22 December 2024

Irresolved

Whether it's Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Saturnalia, Festivus, or in any combination, I wish for you all the best this holiday season and the time to reflect on the close of one year and the opening of another, as we have so many times.

I'm not one in favor of New Year's Resolutions: popularism, tradition, and external Influencers of "joiner culture" seem slim foundation for success. Consider such resolutions made in these next weeks as "by the way" in terms of their chronography.

But what, if not these traditional influences, should we use to support our own commitments? I imagine many of my own plans to be marked with an asterisk: with the freedom to adapt and to change as time for rethinking determines. I am, in this way, committed to the irresolute. I am not precisely uncertain how to proceed, but whether I should always proceed. That active interrogation of action feels healthiest to me.

Waywords 2025

It is in such spirit that I fuel my own 2025: from podcast to projects.

• Literary Nomads begins (at long last!) as a (mostly) weekly podcast. revolving around some key texts and then exploring the spaces and activity around their readings.
• My reading and reviews agenda includes explorations in democracy and tyranny, writing back and changing spaces.
• In writing and publishing, I am looking at three projects (with 'Who knows right now?' for completion dates)
  • A longer poetic work on engagement and ennui
  • A series of novella-length prose works in the malleability of language
  • Drafting a long-planned novel-length literary fantasy
• In teaching/education, two online courses: one the long-planned course on poetic structure, the second (likely) on a single prose title to be determined (Ellison's Invisible Man? Arendt's work on Totalitarianism? a complement to the podcast? something else?).
  • In addition to these, a more regular distribution of related and surprise lessons and resources for educators and learners.
• Legacy Season 2, the fiction/memoir podcast.

Along the way, the newsletters continue, offering the extras and byproducts of these projects, opportunities to participate and apply my learning to your own projects, and discounts to anything I produce for publication.

If you missed the recent Winter Solstice story, here it is, a 1907 work by Edith Nesbit called "The Shadow." Love the subtext in this story, and a transcript is available (along with several online copies around).

"The Shadow" A Winter Solstice story of 1907, when four women begin to tell stories around the fire. . . . Listen Now

Literary Nomads plan!

I used the Solstice story to test the technical aspects of the podcast, and everything is looking good. Next I get the feed active so that the fifteen podcast services it airs through begin to "ping" it regularly and I can give them time to adopt the new settings, logo, etc.

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First:

Transition episodes to the literary explorations. I will fulfill a request made by several people last September: the full interviews created for the Unwoven book launch. So, for the next episodes:

• Trailer for Literary Nomads
• Interview by Dr. Jessica Manuel on themes and motivation
• Interview by teacher Sarah Rusinowski on classroom applications
• Interview by scholar-poet Kelly Porter on techniques and readings

Beginning Late January:

• Andrew Marvell pre-reading
• Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" in four episodes
• Explorations around carpe diem, allusion, historiographic readings, uncertainty in interpretation, writing back, and related texts.
• Lead-in to the second focus text: Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and exploration episodes.

The pattern repeats with additional focus texts like the Bushongo Creation Myth, an essay by Sartre on existentialism, and ND Stevenson's web comic and graphic novel Nimona. Can you believe they're all related?

But it's not so much the texts that are the focus as the multivalent acts of reading and writing with/to/for/alongside/in resistance to them that are the substance of the podcast: for me personally, for students and teachers, for readers and thinkers.

I stand open and irresolute to what will happen! Hope you will follow!

Interested in Connecting In?

I welcome your input, your questions, your ideas, your requests, and your volunteering on any and all of these projects!

Have some expertise that you can lend? I want it! Have an idea how I can plug in to something you're doing? That, too!

As you think into the new year, let me know some of it!

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Review: Olio (2016) Poetry, African American History, Art, Music, Experimental Form by Tyehimba Jess ​ This is, in thread, a biography of Scott Joplin, but in weave a poetic exploration of black musicianship from the 1850s to 1930s, the jubilees, the space between art and utterance. Mesmerizing and transformative. ​ Read the Review

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Early Recommendation from My Reading:

Now to be fair, I suspect this book won't have the broadest appeal: and it's been called "awful" and "genius" in equal measure.

But my first Kawakami novel finds a very different contemporary ennui from Murakami's alienated boku narrator: the physical and dysmorphic challenges around beauty and procreation, loneliness and expectation.

No action per se, a "plot" which proceeds by calendar more than struggle, my subdued expectations have been turned completely around.

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (2012)

​Seek it out or click here!​

“The poison that spreads throughout society blends into everyday life and begins to look ordinary, like the natural order of things, so much so that it no longer seems like poison.”

Last newsletter, I strongly recommended Geetanjali Shree's book Tomb of Sand. She has a new novel out, and this interview with her tremendously talented translator, Daisy Rockwell, opens up a discussion of Indian political history, writers and politics, PEN American and Gaza, and more. I placed the entire article in a PDF because navigating the 7534 pop-up ads on Hindustani Times is something only one of us should have to do.

When the scholars finally finally dig up 2024 . . .

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Thank you for being here. See you all in 2025.

Steve

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What's Ahead?

• My personal reading survival gear
• Long-form fiction
• Preview: Unwoven Teachers Guide
• Reflection: Muses or Misconceptions

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