Recent Reading: Tokarczuk's Flights

 I have recently been reading Olga Tokarczuk's Flights with a good deal of pleasure. Much of what I love about the work of

Friday Links: Freelance Writing, Tabletop Radios, Movies Within Movies, Romanian Village Photographer

 Only a few this week.

A nuts & bolts look at the world of writing for money:

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/everything-ive-learned-about-being

Some good-looking radios from a brand I hadn't seen before. I have one on order, I'll let you know:

https://www.sangean.com/products/all_products.asp

Nestflix: a directory of movies-within-movies (and tv shows). Yes, they have Logjammin'. Yes, they have McBain. But you can submit any they don't have.

https://nestflix.fun/

The photographs of Zaharia Cusnir. A village photographer in the Romanian/Moldovan border region from 1955-1970, Cusnir lived and died in relative obscurity. His negatives were found in an abandoned house, scanned, and now some are on this website. Some of the images are quite powerful: your heart goes out to the subjects. I will be spending more time with these over the weekend.

https://www.zaharia.md/en/about/

Thug: An Introduction to the History of a Nasty Word

Has anyone else noticed the gleeful way certain people use the word "thug"? Like it tastes good in their mouth when they say it? Like they have found a socially acceptable substitute for the N word? That anagram of "ginger," which was "taken away" from "us" by "political correctness?" 

It turns out that "thug" was brought into the English language in the 19th century to help justify the British Empire's conquest of India. So it's been doing the work of dehumanizing the racial "other" to justify violence against them all along.

https://sshankar.net/2020/06/04/s-shankar-thug-the-rhetorical-work-of-a-contemporary-american-word-originating-in-colonial-19th-century-india/?fbclid=IwAR2ud0eiL1aFU4x02wcWDYPENvh9vwjiX0zXX8wrcctKJFQOa0h6phhAY34

I knew Shankar in grad school, where he was a real standout. Proud to point at him and say "I know this guy!"

Ramen in Decatur: Taiyo

Taiyo is located in the Courtyard Decatur Hotel, just up from the square on Clairemont. (Yes, I know it's Clairmont further north where you're thinking of it, but inside the Decatur city limits it's Clairemont.)

We both had exhausting Mondays for our own individual reasons, so decided to treat ourselves to noodles. Serendipity! As we were

Lowery on Texas

The piece in the link (if it's not behind a paywall) is difficult to read. Difficult emotionally; the prose itself is plainly written and more powerful because of that. It's an account, by many eyewitnesses, of the Texas church massacre last weekend. Wesley Lowery, the lead reporter, described it on Twitter this way: "We emptied our notebooks of every detail we have . . ."

I have recently finished Wesley Lowery's excellent book They Can't Kill Us All, and recommend it if you're interested in what's behind the movement(s) protesting police violence against unarmed black people. In addition to reporting on the crime scenes, Lowery takes the time to get to know the community leaders who dedicate time and energy to keeping these needless killings in the public eye.  One thing that becomes clear as you read the book is that reporting on these events takes a huge toll on the journalists who cover them. My second reaction on reading this piece is how devastating it must be just talking to people who have so recently gone through this, let alone actually being present during the killing.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-sound-of-hymns-drifted-from-the-country-church-then-came-gunfire/2017/11/08/4bd191b4-c4b7-11e7-aae0-cb18a8c29c65_story.html?utm_term=.d450c89e921e

Modes of Authorship in Woodworking Discourse

Drafting a proposal for an essay about woodworking discourse.

Having done some drafting on the proposal, I'm now thinking of writing about two different "authorial positions" for woodworking writers, one of them best described as "authoritative" (authority derived from technical mastery and long, successful experience) and the other as "ethical" (an ethos of "passion" and curiosity that seduces the reader into vicarious experience of the author's series of discoveries). The "ethical" author also invites the reader into a dialog; the Internet makes a truly Bakhtinian dialog, in which readers become writers instantaneously, possible. Both authorial modes studiously ignore the involvement of the mechanisms enabling woodworking discourse (print, video, internet) in the same economy of production and consumption that drives us all to feel we need to escape via hobbies.

Only with lots of examples.