👀 Now on to class, and then novel-time!

#AmWriting #Again #Soon

And... now on to the free-to-read newsletter! 📚

This one is for the writers and the world-weary: inspired by a rereading of Vonnegut's Bluebeard last weekend.

Bluebeard explores the struggle to make sense of certain human activities - like art, and love - in a world of relentless cruelty, and trauma.

Is there any sure path to healing through what we create?

And would we be able to stop creating, even if there wasn't?

#CoSoBooks #SFF #BetterWorldsTheory
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/if-your-art-isnt-broken-it-isnt-of

I hope we can get there one day, though. Tribalists though we humans often are... it'd be really neat to live long enough to see more people allowed to be *individuals* first and foremost, whatever identity labels we might carry with us, too.

🤞 Holding on for that day, but not holding my breath.

This week a student needed an explanation of positive racism, after being criticized for praising Jews as "good with money". I explained blood libel & the origin of the stereotype (brutal acts of social exclusion compelling the construction of separate systems), but the whole topic led to her asking about other times she'd praised groups holistically--all positive racist remarks, too.

Many of us don't realize how much treating demographics as hiveminds, even when intended "nicely", can do harm.

🎉 First up today - a paid subscriber newsletter (with a free-to-read section up top; I try to create a mini-essay of note for all eyes, too).

This one reflects on utopia - specifically, how everyone who tries to imagine better worlds is necessarily shaped by the limits of their present.

This isn't a bad thing!

But it's an important and humbling reminder: we're always part of *this* moment's politics, even when trying to dream beyond them.

(A free-to-read up next!)
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/what-utopia-excludes

My favourite sign of Christmas here: the giant walls of anchetas, food baskets that folks give as gifts. The food usually isn't fancy (though some alcohol-and-dessert numbers exist, too), but it's enough to ensure someone can have a decent meal for the holidays.

My parents were of the lower-middle class set that would *rage* if someone dared to try to help them out. Who said they needed handouts? They weren't charity cases!

I love a culture that appreciates food as a gift, not an insult. :)

Following from my little perfectionism panic attack the other day - and a whole other rollercoaster of feels these past two days, eesh! - I've been clinging to my work, compulsively re-editing it, instead of sending it out.

But with this piece out, I'm off for a walk before revising and hitting "send" on the newsletters, too.

We get through our silly brain storms one at a time, right? :)

Hope your own nervous energies have been manageable, too. ❤️

All right, folks. 🌎🕊️

Sorry for the delay.

Today's brief summarizes National Climate Assessment 5.

It's pretty rough news - climate change is here, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and even though there are changes they're not happening fast enough... BUT!

This report also highlights how much climate change is THE issue, at the heart of healing so many of our other problems. Tackle it properly, and you can't help but tackle other social issues, too.
https://onlysky.media/mclark/a-grim-sort-of-hope-notes-from-the-fifth-us-climate-assessment/

#CoSoNightShift
#CoSoMusic

https://youtu.be/p3NZn0mA_XI

#War

The news is really news-ing tonight.

Just finishing newsletter edits, but I had to put my restless energy and urge to follow updates somewhere, so--

#Poetry 🕊️

(Inspired by Neruda, who wrote his most famous work as a teen and resented the shadow those love poems cast over all his political writings in later years.)

Watch your hearts.

Back to work with me.

All right, enough grieving the past.

Back to writing about it for other reasons entirely. 👌 #Soon

...And I know, I know, I can still turn the fun parts of this piece into a pop-sci book on the rise of the theory of stellar evolution in the 19th century. I should.

But sometimes it just breaks my heart to think how different things might have been if I'd been allowed to defend, and to get that pesky "PhD" next to my name. So many doors in publishing would have become easier to step through. No one gives a rat's ass about a scholar without credentials.

Ah well.

In another universe, perhaps.

Sigh. I needed to remember a name for the newsletter, so I cracked open my dissertation for the first time in years.

It is so heartbreaking to revisit, because I'd written it twice before discovering that committee was absolutely not the right fit. One prof was a very defensive Christian who seemed to think I'd chosen to study literary responses to the rise of stellar evolution just to pick on Christians. That hurt my humanist heart. But this was GOOD work. I should have been allowed to defend.