Okay, pals.

As mentioned, today I have a deep dive--and oh the rabbit holes I ran down for research! (It's dangerous to let a lit scholar loose on the canon.)

Human rights and notions of crimes against humanity, especially in fields of combat, were only recently codified well. Most of our history has been spent hashing out raw entitlements to sovereign power. We've barely scratched the surface on what we owe each other.

Can we ever build a truly humanitarian world now?
https://onlysky.media/mclark/no-monsters-no-monarchs-only-humans/

Still no power. 🙃

Well. I'll catch up on the rest of email and delayed replies when it comes back on.

Big hugs. I owe a few of you longer responses, but first it's time to find a place to charge the phone, and write by hand awhile. Try to do what I can without ready resource access.

Thanks for your patience. I sorely appreciate all your kind words as of late - even though I tend to need a day or so to process the especially kind ones.

Be good to yourselves! Hydrate!

Charge all your devices!

I'm a bit wired from the journey out, but coming home on the Metro means passing Río Medellín, with all its scenes of abject poverty, & thinking about the complexity of precarity.

My life (like the lives of many others here) is sustained by a fragile set of social factors continuing to work in our favour.

At present, I'm scrambling to regain workflow as a barely breaking even freelance writer.

But *so* much of the world is operating at subsistence level.

There is privilege even in my crises.

Also:

I was soooo good, folks.

The bookstore in the tech mall called, but I only pressed my head to the glass like a kid in... well... in my case, in a bookstore.

Toronto folks who remember the old Yorkdale, it once had three bookstores, now merged into one lifestyle reading experience. When I was a wee sprog, whenever I got "lost" my parentals knew where to look. They were my version of "find a trusted adult". 🙂 Still are. (Gorgeous edition of Cortázar in this one.)

#AllBookstoresAreCool

The laptop has been forked over for a $25 CAD deeper clean, and I've sourced a good replacement for $343 CAD if this proper technician says the original is unsalvageable. I'll know tomorrow, but while I'm here, I promised a tech-unsavvy friend I'd source a cheap refurbished phone for him, & then... I hope the power's on when I get back, so I can finish today's difficult, research-heavy piece. 🙃

Sorry for being so scattered this week, folks. Trying to juggle many hats on wonky tech. More soon. 🤗

Power's out, so I'm hiking across town for a second opinion on my conked out laptop, or to find a refurbished one at a good price.

'Twas a good effort to try to make the desktop work, but a mobile machine is key considering my work environment.

Happy day and good adventures to you all!

Personally, I have a natural "withdraw" response when I'm dealing with despair in the wake of a disclosure, or general B2 depressive lows.

But I've also sometimes vented in awful ways.

Become obsessive over things that do my humanism no favours.

Been at my *worst*, in full and public view.

We're all carrying wounds--sometimes very raw ones.

It is an essential, if also difficult part of healing, to give each other grace after the worst in us comes out.

I hope we always can, and do.

3/3

And a *lot* of us are moving through those stages right now. Some by choice, and some... not so much.

When disclosure of a terrible site of vulnerability has been forced upon you by external circumstances - when you have *no choice* but to see your trauma become a grand public spectacle, with everyone asking you about it, and weighing in on your responses to it - overwhelming, trauma-driven fury (X happened to me, and now Y can rot in hell) is very normal.

It should also never be policed.

2/3

One quick mental wellness note:

Yesterday was a rough one for the noggin. Lots of different factors involved. For one, I have a family member with bipolar-1 whose mania has a way of setting off my bipolar-2 lows.

But I was also dealing with "overshare withdrawal". While writing about violence last week, I mentioned something personal, which had come up in my noggin because I was writing about sex-based war crimes (and will be again soon).

Disclosure has stages of vulnerability, though-- 1/3

Also:

I'm just catching up on a workday lost to a few setbacks: some snail related, some more personal.

Regarding the Snail: I'm going to go across town to see if I can find a nice refurbished laptop to replace it... later this week.

Lots of catching up to do first!

But my newsletter on McNamara went out this morning to subscribers, with a wee opening essay reflecting on why we can't seem to learn from history, free to read by all.

More soon! Email next.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/on-foxes-henhouses-and-the-fog-of

I think legacy media might be playing on my last nerve, because recent reports about Saudi Arabia pursuing oil market growth have been pitched as a revelation of undercover reporting when they are anything but - and when writing the story that way *completely* distracts us from interrogating the failure of Western leadership that has allowed oil-rich countries to exacerbate the #ClimateCrisis for us all in the first place.

Anyway, here's today's news brief for OnlySky:

https://onlysky.media/mclark/saudi-arabia-surprises-no-one-with-its-commitment-to-boosting-oil-markets/

Newsletter set for early morning mail-out.

It took longer than expected because something kept tweaking me about my argument. I knew it wasn't right, but sometimes I need a good long pace to figure out why. And I'm still holding off until tomorrow for one last predawn read.

As ever: it's better to take the time to argue with one's premises, than to post a wobbly thesis too soon.

(a.k.a. why I'll never be a clickbait writer or as rich and [in]famous as a columnist for the NYTs. 🙃)

Night, all.

As for including both Judt & Arendt?

Both are essential reads to undermine a myth of clean divisions between "good guys" & "bad guys". I'd also add They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer. Haven't read Maddow's Prequel yet, but I suspect it'll be a strong addition to the myth-busting.

It breaks my heart how little we've learned to see past the self-flattering Western propaganda. So long as we think hate keeps to neat ethnic borders, we will keep creating the conditions for more atrocity.

The reason I have both Wolff and Englander is that they each have a KNOCK-OUT story about literature in a hard world.

"Bullet in the Brain" follows the last flicker of synaptic activity in a man who used to love language before he let himself become as ugly as the world.

"The Twenty-Seventh Man" follows an unpublished man accidentally rounded up with famous writers in Stalin's purge. This gives him the perfect audience for a lovely story he finishes before they're executed.

Both sharp reads.

28. Nazim Hikmet, Poems
29. Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected
30. Tobias Wolff, The Night in Question OR Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

Whew.

So many key books missing, but it's good to review one's touchstones--even if left kicking oneself for everything left out!

Literature is a conversation we have with ourselves, about ourselves, over time.

Whenever we write, we're in dialogue with the stories given to us and around us.

Choose your fellow-travellers well.

16. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
17. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
18. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss, or Middlemarch
19. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
20. Adele Wiseman, Crackpot
21. Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
22. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
23. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
24. Neal Stephenson, Anathem
24. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
26. Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language
27. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

3/x

6. Tony Judt, Postwar (but also Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem)
7. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies
10. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
11. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
12. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
13. Fyodor Dostoevsky, either The House of the Dead or The Brothers Karamazov
14. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future
15. Anton Chekhov, The Complete Short Novels

2/x

🙃

I thought @thedisasterautist's meme prompt today was pretty neat, but it is VERY hard to ask a writer to pick just a few good books.

Still, here goes nothing:

Top 30(ish: actually 34)
Books To Know Me Better

1. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
2. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
3. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics
4. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
5. Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War

1/x