Reading. I finally began reading Albert Camus's The Plague a couple weeks ago. Or, rather, re-read. I've read it once before. I find it, in some ways, a difficult read. Perhaps I'm simply not a particularly sharp reader, but it is, stylistically, a couple steps away from the fantasy novels and history books and biographies that I typically read. It is rewarding, though, and filled with wonderful quotes that I'd love to throw at you if I were finished.
Besides that, I'm also reading Chris Harman's A People's History of the World. It's a broad survey of, well, the history of the world, from a left-wing, Marxist perspective. While both of those things have wildly divergent definitions, because so many people self-define themselves in those ways, and each person's meaning differs from everybody else's, here, it's left-wing and Marxist as I understand it: alliance and solidarity with working people, with the enormous totality of humanity, rather then with the wealthy and the powerful.
Because it is broad, and because there's so much history to the world, it's inevitably limited in many ways. Though Asian and African history both get multiple chapters dedicated to them, the history does focus on the Western world.
The Best of Elizabeth Bear is another occupier of my time. This one is a collection of twenty-seven stories by Elizabeth Bear, who in my opinion is one of the better genre writers working right now. I've read a handful of her novels, and while I've never yet loved any of them, her short fiction is stellar. I'd go so far as to say that Bear's short fiction is better then many of her novels - though, as she is a prolific novelist, this may be a result of my simply not reading enough of them. Much of the short fiction here is new to me, even though I own a copy of one of her other short fiction collections, Shoggoths in Bloom.
I've finally started on Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning, after watching a podcast interviewing her which ranged from the singularity to the pandemic to the Renaissance. (It is, by the way, a fantastic and informative podcast from which I guarantee you will learn something, unless, of course, you are, like Palmer, a historian specializing the Renaissance period.)
I'm only a few chapters in, and thus far, I'm quite enjoying it. I enjoy its vision of a world where gender has abolished, and I enjoy the opinionated voice of the protagonist Mycroft. It presents a truly unique future, and it proves that, if you look hard enough, you will find people for whom modern-day capitalism does not occupy all of the horizons of the imagination.
The fifth and final of the books I am reading - I try to keep myself to five at the most - is Alexandra Rowland's A Conspiracy of Truths, which I knew little of other than that it had been described as a "story about stories and storytelling." I'm not sure what I expected based off of that, but it wasn't what I got.
What I did get, though, is so good that my initial preconceptions were blown away completely. I am a quarter of the way through, roughly, and it's a delightful and fun. It's not quite a story about storytelling so much as it is in who the story is being told to and how it's being received. Chant is fun in his ferocity and in his grumpiness, and the characters surrounding him are equally colorful - Ylfing is especially easy to fall in love with, and I have done so. A skillfully set trap, and that I have fallen into it and realized it in no way undermines the effectiveness or beauty of it or the skill with which it was prepared. (Hats off to Rowland.)
Composing. "Grand Inquisitor Field" has been occupying my time. It's been a difficult track to write, as I am attempting to work on a level, orchestrationally, that I haven't attempted before. The results are worthwhile, but also sometimes frustrating, and I feel that my results are, in some ways, a little brutish and ham-fisted. French school, not quite. In that way, though, it's a good learning experience. I'll be able to look back upon it and see what I can improve upon, what I can carry over, what I can discard.
Writing. I have always been prone to procrastination in this area, and that has held through, even though I've been at home for so many days. I have been shopping a completed story I have around, thus far, one rejection, and it's currently with another magazine right now.
As for my in-progress short fictions? The anthology submission has sort of stalled out, while another story that I've been working on is waiting for me to come back to it, after getting about a thousand words into a draft and realizing that I needed to discard that draft because I'd figured out a new and better angle to tackle the story from.
I am also collecting ideas for a more ambitious project that I may one day attempt, may not. A writer on Twitter asked about authorial ambition, and I replied "a socialist/left-wing epic fantasy." With a name finally put to it, the gears in my head are turning, and slowly, slowly, I am getting world-building ideas. Will it come to anything? I don't know.
The World Around Me. There is so much going on everywhere at once that I can not but leave it alone most of the time, and concentrate on my reading and composing, because otherwise the allostatic load would be too much to bear.
Riots. Another unjust murder of a black man at the hands of the police, and so there are riots. These, I can only hope, will lead to tangible, material structural changes to society. The media is, of course, making a big fuss about antifa and about violence. I don't always agree with Nathan Robinson, but he's written a fantastic article over at Current Affairs, and share a quote from it, too:
If protesters destroy a police car, and police destroy a protester’s eye, both will be called “violence,” and it won’t be made clear that what the police did caused far more human harm and is more brutal and inexcusable. Police cars are replaceable. A journalist’s sight is not. Destroying property is not in and of itself a violent act.
Leaving the country. On my Facebook, I've made it increasingly clear that, as soon as I am able to, I plan to leave this country. Thus far, not a lot of positive response. But, frankly, I don't care. Their arguments are unconvincing: warmed-over and faintly liberal versions of "American exceptionalism" get trotted out and so do banal platitudes like "fight where the need is."
You know, fighting where the need is is valuable wherever I am, for whatever a particular value of "need" may be. I can do that, and still leave.
I come from generations of poverty. I can only speak for my mother's side of my family, as my bio-father is no longer part of my or my brothers' lives, but I've had a happier and more materially secure and more comfortable childhood then my mom, her mom, or her grandparents, or her great-grandparents, and the same is probably true for the great-great-grandparents and their forefathers, too.
I am exceptionally lucky that, even though in monetary terms we are still poor, we - that is, me, my brothers, and my mom - have, in the past five years since we moved to Michigan, been able to lead a comfortable life. Consider the salient facts, then, that America is in the midst of a second Gilded Age; that we Americans have been convinced that the abstract liberties that the Constitution supposedly guarantees are more valuable then the concrete liberties that can be found in other countries of the Western world; that the opposition to Trump is weak, spineless, and ineffectual, even as his rhetoric becomes more and more openly fascistic and authoritarian.
And that only scratches the surface of it. Over on HuffPost's Highline, there's a fantastic article titled 'Generation Screwed' which is about all the ways in which millennials have been screwed over. (Malcolm Harris's The Making of Millennials is a great book on the subject, too.) Zoomers, that is, my generation, are being screwed over all the same ways, except more so, and probably in new ways, too, that we, or at least I, haven't realized yet. (And, yes, Gen X was screwed over too. I haven't forgotten you!)
Why, then, would I want to risk returning to the miserable poverty my mother grew up in? The risk of not being able to feed myself - the risk, if I had kids, of not being able to feed them, or to provide them with happiness or medical care or material security? I have the opportunity to have the kind of physical and mental health and well-being and security and contentedness that me and my family didn't fully have until five years ago, that we, even now, are a paycheck or two away from exiting. If leaving the country would make it even a little bit easier for me to have that, then why in the world would I give that up for "fighting where the need is"?
Worry not. There will, in time, being a seventh Life in the Time of Coronavirus.
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