THREEDOM! (#5) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
THREEDOM! (#5) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
This newsletter is a bit delayed on purpose. January 4 is my birthday, so I always have a second chance at a “new year” in case I bungle the traditional one. And to be honest, my heart's not really in much these days.
2021 was a mess. I got through COVID, and months of long-COVID symptoms, and the attendant “survivor’s guilt” of recovering when I know people who did not, or whose health has been permanently diminished by their long fight with the disease. All of these are “wins,” I suppose, but they just feel like heaviness mixed with gratitude for me.
I also finished a book, landed an agent, lost most all hope of selling the book with the majors—and, because I also fell back into legal limbo, all of this left me quite adrift with respect to next steps. I translated a collection of local stories—and then discovered that there really aren’t any presses for it; translation is a networking game, too, and I don’t have one. Story of my life.
I’ll probably self-publish that book this year, because it’s the only way I have to convey thanks to this country that provided me with an opportunity to try to build a better life. As for the rest… I just don’t know. I either need an inordinate amount of money to regain stability here, or the energy to give up on my home entirely, and try yet again to start again.
I cannot stress enough how little energy I feel I have left in me, though. Everything has been so difficult at every stage of trying to make a home for myself. I don’t know that I know how to hope that things will ever be different this one next time.
I also had to cut ties with a substantial part of my community in December. This year, I have a few projects (discussed below) that will serve as anchors during these difficult next few months of grief and reorientation, but mostly, I want to stop from narrativizing everything else. This difficult situation has left me unable to hear myself clearly, and I need to change quite a bit of myself to be able to bear up to what comes next.
I hope your own 2021s ended on better notes. I hope your 2022s are starting wonderfully.
May you have as much or as little “story” in your life as you’d prefer.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Three conversations on justice
A change in media investment: anarchism’s stories for today and tomorrow (J1)
“An Interview with Cory Doctorow,” It Could Happen Here (podcast) (J2)
“adrienne maree brown on Emergent Strategy,” Live Like the World Is Dying (J3)
Three reflections on media
The Matrix Resurrections as “playthrough” (R1)
Don’t Look Up and punching up (R2)
The fantastical tedium of The Wheel of Time (R3)
Three unusual life paths
Angela Merkel and biography’s gaps (LP1)
Aphra Behn and opportunities come and gone (LP2)
Walt Whitman and the life with little reprieve (LP3)
Three new projects for 2022
OnlySky, the column (NP1)
Global Humanist Shoptalk, the podcast (NP2)
To Hell With Awards Season (NP3)
Three hopes for 2022
Take One: Eco-nihilism (H1)
Take Two: Moving from affiliate group activism (H2)
Take Three: Histories of care even amid atrocity (H3)
Miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
Food is life! (M2)
Movies to watch this month (M3)
M1. A quotation
“If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.”
Mo Willems, picture-book author for early readers and the occasional lost adult
LP1. Angela Merkel and biography’s gaps
Biography rarely interests me. I wonder how much that has to do with being a writer myself, though, and therefore quick to recognize that biographic treatments are always more about the biographer than the subject. I certainly have come to enjoy some biographers’ writing (Richard Holmes, Ruth Franklin, Kay Redfield Jamison), but it’s been hard—and perhaps rightly so—to come away from most biographical treatments with a sense of now knowing the subject well.
And autobiography? Oof, even worse: That’s just biography in the hands of someone who can only ever tell us whatever story of themselves they want us to accept as their own. This, too, can be informative, but I tend to feel like I understand people better through what they have to say on other topics, other themes, rather than through analysis of their own experiences.
Sometimes I imagine how I would begin to tell the story of my own life, for instance, but I’m immediately confronted by a list of necessary exclusions—or, conversely, confessions so stark as to consume and tone-shift the rest. Like the notebooks in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, I suspect my life would have to be compartmentalized to tell any given story of it well. I’ve thought about structures that might better reflect the messiness—something like Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, perhaps: a story in reverse, with every link in the causal chain as estranged as it deserves to be, because of all the different factors that go into so much of what we do anyway—but all of that feels dishonest in its own tedious way, too.
Memoir is more tolerable—in slices—because at least there it’s clear what the author’s agenda might be: what they want to impart, and what they’re not going to bother to address. Memoir feels closer to fiction in this way: an act of craft intended to impart feeling above all else.
In any case, rare is the documentarian or biographer who admits the limits of this form, which is why, as I ruminate on the mess of my career to this point, on my 36th birthday, I find myself returning to recollection of a moment from a 2013 documentary on Angela Merkel, in which the host, Andrew Marr, did confess to biography’s failings:
“Angela Merkel is 35. She has always been a loyal member of East German society. In films like this, people like me pretend that we understand every aspect of the story, but I have to say to you, this is one of the most obscure and mysterious parts of the Angela Merkel story. What was going on in her head in that remarkably short period of time when she went from being an obscure East German citizen to being a leading German politician, we really don’t know.”
This is perhaps the single-most calming piece of biography I’ve yet encountered. Her early years, and the question of where she gained her quiet, calculating, “Grey Mouse” prowess before a later-life introduction to national politics, are subjects of great discussion in works of related biography.
Some ascribe the phenomenon to the tangible estrangement of her early living arrangements; others, to physical impediments that meant she had to plan all movement with more care than others as a child; still others to her aptitude for structures of math and language, or her father’s Lutheranism, or the family’s calculated planning for her inclusion in Soviet movements to afford her a better chance of getting into university, or her own early realization that she would be better off studying quantum chemistry (a branch of physics outside political interest) than pursuing her “real” love, teaching.
In other words, there are many different ways to talk about her early life that seem to advance plausible explanations for who she was, and how she handled herself, later on in national politics—but none of them is definitive. And because so much of her life was shaped more by massive societal transformations than by any inevitable personal trajectory toward political achievement, I’m inclined to think that the greatest lesson of her life story lies in its most inscrutable moments of transition, like the one Marr confesses to knowing very little about. Sweeping cultural tides and a hodgepodge of inner habits always stand to drive us in ways that might well turn out to change history writ large—or to leave us ever on the banks of obscurity.
What might we accept about ourselves—and our potential for change—if we came to think of ourselves more often as people moving through mercurial moments and societies in flux?
R1. The Matrix Resurrections as “playthrough”
The Matrix (1999) quickly joined a long tradition of series where the first chapter is considered ground-breaking work, and the follow-ups prove relentlessly divisive. If you liked The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), you’ll probably like the fourth instalment, The Matrix Resurrections, which came out this past month to starkly divided reviews. Is it a sequel? A reboot? A self-conscious meta-commentary on the nature of sequels and reboots themselves?
I’m in an odd subject-position on these films. I stopped watching The Matrix Reloaded at the rave scene when it first came out, and only recently picked up the series again—at which point, I was deeply fascinated by the calculated ambivalence of the scripts (as discussed in Threedom! #3). Of course people could map this universe onto whatever struggle to resist imposed order meant the most to them: the metaphor was both precise enough to retain internal coherence, and vague enough to serve as cipher for a wide range of tensions between individual desires for emergent destinies within top-down systemic models of What Life Should Be.
And so, yes, I’ve watched Resurrections twice now, and I find it goes down very easily—but I’m not sure where to put that reaction on the scale of responses I’ve been seeing online. Generally, responses have converged in three clusters: first, absolute contempt (from the same crowd that loathed chapters two and three); second, delight at the intertextuality and all the new elements added to the extended universe (from those who enjoyed chapters two and three); and third, frustration that Resurrections didn’t go hard enough on its messaging.
This last group amuses me, because it contains people who have decided what Resurrections is “about” in the same way that people were first absolutely convinced that they knew what The Matrix was about—and from that conviction, they have resolutely decided that Resurrections “failed” because it didn’t get even more pointed than its fourth-wall-breaking scenes already do, and because the ending didn’t offer concrete solutions for the problems its universe posed.
But the second group is also interesting, because I feel as though the love being expressed for this film suggests that it’s doing very different work from the traditional blockbuster. Having recently re-watched chapters two and three, I too was primed for all the intertextual referencing—but also, having recently watched Leo Carax’s Annette, an art-house film that tells you at every step what it’s striving for with respect to the director-actor-viewer relationship, helped a lot with embracing the meta-commentary here. I felt that Resurrections was clear from the outset about the sort of film it was going to be, and that made it easy to follow along.
I’ve taken to calling Resurrections a “playthrough,” though, because this better aligns the film with the videogame metaphor that is used within it, to discuss The Matrix as a franchise.
In a videogame playthrough, you are making use of the same high-quality, high-cost materials that every other gamer has access to. The same skins. The same backdrops. The same overarching plotline. There’s some mixing and matching of possible outcomes from one playthrough to the next, but no one really re-plays videogames with the expectation that theirs will be the One True Way through. Rather, the game is re-visited for the sheer fun and delight of spending time again in a given universe, and for the excitement of finding minor upgrades to the overall concept along the way.
If my suspicion is correct, and our broader range of visual entertainment is shifting our approach to cinema, this would also explain why so many recent films are nudging way, way up in average length—a blurring of the lines not just between the binged Netflix series and the traditional theatre experience, but also between the length of a traditional blockbuster action-adventure film and a strongly story-driven videogaming session.
And if I haven’t been able to describe this as well as I’d like, that's also fine, because I suspect that contemporary videogame, adaptation, and film studies are also pointing in this general direction, but with far better vocabulary for it all. Simply put: We’re now absorbing visual media in many ways that give us the illusion of participatory control. Why should audiences approach the same discrete units of visual media with similar expectations or intentions? For some, then, Resurrections fails because it’s not a controlled, tight, pointed commentary with sufficiently entertaining “bullet time” action sequences, in keeping with the first film in the series. For others, it excels as an expansion-pack for a universe that has already been played through and personalized at length for those who found deep personal meanings in chapters two and three.
And that’s honestly kind of neat to see. All our labels are arbitrary, after all—and constantly under negotiation. I think we’re seeing a shift in media expectations and interactions happening in real-time, and I’m keen to see what new artificial divisions emerge for us next.
J1. A change in media investment: anarchism’s stories for today and tomorrow
I’m listening to more anarchist media than ever these days, but it’s a funny thing, to be thoroughly cognizant of a conscious attempt to on-board different ways of talking about the world. If I were a devoutly religious person in an orthodox faith, I might spend my days listening to podcasts hashing out the minutiae of specific elements of scripture and related canonical writings. Or, if I were down the rabbit-hole of a U.S.-centred cult like QAnon, I’d be logging onto my preferred forums to tune into the people and events currently being added to the broader mythos of the conspiracy, and training myself on all the key talking points of debates that seem so vital to me in large part because most of the “sheep” around me haven’t yet clued into their existence.
Or, if I were part of, say, a poly-furry community, I might pop onto related Discords and art-sharing platforms to enjoy the range of conversation advanced through comics that playfully hash out key details of consent and communication, or sift through the screencaps of a recent interpersonal conflict that emerged in one of our gaming groups, and add my voice to the fray debating whether or not one hostile actor should be removed.
Or… okay, yes. I could also be logging onto Twitter and seeing if today we’re arguing again about, say, whether literary publishing is biased against ADHD writers because editing standards don’t accommodate for the One True Style that a given writer with ADHD has declared to be The Way That People With ADHD Write. (Not a hypothetical, I’m afraid; this was actually a somewhat recent and highly reductive argument, which thankfully fizzled out. A lot of nonsense emerges as people try to test out new pathways to industry power.)
Suffice it to say, our media choices so easily come to feel obvious and intrinsic that there’s a definite fascination to seeing one’s attention change in real-time—and yet, anarchist movements, in the real sense of the term (i.e., anti-hierarchical movements), are hardly a surprising choice considering the year I’ve had: The social contracts I’ve broken from. The fear of breaking social contracts that I’ve broken from, too. And, of course, my awakening into an even deeper understanding of the callously arbitrary in our institutional practice.
This vein of media poses a welcome shift, too, because these anarchist communities share my criticism of, say, neoliberalism as an ineffectual-by-design form of activism that consumes many communities that claim to be better-justice-seeking. These groups also talk about—and enact—forms of mutual aid that reflect how I try to move through my day-to-day. And they share space, focussing on broadening the platform rather than developing cult-like personality centres around people claiming more expertise than they actually have, in ways that strongly resonate with my own distrust of pedestals and mis-applications of standpoint epistemology (see: Threedom! #3, under "Identity Fraud").
And yet, I have to be careful about this new fount of media inputs, the same way I would encourage everyone to be careful about the communities in which they cultivate routines of news-gathering, opinion-setting, and justice-seeking, because I agree with the commentary a lot. But if I’m only immersing myself in ideas that sit easily, I will be setting an extremely dangerous routine for myself: The Way of the Echo Chamber. This in turn will cultivate small-c conservatism in me, and leave me both out of touch with the wide range of dissenting intel feeding other points of view, and less comfortable holding other ideas in tension.
So. I may well have found my “people” in many of these conversations in mutual-aid-oriented anarchist discourse… but if I want any of it to be useful to my work as a humanist, I have to make sure I’m not losing sight of all the rest.
NP1. OnlySky, the column
This month, I will finally launch my new column at OnlySky, an explicitly secular media outlet that takes one natural world and one mortal life as a starting point. (Yes, its name comes in part from the song “Imagine.”) OnlySky’s contributors focus on exploring the human experience from a shared secular perspective, and the site features news, storytelling, opinion columns, podcasts, and video by both new and well-known voices across the secular spectrum. The focus is definitely more U.S.-centric (logical when one thinks about the start-up investment capital involved), but there are also quite a few of us from international standpoints, and we’re keen to build a platform that brings in more of the world, especially over time.
My own role as a columnist has changed in these last few months, as the site tinkers with its branding to start on a decisive note, but I’m optimistic about the launch all the same, and excited to be on the ground floor of something that could make a real difference for changing the way we talk about what it means to approach social issues from a secular perspective.
OnlySky is situated to take up the mantle of the world’s largest site for secular discourse, in the wake of Patheos’s decision to take a more exclusively spiritual direction. Nonreligious writers brought in a huge chunk of ad revenue for Patheos, but some of us focussed on criticizing religious hypocrisy and spiritual encroachments within the secular realm, and that definitely also inspired complaint among other advertisers and related, prominent public figures.
So. They decided they wanted a less “political” website that focussed more on each writer’s spiritual life… and that was as good a reason as any for most of the nonreligious writers to leap to something new. Which is great for all of us! I stopped posting to Another White Atheist in Colombia around when I first caught wind of the site’s interest in being less “political,” because I had just started a series on humanist public policy. Why on Earth would I continue to develop that material with a brand that didn’t want us to go in “political” directions?
Global Humanist Shoptalk is the name I had originally planned to use to brand my work at OnlySky, which includes both the column and the podcast (see: NP2). However, the site is now going to shift from labelled columns altogether—a decision that I understand and support, because we want to move away from fostering top-down cults of personality via rigid blog-column spaces.
This is also the guiding force behind one of the things I love best about our new platform: the participatory readership model, supported by a commenting system that allows for the cultivation of fuller communities of commenters and original contributors. I completed moderator training for the backend, too, and am delighted by the ways in which we should be able to curate and foster the best conversations on this new platform.
So, the name might not be as prominently listed, but Global Humanist Shoptalk will still involve major meditations every Monday on a key humanist theme related to better-world-building, and a “Tooling Around” follow-up exercise (i.e., invitation for discussion) every Wednesday.
I’m sorely looking forward to seeing what kind of deeper conversations and action plans we can build from the issues discussed on both those days. I hope you’ll consider following along—or checking out some of what my fellow columnists are also looking to do.
H1. Three hopes for 2022… Take One: Eco-nihilism
I forced myself to put “hope” on my list for the January newsletter, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been glowering at the category all month, struggling to figure out what I wanted to say on hope that wouldn’t come off as saccharine, naïve, and simplistic. There’s a term in environmental activism, “eco-nihilism”, that’s actually supposed to be rather positive, because it frees people from aiming for an overly rosy outcome to climate-change activism. What can we actually accomplish, eco-nihilism asks us, if we put aside the unattainable possibilities, the magical future where we can completely roll back all the damage we’ve done and frolic in a full return to nature? What if we focussed on finding the best adaptation strategies to the changes already underway?
I’d love to extend this term across to board, if I could, because I’ve always found slogans like “Stop Racism!” and “Stop Sexism!” absurd, for all that they overlook the fact that every new generation has to learn to overcome prejudices as a matter of course. It’s part of every young human’s development. Until we can a) provide truly universal equity across global communities, and b) upload every child at birth with everything they need to avoid all the damaging behaviours that come from the exploration of embodied/systemic power and initial reactions to difference, there is never going to be an end to systemic problems. But also, should the sheer fact that these issues will always be with us be enough to make us throw up our hands and say, “Oh well, if it can’t be stopped completely, why even try?” Of course not.
And so, yes, I know, this is odd for a humanist to say, but I quite enjoy this application of “nihilism,” as a counterpoint to so much sweeping and superficial activism that sets the bar for success so high that it’s no wonder so many of us fall prey to disillusionment along the way.
We will always be broken people in broken systems.
Yet hope simply has to spring eternal… that we can maybe fix a little of either, along the way.
J2. “An Interview with Author Cory Doctorow,” It Could Happen Here
In J1, I noted that, while I’m enjoying the anarchist media I’ve picked up as of late, I am ever and always suspicious of any situation in which I’m only consuming that which I agree with—because it makes me a poorer humanist not to be able to hold different ideas in tension. But I don’t want to give the wrong impression of this vein of media, either, because anti-hierarchical movements generally lean toward de-centralization in a way that already naturalizes differences in need, ability, and outlook. So, here’s a fun example of a conversation between Robert Evans and Cory Doctorow, two figures I discussed separately in Threedom! #4 who conveniently came together for an episode on the It Could Happen Here podcast in December.
Doctorow is the author of a wide range of science fiction that establishes plausible futures informed by digital-rights, anti-monopoly, individual-dignity, and pro-mutual-aid advocacy. This makes him, of the two, the more optimistic—and that means that, as the pair spends a highly stimulating hour walking through various present-day challenges for people seeking to break up the power of Big Tech to accelerate injustices, disparities, and deconstructions of democracy, Evans finds welcome check for his usual focus on the harsher and crueller activist realities that emerge from his own journalism and podcast-work.
It's a wonderful conversation, wide-ranging and not even close to all doom-and-gloom despite the immensity of the problems they’re tackling, and I really can’t do full justice to it here. However, I was especially chuffed by an anecdote Doctorow shared from a friend of his, Ada Palmer: a science-fiction writer after my own heart, because Palmer’s novels are highly informed by academic work in literary history and better historiography. (Whereas my unpublished space opera was inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Palmer’s Terra Ignota series has a Tristram-Shandy-esque feel to its overarching narration.)
Doctorow explains, in this interview, that Palmer teaches medieval papal politics with a hands-on exercise that involves sorting the class into different factions, each jockeying to get certain historical figures into final-candidate positions. They go all out, apparently—elaborate costuming, and the use of a fancy cathedral to perform the final puff of smoke when a new medieval pope is elected at the end. But the fascinating part—and the part that Doctorow says informs his theory of history—is that, in Palmer’s anecdotal experience with playing out historical simulations, two of the four final candidates are invariably the same… and two of the four are different pairings every time.
Doctorow raises this anecdote in response to Evans’ slightly more fatalist and despondent view of how much human beings can ever change about their systems—and I find the pragmatic optimism in it delightful. Yes, okay, maybe the full weight of sociopolitical and environmental variables driving historical action cannot be turned entirely from certain outcomes. But that doesn’t mean that everyday human action can’t still shape some aspects of our future landscape.
And in a world that is now slowly coming to grips with the fact that climate change can’t be “stopped” so much as “eased” and “adapted to”? Well… that’s the kind of pragmatic hope we need, so as not to fall so deeply into despair that we choose not to act for change at all.
LP2. Aphra Behn and opportunities come and gone
Another prominent historical figure on my mind as of late, when thinking about the failings of biography to account for the precarity of life, is the Restoration-era British playwright/spy Aphra Behn. Like Angela Merkel's, Behn’s career was sharply shaped by circumstances outside her control—and like Merkel, Behn’s biography has significant gaps.
We have no idea which of Behn’s accounts of early childhood is correct, and a great deal of reason to believe that she intentionally obscured her origins. We have no idea where she gained the level of education she clearly had, but we do know some of its limits, especially with respect to ancient languages.
We also know that, in 1666, she was working as a spy in Belgium, trying to make a double agent out of William Scot, and that her efforts were in vain. She might have spent time in debtors’ prison, after suffering from the cost of living in this service to the crown (not exactly James-Bond-era espionage afoot)—but also, maybe not.
Either way, we’re fairly certain that it was while she was in debt and widowed that she turned to theatre, a pursuit that would shape some of her life’s greatest contributions to literature. She penned what is considered one of the first novels in the English language, Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688—30 years before Robinson Crusoe, the book I was initially taught to consider “the first” in English; there are now many contenders!), and its stage-play version gave it some acclaim. But it was Behn’s comedies, including the pointed gender/sex power games of The Rover (1671), that brought her the greatest theatrical acclaim.
However, all of this transpired against a backdrop shaped by factors well outside her creation or control, and which went a long way to deciding the shape of Behn’s more immediate legacy, such that she’s had to be reclaimed by late 20th-century and 21st-century scholarship. Theatre had been banned in England between 1642 and 1660, and when it returned there was a disruption in the tradition of training up young boys to play the parts of women—a golden opportunity, some had hoped, to put an end to the abuses that had gone with that earlier practice.
One set of abuses was simply replaced with another, though, because being an actress in the 17th century was seen as synonymous with being a sex-worker, and the actresses were routinely treated as a kind of voyeuristic spectacle, routinely exploited by audience members wandering backstage or serving as patrons to the stage.
In this environment, it hardly mattered that Behn was a playwright; she was a she and she was of the stage—ergo, viewed by many (especially in keeping with stage-company rivalries of the day) as a sex worker in her own right. It’s hardly surprising, then, that her work so plainly addressed exploited women, sexualized power struggles, and other forms of societal trespass under the veneer of polite society. Her plays—both the originals and the reworkings of earlier-century content—were pointed, striking, provocative, and cleverly written affairs.
I grew up thinking that there was no “female” Shakespeare, and that men alone were noted writers until relatively recently. I was certainly thankful that my university education fleshed out deeper histories—but even more so, that it revealed the impoverished nature of our everyday perspectives. Why should every generation need to “rediscover” “lost” histories in the first place? For how much longer? What does it say about us, and about how little we’ve progressed on a behavioural level, that we continue to teach historical and societal baselines that—if lucky—a few of us might eventually unlearn?
And what might we do with any deeper historical know-how we might gain, to establish a new and better baseline: one that might actually stick for generations still to come?
R2. Don’t Look Up and punching up
When Idiocracy came out in 2006, it quickly became a litmus test for jerks. It was one of those comedies, after all, that played neatly into the idea that “most people are idiots, but not you, oh wise viewer of this film making fun of how most people are idiots!” And yet, it also managed to be fascinatingly divided in its contempt: not only were the “idiots” at fault for over-breeding and passing on their “idiocy”, but the intelligent were also “idiots” for not breeding enough to pass on their “superior” genes. What did this leave, though, as a pathway to being part of the wise viewership that got to look down smugly upon the rest? Why, the average joe, of course: the person with a little optimism and a somewhat open mind, who is neither too bogged down by the tedium of intelligence nor too boorish and careless in his tastes to be considered cruel.
Ironically, though, the average joe is… average for a reason. He is the vast majority of us. Which means that the film was not, in fact, incisively critiquing the rise of a mass “idiocracy”; it was simplistically presenting our socioeconomic and political problems as the result of the “wrong” people breeding and the “right” people being too “stupid” to breed instead.
And it was popular, because it flattered the heck out of its average-joe viewers, without asking them to change a darned thing about how they moved through the world themselves.
So, watching Don’t Look Up this month was thought-provoking: first, because it also presents rare exceptions in a batshit world, a world where a planet-ending comet would be mere fodder for news cycles and market-share debates; and second, because it invites viewers to consider themselves as part of the rare few that would obviously and absolutely know to take the comet seriously. The film invites us to feel like the terrified scientists at its centre: people who have discovered this horrific planet-ending event in process, and who have to bypass an incompetent U.S. government, an over-confident plutocratic tech sector, and sociopathic mainstream media to make their message heard.
Now, just for a quick thought experiment… imagine if the discovery at the heart of this film wasn’t a planet-killing comet. What if a small-time religious leader was faced with a credible vision of theistic apocalypse—and that anyone, if they bothered to visit his or similar shrines all the world over, could easily receive the same message? What if the whole film was framed around the dismissive and superficial secular-media responses to this horrific and undeniable fact of a countdown to a spiritual End of Days? (Oh, and keep in all the other major beats, too: the popular soothsayer’s rise in public appeal, his dalliance in sin, and the return home with contrition to be reunited with family at the very end.)
Would most of us not immediately roll our eyes?
A film like Don’t Look Up works because it preaches to the choir. And, like Idiocracy, it also doesn’t expect change from us, because we’re obviously just like the central protagonists: We know better! We’d never be caught up in the same social-media circus! We’ve already done all that we possible can! ...Right?
The danger with this kind of film is that it allows us to feel affirmed in our frustration by creating a simplistic division between Us and The Problem—which massively misrepresents the problem itself. You can especially see this in how the film pretends that the rest of the world would gently defer to U.S. space missions every step of the way, with the only other alternative launch site conveniently blowing up late in the game.
In reality, though, we’d be looking at a chauvinistic space-race between multiple launch sites in China, India, and Russia—and maybe also an enterprising South African or Nigerian billionaire, throwing their own continental project into the mix. But to allow for the rest of the world to have agency would mean accepting that the U.S. approach to mainstream-media discourse isn’t actually Everything—and the movie can’t do that, because the moment it does, its protagonists also become every bit as complicit, for their failure to look beyond the U.S. paradigm for people willing to listen, and to support, to save the world as a whole.
Not that this major oversight is new to the genre, of course. The future described in Idiocracy also existed at a remove from the real problems “dumbing down” society in 2006—which, surprise!, were not at all about over-breeding by people with the “wrong” genes. What we had instead was a reduced investment in quality education, along with aggressive attempts to curtail voting rights and access to accurate information through media and textbooks. We weren’t “stupider” as an issue of genetic potential, but we did have mainstream media and major corporate lobbyists normalizing the prioritization of charismatic leadership over relevant experience, and depreciating public confidence in subject-specific expertise. Worse still, this was all happening amid increasing rich-poor disparities, along with a growing body of research into how white “liberal” U.S. citizens were perpetuating racist systems in ways that unjustly continued to code poverty and dangerousness with non-white bodies.
And none of those issues, surprise, surprise, was even remotely well-addressed by a film suggesting that the rich “intelligentsia” and the “stupid” poor were equally to blame for their family planning decisions amid this broader set of social crises.
So what’s the real lesson in Don’t Look Up? I’d argue it’s the ease with which we can be comforted by products of the industries doing us the greatest harm—including this very film, because it doesn’t adequately represent the problem before us. But also, if we’re not careful, it can absolutely lure us into a false sense of belief that the problem is out of our hands.
Don’t be deceived:
It is not.
[Counter-rec: Watch Burning (2021), an excellent documentary about Australian misinformation campaigns, especially from coal and gas lobbies, that wrought havoc with attempts to combat climate change and helped bring about Australia’s worst bushfire years yet.]
H2. Three hopes for 2022… Take Two: Moving from affiliate group activism
Another new-to-me term this year (which just goes to show how out of step I’ve been with huge swaths of global discourse) is “affiliate groups” in the context of activism. This is crucial for anti-hierarchical movements, but I’ve known it more in the context of “local chapters” or “hyper-regionalism”—so it’s neat to pick up on synonyms in active practice.
In the context of mutual-aid anarchism, for instance, an affiliate group is one’s site of direct action, a group formed by strong interpersonal bonds and committed to shared goals. There are pros and cons, then, to the use of “affiliate groups” as the building blocks for systemic change. On the “pro” side, an affiliate group—by virtue of not being an artificial construct placing strangers together under pre-set frameworks—can get around a lot of authority issues enmeshed in formal hierarchies. Just as a group of friends can collaborate in a more direct way for, say, a potluck or moving day, so too can they collaborate without formal titles for bigger social change. And although long-term state infiltrators are a well-documented phenomenon in anarchist communities, affiliates certainly reduce the level of infiltration by keeping their action groups collegial.
On the “con” side, though, such an affiliate group by its very nature can be prone to cliquishness—and with it, an exclusivity to a wider range of points of view. This can make it very difficult for local newcomers to find a place to contribute—and how is that ever useful to any broader consensus-building or communal action?
Listening this past month to discourse about affiliate groups in anarchist circles, I couldn’t help but reflect on what similarities exist between these action-sites and the groupings that crop up in most any community—including my literary circles. Everyone has “their people” in SF&F, after all, and publishing fortunes rise and fall based on the people who are or are not in your circles—but also, pleasure in the craft itself can rise and fall with your affiliates, too. So, it can be a capitalist affectation, and highly toxic when it is; but focussing on your smaller groups can also be a way of divesting the writing world of its fixation on mainstream industry success.
I think the biggest difference between literary and anarchist affiliates lies in intentionality, then—but even so, small groups of SF&F creators absolutely do sometimes band together to create, say, a new magazine or project in service to elevating traditionally marginalized voices and perspectives. There are groups of writers who see their work as furthering greater ends. So why don’t we talk about the process more often in this way? And could leaning into the language of affiliate groups also help us define the contexts in which something more than an affiliate group might be necessary to bring about lasting change?
After all, widely divergent affiliate groups do rally together around bigger causes; and when they do, that broader consensus work gives space for the outsiders, the people without access to the same strong small-group bonds, to lend their voice to the chorus, too.
What would this look like in the SF&F community? I think my atheist community—i.e., the one gathering a wide range of dissenting perspectives under the umbrella of OnlySky (see: NP1)—is certainly striving to build a broader consensus from disparate slices of the secular field. But SF&F? Well, thanks to the nature of mainstream publishing and a strong human desire for prestige, the industry is so expressly driven by capitalist models of human interaction that it’s difficult sometimes to imagine another goal under which to rally.
And yet… difficult isn’t the same as impossible.
And I do have some ideas about other, broader campaigns we could foreground working toward instead. I hope to hash out some of them in a few episodes of To Hell With Awards Season, along with a future issue of Threedom!
For now, though, let it be enough to say that I think there’s reason to hope in the possibility of surmounting our cliquish tendencies by setting more intentional and ambitious goals under which many disparate sections of the genre might gather. Affiliates are perhaps not only a useful organizing principle but also an inevitable one—and yet, if they ever become the be-all and end-all of our campaigns for change; if our small cliques are not put to some greater work, to help us contribute to something above and beyond themselves, they can absolutely stunt us, too.
M2. Food is life!
Christmas was set to be a pretty rough and lonely season for me, due to the need to extricate myself from a huge chunk of community here. But I did spend Christmas Eve, “Nochebuena,” with a Venezuelan family here in Medellín. Two in the family are my friends, from a time when I was living elsewhere in the city and my Spanish was awful. They never laughed at me for it, though. They always treated me with great kindness and patience, and they have always welcomed me as a fellow immigrant.
And so, in the middle of a rough season, I was deeply honoured that they opened their home to me; and in that packed little apartment, I got to see a lot of love and warmth and laughter and dancing and the like play out… for hours. South American Nochebuena is a fiesta that can continue until the wee hours of the morning. I couldn’t make it more than 2am myself, before I need to call a cab to return to my home on the other side of the city—but my heart was full and rested for the night, at least.
(Oh, and my stomach was, too. I had asado negro [black roasted beef with Venezuelan spices], pan de jamón [a roll of ham and pickled things in bread], hallaca [cornmeal-wrapped tamales with meats and a medley of flavourings], and a Venezuelan potato salad. There were half a dozen store-bought cakes to go with the lime pie I’d been asked to provide, and some sweet pineapple dessert sauces, too. We all took home leftovers.)
I’ll also mention that my night was a little constricted by a 17-year-old who was quickly enamoured with me, and in a way that makes me incredibly angry when I think about the number of adults who pursue people at significant age gaps. He kept me from the dance floor by his eagerness to talk with me and his insistence that he doesn’t like dancing, but other than that loss to my evening's fun, I managed to keep the conversation on his future and how he could study to optimize opportunities in line with his interests, and lots of quirks of the English language. The most painfully awkward moment had to be when he saw that I have Minecraft on my phone, and was beyond excited. “Can we play together?” he asked. I delicately told him I play Minecraft with my little nephews, and he tentatively ventured, “So, you wouldn’t play it with a… boyfriend?” Ugh. Honestly, I both know why older people prey on younger people, and also cannot wrap my head around it.)
Anyway, the most important part is that South American cultures focus far more on joy in the present. I was filled with grief and exhaustion, and I was ruminating extensively over my own losses and setbacks, but for that night I was with many other people displaced by far more dire situations, who nevertheless fully live out the lesson that I still struggle to absorb: That one has to live in the moment, and enjoy the gifts it contains. Sometimes there really is no other way to survive.
As I write this, my heart is heavy again—I’m still far more Canadian than South American—but I’m trying my best to think like the latter. I need to stop narrativizing everything to a given outcome, because whenever I do the outcome is always very, very bleak.
I wish I’d been able to dance that night, mind you. That probably would have helped.
Maybe I’ll aim for doing so sometime soon.
NP2. Global Humanist Shoptalk, the podcast
One part of my new role at OnlySky is the launch of a podcast series, which will be clearly branded as Global Humanist Shoptalk. The podcast takes a slightly different tack to the issues explored in the main column. Whereas my weekly posts are focussed on cultivating conversation, the podcast is expressly about developing a practice of slow thinking about different subjects. (This is also why I jokingly suggest that, hopefully, the podcast will at least be good for helping folks fall asleep.)
As I note in the first episode, I despise the “hook” that has become standard in many of our storytelling communities—and which is not at all universal to narrative practice. One of our biggest issues, which social media absolutely fosters, is that we’ve been trained—and continue to train ourselves—into expecting charismatic, over-confident, and decisive “takes” on various issues. We want strong voices, clear performances of authority… but is that what we need?
I have made a middling career, granted, of going against the grain. I don’t like the way most activism in my communities plays out, but I don’t even have the commercial “decency” to make my dissent marketable: no grandstanding performance of My View Against The World!
And so, yes, I think that many fellow writers’ and atheists’ approaches to the discourse is counterproductive to their stated aims of building a more inclusive, equitable, and informed future. But gosh darn it, I won’t even expressly call out individuals so that we can create a dramatic sparring match between everyone rallying on different “sides” of the “debate.” Awful, just awful, I know.
And now, despite knowing full well that I certainly won’t be gaining popularity points for trying to add my voice to the chorus of those advocating for slower, more careful consideration of how many different vantage points there are to every issue of relevance to better-world-building, I’m making a “slow” podcast that invites you to dwell awhile in the various tensions that surround a few key issues, without rushing to resolve them all.
Good grief. How in blazes do any of you put up with me, eh?
(I will be chuffed, though, if the podcast does help any of you to sleep better, so please do look for Global Humanist Shoptalk at all the usual podcast distributors around mid-month, and let me know if it serves for that purpose!)
R3. The fantastical tedium of Wheel of Time
I was never much for fantasy even when reading it as a teen; I had my Piers Anthony and my David Eddings and not much else, as series went—and even then, it was Anthony’s (bad) humour and Eddings’ military strategy that delighted me than anything else. I never had a phase when I got excited about magical creatures and outsize magical powers; I was never enamoured by alt-histories where women played out social peril and potential against differently brutish masculinist backdrops; and after my Joan of Arc phase ended around age eleven, I never again sustained an interest in courtly politics and its consequences.
I was a sci-fi kid, dagnabbit. And so, even when Game of Thrones became a sensation in my 20s, I wasn’t watching it. I only started watching parts of later seasons because the company I kept wanted to watch episodes while they were over—though honestly, by then, I didn’t even need a briefing on the series, because its every plot point had been talked to death online. One couldn’t help but “watch” the series just by existing on social media during a specific period.
In early university, of course, I was surrounded by fellows who read and loved The Wheel of Time series, but as the vast majority were (Ayn-)Randian themselves, I was not inclined to take credulously their claims that the sociopolitical discourse in Robert Jordan’s series was any good. I did try to read book one, but the writing was not to my taste: poorly paced, repetitive, with some pretty uninspired sentence-level prose, and character arcs I found tedious. So, I went back to my sci-fi and the world pressed on.
I was more recently fascinated, though, by the adaptation challenge posed by this series: a series with a significant Marty Stu in its character of Rand, a fairly generic lad who would end up bonded with not one but three women who loved him beyond all measure (and with one more, unwillingly) in this world he routinely saved through his centrality in the weave, and his unsurpassed power and skill with the magic of the realm. So many elements of this world clearly owe their origins to Tolkien, and although there were far more women in Jordan’s books, their representation is… routinely not great, both in terms of sentence-level descriptions and overarching character arcs.
Unsurprisingly, then, Amazon’s producers decided to abandon fealty to the books to try to patch many of the series’ storytelling gaps and missteps. To this end, the first season extends its mystery about who the Dragon Reborn could be by broadening the initial playing field of possibilities. It also centres itself far more around the politics and perils of women who can wield magic (the Aes Sedai especially), and disperses many of the things done singlehandedly by Rand into other character arcs—even as the series also kills off and pares down plenty of key secondary characters.
Were all of these changes enough? Not for me. I found the season to be quite the slog. Now, some of this comes down to the look of the sets being fairly flat and uninspired, and the equally uninspired way in which most of the travel sequences are portrayed. Mostly, though, it comes down to the flatness of most of the characters—whether due to the storytelling compression compelled by an eight-episode fantasy epic, or to poor scripting that routinely wavers between too much exposition and an expectation of significant background knowledge of the source material to lend narrative weight to a specific place, character, or event.
Usually, though, I enjoy this sort of viewing experience because of the narrative challenge it presents: a sort of “So? How would you do better, O Writer?”
This time, though… I’m genuinely left thinking that The Wheel of Time cannot be adapted well, because the sheer number of adjustments necessary to make the original story less ridiculous has already turned it into quite a different tale. Maybe this is just my impatience with fantasy in general, of course—but at the end of season one I found myself thinking that the time of Good versus Evil, Light versus Dark, and The Chosen One was surely drawing to the close.
And I sorely look forward to an era of Greys and Groups rising in its stead.
[Counter-rec: Did you watch The Underground Railroad? If not, you’ve missed out on a gorgeously shot speculative alt-history that moves through a period of U.S. slavery in a way that you probably haven’t ever seen before. The “gaze” in this series is not fixed on the usual atrocities; it’s set firmly and brilliantly on the richness of lives caught in the middle of those atrocities, and leaves ample room for human beings to have other struggles concurrent to the ones that most of our slave-era media erases. Beautiful, potent world.]
LP3. Walt Whitman and the life with little reprieve
As I noted back in Threedom! #1, when writing on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, I’m fond of histories of writers who were less successful in their time than their reputation might suggest. I’m grounded not only by the fact that many other writers’ lives were often hard and lonely and full of doubt, for all the brilliance of the work they produced—but also, that readers today generally forget this.
Ever so many of us take for granted the exceptionalism of these people once seen as muddled, complex, struggling dreamers—even failures—in their time.
And yet muddled, complex, struggling dreamers—even failures—exist in our time, too.
Walt Whitman was a man after my own heart in many ways—minus his milquetoast views on the abolition of slavery, which I’d like to think that I in the same era would not have equivocated over in the slightest.
I resonate with two aspects of his life especially. The first is that Whitman’s working life was one of relentless upheavals, starting with life as a printer as an adolescent (in the 1800s, more than old enough to be working), and moving through lives of teaching, journalism at various publications, personal caregiving and hospital work, government clerking, and serving as staff for the attorney general before a stroke left him partially paralyzed. In the middle of this fray, he also self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855—and then spent decades tinkering with what would become known, with its 1882 formal publication, as his life’s crowning achievement.
And it was only with formal publication, almost three decades on from the collection's original creation, that Whitman gained the financial stability to buy land and find a place to truly rest. This might seem like an odd part of the story from which to draw comfort, but in it I’m reminded that the idea that work of merit ever automatically or justly rewards its creator is absurd. Whitman got lucky near the end of his life. It needn’t have been so hard all along the way.
Further to this last point, then, let’s backtrack to that first career path for something even more curious—and the site of my second resonance point: Whitman did not leave his first love, at the printing press, of his own volition. The press literally burned down in 1835, in a massive fire in New York City that obliterated the whole local industry in one fell swoop.
Now, yes, even if the press hadn’t burned down, the Civil War would probably still have caught up with Whitman, and he would probably have been every bit as moved by the suffering he saw in hospitals and family thereafter. But it is also fascinating to consider what path his life would have taken if he had been able to stick with those printers from the outset: the industry networks that he wouldn’t have had to spend decades worming his way back into; the publishing communities he would have been a part of as a matter of course.
Would he have needed three decades to move into a position of acclaim with his work?
Not easy to say, because, of course, the book of poetry he first self-published in 1855 was itself the product of twenty years of tumult. Probably whatever he wrote from a place of greater socioeconomic stability would have been different—and maybe less consequential to the broader sweep of US literature.
But also... maybe not. Maybe in another timeline, a timeline where Whitman was entrenched in the publishing world all his working life, but still also engaged in journalistic practice, he would have produced other veins of social commentary even richer than the ones we have now.
And maybe he would have been healthier and happier all the while.
Whitman worked very hard to get lucky at the end of a scattered and fraught career, a career shaped as much by factors outside his control as by choices he made with what he was given.
So must many of us. Not all, but—many.
And so we press on.
NP3. To Hell With Awards Season
Whew. So, this last project is still evolving. I had really hoped it would be fairly straightforward to start a video channel, but I hadn’t realized how many different breaking points could exist for something so seemingly innocuous.
The first breaking point had to do with location: I live by the highway. The only good hour for recording is apparently 2:30am to 3:30am in weekdays. Ugh. If I look tired whenever I'm filming, it's because I am.
The second issue had to do with my computer. My laptop was chosen more out of necessity than anything; my last died in May 2020, in the middle of lockdown and at a time when distribution networks were focussed more on getting essential supplies out to local stores. With very few options near at hand, I ended up with a computer (Acer Swift 3, Windows 10) that had serious lag problems with Google Chrome, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and the like from the start. After an initial two-day defrag, I started waging war on all Windows’ nonsense background processes, but a few of them continue like The Cat That Came Back. When Windows jumped to 11, the problem actually worsened in one case, because now I have two iterations of one particularly pesky background process. The fight continues.
Suffice it to say, then, despite my best laid plans to use a dedicated online video-editor to avoid the problems with a local program, I have run into lag issues that managed to turn two hours of video-editing (for the second episode) into days of delays and setbacks.
That has to be addressed before I can move on to editing for episode three of a series I really wanted to get smoothly off the ground this year—but so it goes.
Ideally, if I can find a better workflow for video-editing, though, I should be able to produce twice-monthly commentary on work in SF&F, and the debates that surround these and related genres. The name of the series comes from my frustration with SF&F’s hyper-focus on awards season as the measure of good quality work in these genres. There are many reasons why awards should not be the be-all and end-all of our discourse, and I started my BookTube to try to add to the sort of conversation we can and should be having outside of whether or not something will get onto End-of-Year lists.
The first episode (which has some sound-mixing issues) explored nonfiction essays in SF&F, precisely because there are fewer awards for nonfiction work—and as such, it tends to get less acclaim. This is deeply unfortunate, because the nonfiction that emerges in our genre is key to situated new fiction and poetry within a broader cultural and historical backdrop; we owe our reviewers and essays a great deal.
The next episode (better produced, and a stronger starting point) looked at The Deadlands, a new-to-the-genre publication that bypasses the tedious debate about what “is” science fiction and fantasy by instead focussing on a specific topic—death—and cultivating a consistent tonal range for all work exploring related concepts. Publications like this one stand to heal a ridiculous commercial divide and allow us to focus more on how literature can help us reflect on the ideas and moments that matter most.
The third episode is one I’m definitely looking forward to sharing, when I’m ready to brave the editing process for its initial video. In it, I talk about the less popular story of a writer who will probably get an award nomination for her last story of the year. This is considered a bit taboo—one is “splitting the vote” by elevating a second work by the same author—but only if one treats awards season as the be-all and end-all of debate.
As it stands, I truly think that this author’s first story of the year was far better, and far more potent, because it doesn’t use the prop of older writers—the foil of an easy, othered nemesis—to get to the crux of how we convince ourselves that our terrible choices were inevitable.
(Soooon!)
After that, I have a few more episodes lined up, but it’s all contingent on workflow. I want to do so much, and I know I have the talent to learn to do things well. But do I have the means?
I’m not sure. I’m certainly still a lot more tired these days than I was before, with a lot less energy to focus for long stints on the work, and I have a lot less hope that things will ever pay off if I just keep hustling.
But that’s a topic for another section in another newsletter. This, however, is the space in my first newsletter of 2022 where I try to pretend that if I just keep trying, and find those necessary improvements to production process… everything will surely “work out” in time.
Thanks for following along with the attempts at something new, at least, if you do.
H3. Three hopes for 2022… Take Three: Histories of care even amid atrocity
Okay, bear with me, folks. I’m the king of “downer” optimism, and this version of hope is no exception. It’s tough to be any other kind of hopeful, though, when the pandemic has shown how much callousness and contempt for other lives exists.
And yet, I was recently reminded of one of the worst human beings in history, probably a human being worse than Hitler. King Leopold II tricked the world and the peoples of the Congo into giving him reign over the Congo, and he used that trickery to drive this new nation into one enterprise—the making of rubber—in ways that yielded death tolls of somewhere between 10 to 15 million, depending on your statistics, for some 2 billion at most in today's equivalent currency.
And the death tolls don’t even speak to the full atrocities of his slave-state, a place that required plenty of local soldiers to flesh out the ranks, and needed a way to restrict bullets to them so they wouldn’t revolt. The solution? All fired bullets needed to be accounted for with right hands from corpses, a system intended to keep soldiers from hunting or stockpiling what they were given. But the local soldiers absolutely kept hunting and stockpiling. They just also entered villages and cut off hands to produce for their white oppressors. After all, the brutality of the regime meant that they would easily face being lashed to death otherwise.
Horrible, horrible history—and maybe the worst part of all is that King Leopold II did all of this for mere profit. No ideology. No misguided beliefs. Just pure, sociopathic greed.
And yet.
What allowed King Leopold II his reign of tyranny might actually somewhat surprise to folks today, since we always like to think that we’re living in the times of greatest progress. King Leopold II was originally just the king of Belgium. But he was ambitious, so he created charitable front organizations supposedly dedicated to the uplift of Africa in order to start fundraising for his long-term plans. He then ultimately proposed—gallingly enough!—a “Congo Free State” and claimed that his mandate, in running it, would be to fight the East African slave trade, cultivate free trade so that locals could rise up in the global state, advance humanitarian policies, and foster charitable and scientific missions of all edifying types.
So. Let’s pause and reflect on that. There were anti-slavery movements. There were people in Europe clamouring for Africa to be allowed to participate with equal dignity on the world stage. And they all got played for horrible patsies by one of the cruellest human beings in recent histories.
However, even when these claims of a philanthropic mission fell through? When Congolese exports bore no resemblance to the free trade economy promised? When reports began filtering back of King Leopold II’s atrocities? People tried to turn the tide. They tried to stir up enough anger for something to be done.
Did it work? No—and in part, because King Leopold II hired his own spin-journalists to go into British colonies and report on atrocities there, as media deflection. (Classic "But her emails"-ism, 19th-century style.)
Nevertheless, this is where the hope lies: in the fact that, even among the most heinous historical moments, no one horrible actor ever represents the sum total of us. And that’s important to remember, as we look helplessly at issues like climate change and healthcare equity that affect the world today. The damage done by our Jeff Bezoses (i.e. the billionaire class) cannot be as simplistically summarized as the horrors wrought by King Leopold II—but we’re still living in an age where some of us have outsize power to wield for good or ill.
And yet, only by our collective mandate. Only by our collective willingness to prop up their enterprises.
It might not seem easy to choose otherwise—heck, it might even be the toughest thing we’ve ever had to do, to choose otherwise—but it can be done.
King Leopold II would have been nothing without his early investors.
What are we investing in now, that we could and should pull out from instead?
M3. Movies to watch this month
Passively watching movies and series seems to come so naturally to us in pandemic, and so it's easy to end up only viewing whatever’s trending. This is how I came to binge many of the usual suspects this year, even though I didn’t enjoy most of it. I’ve also found these days that I rarely have the attention span needed for a more serious film, something more than the action-heavy fun of, say, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (yet another mainstream film with no greater redemption arc for male transgressors than death, alack—but which was otherwise entertaining) or Spider-Man: No Way Home (which did have a terrific alternative redemption arc for a wide range of male characters; loved it).
But at the end of 2021, I was able to watch Annette and The Card Counter, two films I greatly enjoyed (although, ask me if you want to know if I’d recommend them for you—the latter, sure, if you liked In the Valley of Elah; the former, only for highly selective audiences). And now I’m keen to try to add some heavier fare with intention to my viewing schedule this month.
In particular, I’m looking forward to watching:
The Power of the Dog, a Jane Campion film offering a tense portrait of power and powerlessness in a desolate Western context where articulating and addressing complex feelings has added levels of precarity. (I’m looking forward to this as a way of meditating on the complexity of many of my own feelings, obviously.)
Preparations To Be Together for An Unknown Period of Time, a Lili Horváth film (Hungarian) about a neurosurgeon who returns to Budapest with the love of her life… who insists that they’ve never met. The film apparently holds many fascinating possibilities in tension, not least of which (for me) being the idea that this highly intelligent person could be rationalizing all manner of elaborate neuroses for herself to get around the altogether quotidian possibility that this man is simply lying for an easy out. As someone who over-analyses everything to death… oh yeah, I’m expecting to be discomfited by this film.
Nine Days, a film by Edson Oda about a nine-day interview process to determine which of a series of souls will be given a chance to be born. Obviously I’m hoping for another experience like Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life, in which a series of recently dead people are asked to choose a memory to spend eternity within. I don’t know if lightning like that can be caught twice, but I’m certainly looking to give it a chance.
Memoria, an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film (with Tilda Swinton) that follows a Scottish woman undergoing a mysterious sensory syndrome while traversing the jungles of Colombia. It’s not just the fact that this film is set in Colombia that makes it interesting for me (this director has always had fascinating explorations of memory and perceptions of reality); it’s also the fact that a non-Western director is offering up his idea of Colombia. I’m fascinated to see what that difference in foreign lens might offer with respect to representation of this place.
Parallel Mothers, a Pedro Almodóvar film about two mothers who give birth on the same day. The movie doesn’t actually interest me for its premise or content (not big on mother films in general), but Almodóvar’s storytelling never goes quite the way one expects. He’s very good at illustrating how, for all our attempts to create coherent narratives for the events of our lives, life… finds its own mercurial way. Looking forward to seeing how that plays out here.
The Worst Person in the World, a Joachim Trier film (Norwegian) about four years of a woman’s slings and arrows in love and work. This film is way outside my comfort zone, because anything with a whiff of rom-com usually bores me to tears, but it’s been well reviewed as an excellent portrait of human failings and existentialism through its protagonist, so… I’ll give it a shot. (Hoping for something Fleabag-esque, at worst.)
Will I get through all of these? I don’t know. But it’s at least worth it to aim at more “slower” viewing that allows me to reflect in a calmer way on various setbacks in my own life. I hope your own intentional viewing this month is productive, too.
J3. “adrienne maree brown on Emergent Strategy,” Live Like the World Is Dying
I only recently learned about the existence of Margaret Killjoy, and I’ve been endlessly chuffed, ever since, to find that I actually do like the name “Margaret” on someone. Margaret shares with me a lot of her reclusive, DIY, and de-centralizing tendencies, but with a far more seasoned background of work with mutual-aid affiliate groups and related resistance efforts as an anarchist.
Here I am, conversely, as a person who ran too long and too hard through academia during many periods of my youth, desperate for some kind of safety even within systems that I strongly disliked and deeply distrusted (especially from a position of class precarity), who nonetheless came to many overlapping views from their humanism.
I’m 100% for hyper-regional global governance, for instance: a system that would still allow for the cultivation of international experts, but whose findings would be in service to local action groups deciding what works best for them and the communal needs they will usually understand better than most.
And so, I was delighted to listen to an episode of Live Like the World Is Dying where Margaret Killjoy talks to adrienne maree brown (lowercase intentional) about the concept of “emergent strategy”: a critical component to the building of better global systems.
As the two of them discuss, mainstream media has cultivated an idea of the “mob” that runs counter to how group dynamics not only can work within human systems, but also already work in a wealth of other natural systems. As brown notes:
Emergent Strategy is for people who are ready to be responsible for shaping change around them. And some of the key lineages of it are the scientific concepts of emergence. So, emergence is the way patterns and the way—like basically all these patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions. And they’re very complex patterns, but each of the interactions or each of the relationships are relatively simple.
So, I think of like a flock of birds, a huge murmuration of birds, moving through the air, avoiding predation. And it looks like the most complex, choreographed, beautiful thing. But it’s actually this simple system where each bird is paying attention to the five to seven birds right around it and following the subtle cues that they’re sending each other: it’s time to move, left, dip, rise, move, right.
One of the core questions of Emergent Strategy was, what would it look like if our movements and our species could move in that way? What would it look like if we could murmur it together? How would we have to trust each other?
Their conversation explores a wide range of applied and theoretical issues—everything from insights from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (for my sci-fi readers!), to why right-wing terrorists on January 6, 2020 didn’t have such an harmonious approach to group action, to lessons from disability justice communities, to the surprising way that allies can emerge in times of struggle, to the wrong kinds of “prepper” culture that don’t actually account for our need for sustainable communities to weather the coming storms.
It's a wonderful conversation, with many a thought-provoking soundbite, but I’m especially left dwelling on that pathologizing of “group” behaviours at its core. We are routinely invited to take for granted that group behaviours, mass behaviours, will intrinsically lead to the worst possible human outcomes (see: R2, on Don't Look Up). And yet, every flock of starlings in flight shows us that something beautiful, something endlessly adaptive to the worst of what the world around us might put out, can emerge with just a little bit of attentiveness to one’s immediate environment and outcomes.
Margaret is the Margaret I wish I had been. I wish I’d been surrounded by similar starlings, at least, during many of my formative and deeply troubled years of youth.
But oh, it’s not too late yet, is it? I can still find a flock worth beating in lockstep with—and I look forward to seeing what emerges when I do.
Thanks, as ever, for reading and following along. If anything here struck your fancy, and you have both the means and inclination to support the work, you can send something directly to my PayPal account, or support my Patreon for other little features mid-month.
Or, you know, donate to the UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, or your local friendly anarchist/mutual-aid organizations. Wherever you think will make the greatest difference down the line.
Happy 2022.
May it be... well, something more constructive than the last five years for us, at least.