read for fun again.
Well, maybe not exactly "fun." (Except Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which is fun.) Rather, I've suddenly found the mental energy to read things that make me extremely angry. In fact, I crave it: history and context make the current horrors of our world slightly easier for me to take. I'm actually still tinkering with an essay on the origins of Zionism that sprang out of a book I read in November—expect that maybe next month?
Right now, though, two of the four or five books I'm reading (I have ADHD, OK??) are Vincent Bevins' The Jakarta Method and Robert Moses' The Power Broker: a real double dose of 20th century United States fuckery.
Without having finished The Jakarta Method, I'm already getting the feeling it's the kind of book most Americans should read. You can probably guess why from the subtitle, but there are two points I want to hit:
First, a major argument of the book is that depicting the Cold War as only the ideological clash between America and the Soviet Union is inherently flawed. Did capitalism win an economic victory over communism? Or did it win because the U.S. created a "global extermination network" that murdered huge amounts of people throughout the Global South?
Secondly, I just think everyone should know that one time the CIA tried to make a fake sex tape in an attempt to disgrace Indonesian President Sukarno. It was so awful they had to scrap the plan, which I'm sure disappointed one of its filmmakers, Bing fucking Crosby.
Me, a week ago: "I need to stop planning such ambitious books so that I don't lose my mind writing them."
Me, right now: "What if I wrote the fantasy equivalent of The Power Broker?"
Manicure
I had absolutely zero ideas going in, and Stella had just gotten a cat eye magnet, soooooo...
