2019: Engagement
Updates
We’re about halfway through Issue #4 of Curriculum and wackiness is ensuing once again for the crew.
On top of that you may recall this from last year:
https://twitter.com/dan_hill/status/1035318024495095808
As it stands currently, Go Home has found a new home and I just need to sort out a few extra details and we’ll be good to go again.
Somewhat connected is the fact that Disconnect has found a home too. More on that when I have more details (I’m not looking to jinx either of these).
There are some nice words about Resurrection Men Issue #2 here. Check it!
Finally, a quick reminder that I’m available for editing work from development, through to project management and line edits. Shoot me an email if you think I can help (info@dan-hill.org) with your project.
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Engagement
So, as briefly spoken about last week, my word for this year is engagement. Re-engagement is probably more apt but that sounds less cool, right?
Tales of my own depression, burnout and other assorted maladies have been a staple of this newsletter in the past, so I won’t go through it again. Needless to say I’ve been drifting for a while and my focus has been shot as a result.
This year though is about engaging again with the things I want to do creatively as well as the things I want to do in the fractured beauty of meatspace. My creative goals this year are tangible, but most importantly, manageable.
They’re based around, yes, re-engaging, with the reasons I got into writing in the first place, the genres and types of work I enjoy and want to see more of in the world.
It’s all about getting back to basics and building up from there whilst re-engaging with myself, the world around me, my writing and those important to me.
Here we go.
Links
Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG knocks it out of the park as usual, this time with a post on Submarine Psychiatry. He talks about confined/constricted spaces and the effects on the human psyche. He also talks about JG Ballard a lot which is apt as I’m currently reading a book of Ballard’s short stories. The Concentration City and Chronopolis sprang to mind when reading Manaugh’s article.
The former focuses on an ‘infinite city’, with the protagonist trying to find some notion of ‘space’ that occurs beyond the draconian urban zoning and a metropolis that seemingly goes on forever. The latter concerns a reality where the concept of time itself has been outlawed. Later in the narrative the narrator discovers an abandoned city where clocks continue to exist.
Both tales take the concept of the city and turns it into a stifling monolith, cutting off the humanity of those who dwell within. Both narrators feel there is something beyond their respective oppressive spaces and venture outside the system to find their answers.
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Contrary to popular opinion Politics is not Harry Potter.
Please no more posts in 2019 about how Trump or some other dirtbag politician is kind of like Voldemort.
““Magic,” as it is discussed in the Harry Potter universe, is a force that allows its wielder to have a profound and measurable impact without organizing, sacrificing, or indeed doing much of anything.”
“Ultimately, the offer of magic — and it was as true of Marx’s time as ours — is a trade-off. Your complicated problems are made uncomplicated, and all it costs is your ability to have any material impact on them. You lose, but at least you get a good story.”
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Jon Bois is probably best known for 17776, a speculative fiction piece infused with multimedia elements that told a tale of a futuristic version of American Football. It was published on SB Nation in 2017. Back in November he produced and directed a new video Fighting in the Age of Loneliness which is a fascinating look at the development and history of MMA juxtaposed against the zeitgeist and politics of the various time periods being discussed. The video is written and narrated by Chapo Trap House‘s Felix Biederman. Flavour narration:
“Your home belongs to the bank, your gas tank is lining the pockets of those who had more to do with 9/11 than the country your brother just died fighting in, and you’re told the economy is in high gear even though your pay cheque is buying less and less, but what you just saw in the cage was unambiguous. One person hit another and the other fell, nothing about it lied to you.”
I’m by no means an MMA junkie, but I remain fascinated with the sport and this series of videos (5 episodes in all, I think) comes highly recommended for fight fans and politics nerds alike.
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Once again Steven Soderbergh (my most watched director of 2018 according to Letterboxd) has published his list of every movie, piece of prose and TV show he watched during the last year. It shows Soderbergh is voracious in his media appetites consuming a wide range of works across genres to fuel his own creative output.
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I’ve seen this article over at Buzzfeed on Milennials being the burnout generation in a plethora of blogs, Twitter feeds, etc. this week. It’s half analyis, half soul searching screed. It’s a must read full of worthy quotes and thoughts to digest:
“This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.”
“Give yourself a face mask! Go to yoga! Use your meditation app! But much of self-care isn’t care at all: It’s an $11 billion industry whose end goal isn’t to alleviate the burnout cycle, but to provide further means of self-optimization. At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting.”
“To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.”
I’ve spoken before in this very newsletter about the concept of burnout and that constant nagging feeling we could be doing more. Always more.
Over at The Well recently, they had their annual ‘State of the World’ thread where various writers, artists and futurists (including the author of my favourite book from last year, James Bridle) put in their two cents about where we all are with things. It was this quote from Bridle that leapt out at me:
““I feel so many of us have taken the internet’s injunction to be everywhere at once as a personal challenge, and turned our lives into reflections of the network: distributed and always in motion. I think there must be something in between: a networked cosmopolitanism, that allows us to properly engage without stretching our bodies and the planet’s resources to breaking point.”
I’m all for hard work, putting the hours into whatever craft or profession you’re trying to level up in. But, like Bridle says, there has to be somewhere in between being inert and the constant state of flux and activity we feel compelled to push ourself towards.
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I’m off now to try and make friends with the cadre of magpies two yards over before they steal all my shit.
See you in two!