Weekly Roundup (Jan. 9, 2022) (Patreon)

Lorda mercy, it's been a minute since I did one of these.

December was chaotic, with a smattering of not-insignificant life changes and a whopping amount of traveling. A lot of it was quite nice. My girlfriend Sage and I had a lovely couple of days in New York City. My mother Anna brought me to North Carolina for a wonderful Christmas, and New Year's Eve with my parents El and Penn in Newtown was equally a riot. After a few years as an adult adoptee, I'm starting to belong to an extended family, and I'm awful chuffed about that.

At the same time, my writing has slowed in recent months. I apologize for that. Relying on Patreon for my income is lovely in some ways, but it can also make writing tremendously stressful. Additionally, I'm trying to balance this job with The Statesman and being a full-time student. Sometimes writing as a journalism major with ADHD moves as quick as a dyin' mallard.

You may also have noticed that Nowhere and Back Again has lost some momentum. I don't think I'm done with the project: I still love the source material and have things I want to say about it. But I'm a different person than I was when I started writing it, and my interests and energy have shifted. Nowhere and Back Again is taking a back seat for the foreseeable future, although you can expect monthly updates to it.

I've also figured out that writing about what's on my mind is healthy for me. That's why I've written about Margo Price and Pinocchio lately. Writing about what's in front of me makes the creative process feel less like a chore and more like a dialogue with my world. I don't know what my next essay is going to be about, and I'm damned excited about that.

But enough about my solipsistic thoughts. Here's my reading at the moment:

Books

The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Say, this is a good book. Why didn't y'all tell me about it?

In all seriousness, my mama Anna and I rewatched the Lord of the Rings extended editions over Christmas. It was a good time, not least because Mama, who re-read the book in full last year, had a lot of insight about where the movies deviated from Tolkien, or, as she put it, got "ahistorical."

At this point, I had quietly given up on Nowhere and Back Again, losing my way in Moria, like Tolkien did in the Forties. It was my Mama's urging and the marathon that brought me back to Tolkien blogging.

Okay, and maybe there were edibles involved too.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) - Classic Czech novel that got namedropped by Margo Price. It's a stunning read, a philosophical statement on the horrors of Soviet Prague and the constraints of monogamy. Unpleasant and hypnotic at the same time.

The Oz books (L. Frank Baum) -- I've gotten up to The Emerald City of Oz so far, the one where Baum frantically sums up Oz's economic and social structure thinking he's going to wrap up the series. He doesn't, of course, but the six books he's written so far are baffling, delightful, and often funny. Contrary to MGM's depiction, Oz in Baum's series is a cracked utopia of permanent entropy where everything is sentient and nothing truly dies. Might write about these books soon.

And now, the headlines

Not much this week, but Dave Kellaway in Anti-Capitalist Resistance is quite good on Benedict XVI's passing (God have mercy on the Nazi bastard, the most destructive post-War pope).

Oh, and ProPublica takes on phone radiation, if you want to sleep worse.