"I'm sorry Sir, but your house not exist."
For some reason Buttondown is choosing not to display my newsletter archives at the moment, so I may be looking in to changing provider again in the near future.
I really don’t want to.
Substack maybe? Or Mailchimp.
Week Notes
The preceding two weeks shall now be known as ‘the confluence’.
Back at the beginning of the year we got the ball rolling on moving from our current shoebox into an actual house. Said house was not built yet, and had a completion date of May. Things were arranged and sorted on this understanding.
Cut to us getting the keys last week.
September now consists of a holiday planned months ago when we thought we would be firmly ensconced in said house. The day after we come back we are moving house. The week after I’m at Thought Bubble.
My life right now is a Kafkaesque maze of boxes, endless forms, and being routed and sub-routed through various voicemail systems as I discover the new house technically doesn’t exist because it’s not on the Royal Mail database and therefore cannot exist on utility company databases.
I realise this is all very first world problems. I never actually expected being able to live in a house in my lifetime so I know this will all be worth it. But, yeah, that’s where I’m at right now.
My brain feels like it is slowly being compressed and wrung dry.
But I did manage to write every day this week despite everything.
Small victories. Take ‘em where you can get ‘em.
Links
1) CJ Chivers has a piece up at the NY Times about the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan and those who continue to fight.
“Often he went about his duties with an enormous smile, singing no matter what anyone else thought — R&B., rap, rock, hip-hop, the blues. All of this made him popular in the platoon, even as he had become tenser than his former self and older than his years; even as his friends and sergeants he admired were killed, leaving him a burden of ghosts.”
Couple this with Tom Engelhardt’s recent post on a similar subject. Seventeen years in Afghanistan. Some of the soldiers now there are young enough not to remember why we were there in the first place.
2) To get to Mars we may have to rethink our own genetics.
“Other scientists have suggested photosynthetic spacefarers, or editing the personalities of the space corps, so that they fearlessly longed for the high frontier because it was their true terminus.”
3) I found an old Cory Doctorow post where he talks about writing in the age of distraction.
“When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.”
Small goals are reachable. Small goals ensure forward motion and consistency.
4) The ‘Oh, this is absolutely my jam’ award of the week goes to Sean T. Collins’ piece on the horror movie image over at The Outline. Don’t have nightmares.
5) GQ on ‘The Great Chinese Art Heist’. The elevator pitch? Plundered treasure, originally from China, is now going missing in a series of audacious heists.
6) Instragram Stories and performative social media.
7) I tweeted out an Emma Goldman anecdote from this article on ‘rigid radicalism’ earlier in the week.
“We’ve found ourselves on both sides of its puritanical tendencies, as the pure and the corrupt. Above all, it is hostile to difference, curiosity, openness, and experimentation.”
8) An amazing piece about the supply chains put into practice by huge multinational corporations and just how invisible these networks are to us, the consumer.
“We consumers are not the only ones afflicted with this selective blindness. The corporations that make use of supply chains experience it too. And this partial sight, erected on a massive scale, is what makes global capitalism possible.”
9) An article on Alewives is mostly a testament to how men have always been awful, striving to take anything from women that gives them power and autonomy.
“By the 1500s, the church had had it with alewives. They were usurping the structures the church had been using to strip women of their agency and autonomy for over a thousand years. Land ownership? Nah, alewives just needed a cauldron. Husbands? Nah, alewvives didn’t need any land. Alewives were perfectly capable of making money without men. They were, quite literally, destroying the patriarchy with their beer.”
10) N.K Jemisin won her third Hugo Award this week. Her acceptance speech is a must read.
“But this is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers—every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, that when they win it it’s meritocracy but when we win it it’s “identity politics” — I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining, rocket-shaped middle finger in their direction.”
11) I’ve mentioned the Criminal podcast a bunch of times in this newsletter, but the latest episode is especially worthy of your time. Entitled Palace of Justice, it takes a look at Benjamin Ferencz’s experiences prosecuting 22 defendants for war crimes committed during World War 2. Ferencz is the last living prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials. Needless to say the episode is a hard listen.
12) I Want To Log Off. Same.