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!
On Reading, Resolution, and Remembering
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3 March 2025 National Reading to Keep Us Human MonthHi, everyone! Lots of projects and works fusing and cohering for me behind the scenes! My initial efforts at local advocacy against book banning are batting .500 with a positive dialog with my library and an opaque silence from the schools: time to escalate. Writing, podcasts, other recording projects, reading priorities, are all materializing into a solid direction for 2025. (I dare not be overly hopeful.) Frustrated and disheartened as are many of us that much is built around and against our current cultural clime. But if nothing else, we build and speak locally in places where we can impact our neighbors, create new relationships, foster inter-dependence. And, at last, the Unwoven audiobook is now available! I'll write more about the process and my takeaways from it next time, but if you're looking for a download of it, my favorite sources and links are here: Unwoven AudioBook | Waywords Studio! Literary Nomads Now WandersOne of my goals for the podcast is to demonstrate the ways to meaning through the use of works like Andrew Marvell's. As such, these past four episodes have raised several questions. Among them:
The next several episodes will now explore some of these ideas (and others) in more practical terms. What should we really understand about carpe diem? What do we do with literary allusion? How does knowing other texts by an author help (or not help)? Why irony is more and more a struggle for readers. Why uncertainty should not be a place of fear. How do I use a poem like this, anyway? For what? Transcripts for all of these Marvell episodes are available on the website, as well. And, as ever, feel free to download, capture, cut, re-use, and excerpt as you want; all I ask is credit for the work you pull from (and I've included ways to cite everything).
And don't forget that you can ask a question for the podcast to wrestle with, too!
Serious Reading AheadThe ad_astra Reading Challenge asks us to read non-fiction outside of our expertise, to engage publishers unknown to us, to advocate on the subjects we've read about. For the next several months, I am taking on the full text of Hannah Arendt's 1958 revision of The Origins of Totalitarianism (and its removed 14th chapter). If you know it, you know its reputation. If not, it's at once a history of anti-Semitism and imperialism from the 1800s to WW1, moving to a close philosophical and political examination of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, and a provocative discussion of propaganda, terror, isolation, loneliness, and despair. As she says in her opening Preface, however, "Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; . . . both are articles of superstition. . . ." More, though, I will be outlining and discussing the work chapter by chapter, and I will be making these materials available to you. (And if all goes well, I will follow this exercise with the equally-daunting de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.) I can make the time to read this and distribute Arendt's thinking for those who can't and as a study/Reader's Guide for those who later choose it. Written notes? Podcast? Video reflections? Tbd. If you are interested in joining me in the reading, let me know and I will provide my reading schedule and other goals. We can set up Zoom chats if we're ambitious, or even just a common GoogleDoc for our thoughts and musings. Otherwise, you can anticipate the notes to begin emerging beginning in April with a new chapter roughly every two weeks.
Booker List Contest: No Winners But All of UsWell, Okorafor didn't place in the long list (but she's still a great read!), and no one else's nominations too, either. I did, however, appreciate the nomination for E.L. James who certainly would have been included if she qualified . . . . But the 13-title list Booker did choose looks like an amazing collection of authors! If you haven't seen it, check here! A Good Month for ReadingMarch's National Reading Month is a good time to make spaces for reading of all kinds: books, yes, but also poetry, journalism, speeches, graphs and charts, credentials and citations, history, and objects of culture which themselves deserve our thoughtful interrogation. Also, of course, it's Irish-American Heritage Month and Women's History Month! Let that spur some ideas for books to read. Sometimes, though, it's easy to let our opportunities to act slip past us. . . . And while I'm waiting for your thoughts, you can make plans for these upcoming noteworthy days: Early Recommendation from My Reading:“You just give me one more good reason,” Angela said to the house from the road, “and when I am finished with you, I will burn you . . . "
This is my first read by Tananarive Due, though I have long had her on my list. So far, tropes you might expect are turned into original moments of tension and despair. How much of our history is inevitably trapped with us? Where does it materialize? Does our contemporary agnosticism nevertheless have consequence?
“Ed delivered the clinching stanza directly into the stage lights —
The Master comes, and the foolish crowd
Never can quite understand:
The worth of a soul and the change that is wrought,
By the touch of the Master’s hand.
— while Hugo, who waited mutely beside him, stared at the audience in what I would not consider total silence.”
Mina Tavakoli spends a weekend at a ventriloquist convention. Who knew what parallels and revelations might follow?
#bookfetish"It’s not entirely our fault, of course. Our obsession is fueled by another force quite well known: commodification for profit. The valuing of the book–we’ll kindly call it two: the love of the object and the love of its reading–-favors the former and denigrates the latter.
#bookfetish is absolutely a psychological stew of nostalgia, of intellectual or class status, of the impulse to art, of political identity, of community or coterie, of lifestyle….
No recourse, really, is afforded us, save one. That in this culture of commodification, we actually read."
Gather yourself, tell your story, listen to those of others, then step forward together. Steve What's Ahead?
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Waywords Studio
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!