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On Monsters, Red Shirts, and Wet Books
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22 Mar 2026 Reader, Finding the ConversationsAs this week's podcast explored some of the arguments pro-medical experimentation regardless of risk and sacrifice, I fell upon a rhetorical strategy that disturbed me. In making their pleas, crusader-tech advocates would first argue a seemingly significant question ["What is the measure of sovereign humanity?" "How much technology can we load into a human body before it becomes cyborg?" "How much medical manipulation of reproduction might render a fetus homo sacer (without rights)?"]. But then, rather than take up the question for exploration or debate, they rendered it a rhetorical query only, since apparently science had already begun advancing past any boundary of protest. In other words, the more profound questions of our democracy---questions of who counts, whose lives matter, who is legal or not, who is human or not---were made mute.
"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." (Gramsci)
You and other Waywords readers have heard me speak/write about the necessity for our voices and the various challenges we face when meeting the attention-abbreviated impatience of the people we meet and their social media. I've also spoken about the conversation "after." I've been heartened by some recent reads (people like Rebecca Solnit, Cornelius Minor, bell hooks {of course}, Louisa Munch, and my old friend Paulo Freire) to remember that first, there is no "end result" of any engagement we enter: the object of dialogue is the dialogic process which engages and revises the world, not some final closure where we can pretend a question is "solved." Second, some of the political decisions are currently well outside the reach/energy/ practical application of our voices. Exhausting our energies on these anxieties is neither wise nor restorative. Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, ""The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." Monsters emerge in the times of transition to challenge the old status quo and threaten the new one. And so we must consider, certainly, what our next-chapter-democratic-communities will look like, how they will operate, what the new status quo will be. Certainly not the former dysfunctional society from which emerged monstrous arguments and acts. And where can we find these conversations now? Who is talking about another space for our thinking, literacy, human growth, and social health? I admit the conversations are rare, and they seem bent towards their own small community's niche concerns; perhaps this is how it must be for now. But in these places, at least, are others taking up the most frictional questions and raising issues in ways I will dare call sometimes "literacy-minded." I've offered a few on the Waywords community page "Engaging." If you know of others, some you have met (or some you have left), drop me a line and let me know about them. (And I'll be updating the page shortly following my AWP meetings.) Let's have our reading be restorative and not always a "retreat."
Literary Nomads: Utopia’s Spare Parts: Star Trek & IshiguroPerhaps I had a bit too much fun with drawing a connection between Star Trek's infamous red shirt crewman deaths as trope and the more grave issue of bio-economics and expendability. But after a trip with Achille Mbembe's book Necropolitics---which among its other globally challenging points, points to a government's legitimacy to rule through its power to decide who lives and who dies---the parallels to contemporary life and literature keep coming. Are we overdue for a debate on the nature and sovereignty of humanity? Do we first need to decide what that sovereign soul looks like? Where might such a discussion be had? I missed a week or so in there with AWP travel, but back on course: next week we torpedo the debate entirely and talk about how imagination itself might be threatened. If you've never read Zamyatin's We or Abbott's Flatland, time to download and brace yourself! Episodes ahead:
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Speaking of future episodes, I've put together some ideas for Literary Nomads Journeys (seasons) in the future along with input from the Street Team. Here are some I'm considering, with episode runs between 15 and 25 episodes total. Journey 7 will be this summer with Anne of Green Gables and Literary Tourism the focus. What should I consider for Journey 8 this fall? Later, I'll have to pare down the readings inside any season's Journey we choose! (And yes, I like them all, along with a dozen others I have sitting in reserve!) Calendar: I See Some Flowers, Young & DoomedThe question isn't what poetry you will read in April: it's how much! Try on some new poets to see what's going on out there.
Ancient Tale, Modern Relevanceoriginal poetry The masnavi, in its ancient Persian form, is a challenging poem, even in its most common "adventure" mode. I succumbed after only a fragment!
Late(?) Book ReviewA Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (1988) I'd be unlikely to turn down anything by Kincaid, but this title, actually a single long essay on Antigua tourism, is a magnificent short read, full of cheeky punch, heady satire, and pathos for a country devoured by colonialism, offered by the brilliant writer who grew up there. And there's just time to read it before cruise season! "I look at this place, I look at these people, and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three." "You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and lie, dismayed and puzzled at how alone you can feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed, how awful it is to go unloved, even as you are surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millennia and then out of the corner of your eye you see someone looking at you and absolute pleasure is written all over the person's face, and then you realize that you are not as revolting a presence as you think you are. . . ." Makes me ashamed not to have read it earlier!
Spring Rain = Wet Books < RepairsCame across this old YouTube video of a reader's nightmare; and how easy it is, in perspective, to fix the problem! (But I doubt I would smile so much in the process.) Moving into the later research and beginning drafting stages of Frictional Reading! (There's a point where we recognize that the research could be unending; I need it to be representative.) And if nothing else, my recent foray to AWP has shown me I'm on a good course. As the Northern hemisphere thaws begin, may your spring projects grow fruitful! Steve What's Still Ahead?
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Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!