February Journal (Patreon)

Trying to turn these reading diaries into a more general review of current writing and reading.

I'd like to make these biweekly (or even weekly), but February made that impossible. It's been a bad month both personally and globally. I would have liked to enjoy turning 23, but some years your birth month is gonna suck. I became an editor for my university newspaper though, so that’s nice. (I’m writing this in the office after a meeting.)

Not going to dig too heavily into the global mess. Obviously Russia's invasion of Ukraine is an imperialist atrocity. Texas' criminalization of transition is another step towards eliminating trans people from the U.S. population, as is Florida getting its own Section 28. The U.N. says climate change will fuck us even harder than previously expected. The world is scary right now. Let's acknowledge that, but we can't destroy ourselves with despair.

I’ll go through the books I’ve been reading first. I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind on reading new books. My friend Phil Christman has just put out How To Be Normal, an essay collection which I’m sure is delightful and I look forward to actually starting it. David Bentley Hart has a new book out too, and damn me for not getting cracking on that one either. And of course I need to get on Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt.

Lately I’ve been hyperfixated on the papacy, prompted by watching Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope and its sequel The New Pope. Can’t imagine why this stuff enthralls me. John Cornwell’s The Pontiff in Winter is a good, upsetting exposé of Pope John Paul II’s authoritarianism and his papacy’s destructive effects on the world.

My friend Chris O’Leary recommended Hadrian the Seventh to me, seminarian Frederick Rolfe’s 1904 wish fulfilling novel where he becomes Pope. It’s a damn weird book; solipsistic and self-pitying, yet a fun look into the pathologies of an English Catholic during the Prisoner in the Vatican era.

The fascination with English Catholicism stuck (look, I’m a Tolkien scholar and John Malkovich’s John Paul III is fucking hypnotic), so I read Graham Greene’s classic The Power and the Glory. Well-written and potent in its despair; you can see why people still like Greene. The Cristero War was an awful time to be Catholic in Mexico (even if the Church’s crimes in that country were identical to its trespasses elsewhere), and Greene captures that like a good journalist would. Could do with fewer (read: none) white English descriptions of Mexican characters though.

At long last, I’ve gotten around to reading Terry Eagleton’s On Evil. I’ve been an Eagleton fan for years, and On Evil has made me fall in love with his writing all over again. Eagleton has a talent for elucidating complex and painful topics without overly simplifying them. The man makes atrocities fun while retaining a moral core, and God bless him for it.

The best thing I’ve read lately is “Transphobia Is Not a Humanism,” my friend Rowan Fortune and their comrade Logan O’Hara’s roadmap to an intrinsically trans Marxist-humanist future. It’s legitimately one of the finest queer revolutionary tracts I’ve ever read, and I’m recommending it to literally everyone. When someone passes me in the street, I shriek and holler about Rowan and Logan’s essay until they go to Anti-Capitalist Resistance and read it.

I’m about a month overdue on this series, so I have an extensive backlog of articles to go through. Sorry.

Today, El Salvador has at last charged its former president Alfredo Cristiani and 12 co-conspirators for their 1989 murders of 6 Jesuit priests and 2 women. It’s shocking to see any justice for this even decades after the fact. One hopes this will bring attention to Reagan and Bush’s backing of the Salvadoran military regime, which they knew killed St. Oscar Romero and thousands others. Some acknowledgment of John Paul II’s complicity with the regime would be nice too, but c’mon, we live on Planet Earth.

This ProPublica piece on homelessness in San Francisco is good reporting.

The union movement of Starbucks workers is one of the most important ongoing stories in U.S. labor. Speaking of organizing, Talia Lavin recently wrote a good piece about antifascist history.

Sarah Palin’s defeat wasn’t losing her lawsuit — it was this Onion masterpiece.

John Nichols gives a good breakdown of why the inflation scare is bullshit.

Remember Doctor Who? Me neither, but my friend Audrey Armstrong has written a good postmortem on grifting showrunner Chris Chibnall’s recent abysmal attempts at “representation.”

Apparently the CIA spies on Americans. Can you tell how shocked I am?

I don’t want to dig too deeply into the recent anti-trans legislation, which hurts too much, but Natasha Lennard’s breakdown of South Dakota’s S.B. 46, and by extension last year’s 147 U.S. anti-trans bills, is important reading.

Pope Francis… appointed an anti-racist Black archbishop in Kentucky?

ICIJ is doing important work as ever, covering some of Putin’s oligarch buddies as well as a fun art laundering thread in the Pandora Papers.

“T4t Valentine (If You Didn’t Have to Be a Saint)” by Jules Gill-Peterson is delightful.

Associated Press has been doing surprisingly good work on queer Catholics lately, from a profile of trailblazing Black gay priest Bryan Massingale to a piece on the experiences of trans Catholics which strongly resonated with me.

I apologize for going so long without updating Nowhere and Back Again. Mental health crises, classes, and now being an editor have eaten up a lot of my time. I love the blog just as much as ever, and am working on it whenever I get a chance. This past week I’ve had a breakthrough with Mirkwood, and I promise you’re going to love what I have planned for you.

Thanks for reading this far. I’ll try to make the Patreon more active in February. I’ve got a VALIS essay to write at some point, so remind me to work on that.

Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible, and viva el Cristo Rey.