Some of my longtime readers will know that a couple years ago I was fortunate enough to turn my fiction-writing into a legitimate second-career. Now, I don’t believe in credentials or authority and all that but, as someone who writes books, I want to say that YOU have it within you to write them too.
And not only CAN you write books, you NEED TO write them. Let me explain why…
There is only one kind of book worth writing and that is the book that you have always wanted to read.
@neuropunk-travesty made a small post last week about issues with some literary genres (namely fantasy) and suggested “occupying” the genre – I agree that this is a great idea.
When we talk about something like “The Western Canon” the viewpoints, contexts, and backgrounds of the works are extremely narrow. Each work has been added to the Canon because it adds to a meta-theme of “canonicity.” This is an intentional act of curation of “acceptable” ideas and directly privileges certain ideologies over others.
For a long time the publishing industry served the same function. As it existed under capitalism, publishing embraced ideas of “market” and “demographic cross-over.” The silencing of certain perspectives was always chalked up to “market forces” – sorry, kid, nobody would PAY to read that…
But these industries don’t just cater to the tastes of a paying audience, they shape these tastes. They reproduce over and over certain formulas and tropes until the presence of the trope/formula becomes mandatory – Nice YA Dystopia you got there, kid, but where’s the love-triangle?
The homogeneity of ideas is not a failure of capitalism, it is in intentional product of it.
You will rarely find works of resistance published, and when you do it is always about “inverting tropes” – thus reifying the “reality” of these tropes even by criticizing them.
If you want to find radical politics in a paperback, good luck. Even something like feminism only appears in its most status-quo-friendly and commodified form. I spent the last week looking for lists of “Feminist Fantasy Lit” and multiple lists big-upped Game of Thrones. That’s a problem.
We will never see the books we want to read unless WE write them.
Now, you might write your book and then it won’t make it through the many ingenious gates of the traditional publishing – and that’s okay. Nothing truly radical ever did.
But today we have the technology and the digital infrastructure where you can self-publish and get your message out. And honestly, fuck it – you can always write it long-hand in a notebook or pass around your hand drawn illuminated manuscript and other people will READ it.
Because that’s the thing: a book does not exist until you actually WRITE it. Talking about it and planning it are all great but it isn’t a book until it’s read by someone.
Every single person reading this has something in them that only they can say. Every person reading this has within them a book that only they could write.
Our goal is to create a better world. But we can’t create a better world until we have imagined a better world. We must produce our own radical fictions and revolutionary futures. We need to seize the means of producing literature.
You don’t think your ideas are revolutionary? We have been taught to fear and revere the thoughts held in books. That’s because access to books is easy to control and censorship is facilitated by the publishing process. My friend, just the act of writing your own thoughts and placing them next to the “sacred texts” is a revolutionary act.
You have something to say. You have a book to write. You know that there exists a book that you have always wanted to read.
You will never be able to read it until you write it. WE will never be able to read it until you write it.
As
of April, 59% of U.S. adults who are eligible to vote are Gen Xers, Millennials
or “post-Millennials.” Yet if past midterm election turnout patterns hold true,
these younger Americans are unlikely
to cast the majority of votes this November.
Time to break the mold! This year, everyone votes!
The only (peaceful) way to keep Trump and the Republicans in check, is to vote.
Register to Vote and Confirm or Change Registration
If you’re not voting against these people then you’re voting for them. You can’t bitch about what Trump is doing to this country if you’re not even attempting to do something about it.
listen i say this every time i see a voting post, but if there’s a barrier that keeps you from physically voting (like, you go to college in a different place than your permanent address, you have work/school, you’re home with kids, you’re disabled, etc) YOU CAN GET A MAIL IN BALLOT.
It’s called “absentee voting”, and over half of states don’t even require any sort of documentation for you to get one. You can literally just. Request one.And then you can vote by mail ahead of time, saving yourself So. Much. Stress.
Oregon has mail in ballots for everyone, and we consistently have high voter turn out, which is why I spread this info, every chance I can.
Note: Also, technically your employer has to give you a couple hours off on election day if you’re working more than a certain number of hours, but losing paid hours isn’t an option for a lot of people. So get on that absentee request!
I’m going to get political for half a second and say absentee voting is really easy!
The Villages is America’s largest retirement community, a carefully
planned, meticulously groomed dreamscape of gated subdivisions,
wall-to-wall golf courses, adult-only pools and old-fashioned town
squares. It’s advertised as “Florida’s friendliest hometown,” and it’s
supposed to evoke a bygone era of traditional values when Americans knew
their neighbors, respected their elders and followed the rules. It has
the highest concentration of military veterans of any metropolitan area
without a military base. It has strict regulations enforcing the
uniformity of homes (no second stories, no bright colors, no modern
flourishes) as well as the people living in them (no families with
children, except to visit). And it is Trump country, a reliably
Republican, vocally patriotic, almost entirely white enclave that gave
the president nearly 70 percent of the vote.
Older voters are America’s most reliable voters, which is why
baby-boomer boomtowns like The Villages represent the most significant
threat to a potential Democratic wave in Florida in 2018—and the most
significant source of Republican optimism for many years to come.
Because while the Villages may look like the past, with its retro
architecture and gray-haired demographics, it sells like the future.
This master-planned paradise an hour northwest of Disney World has been
the fastest-growing metro area in the United States in four of the past
five years. And as the baby boom generation continues to retire, The
Villages is continuing to expand into nearby cattle pastures, luring
more pensioners to this fantasyland in the sunshine, gradually swinging
America’s largest swing state to the right.
Trump supporters who get the most media attention tend to be
economically anxious laborers in economically depressed factory towns.
But in Florida, economically secure retirement meccas like The Villages
are the real reason Trump won in 2016—and why the state’s Republicans,
who have controlled Tallahassee for two decades, think they can avoid a
blue wave in 2018 and help reelect Trump in 2020. For all the hype about
Puerto Ricans moving to the Sunshine State after Hurricane Maria, or
high school students like the Parkland gun control activists turning 18
and registering to vote, any Democratic surge could be offset by the
migration of Republican-leaning seniors who like Florida’s balmy weather
and lack of income tax. If midterm elections typically play out as
judgments on the presidency, then Florida’s upcoming contests will be a
race between the usual laws of political gravity and the state’s
demographic destiny: Trump remains unpopular with younger voters, and
Democrats have already flipped four Florida legislative seats in
low-profile special elections this year, but the older voters who are
most likely to vote in the midterms are increasingly likely to move to
Florida and support the president.
It makes sense that they’re coming to The Villages, because this
leisure-class Sun Belt oasis is a lot more pleasant than the dying
working-class Rust Belt towns that journalists usually visit on
Trump-voter safaris. It feels like a 40-square-mile cruise ship, or a
college campus without required classes. It has enough golf courses to
play a different one every week of the year, and more than 100 miles of
golf cart trails that keep traffic congestion to a minimum. It’s the
pickleball capital of America, appropriate considering that the
badminton-meets-tennis-ish paddle game has become America’s
fastest-growing sport. It has 3,000 clubs that keep 125,000 Villagers
busy doing everything from belly dancing to astrology, water aerobics to
water skiing, karaoke to quilting. It isn’t exactly luxurious, but it’s
comfortable with a median home price above $250,000; though a new POLITICO/AARP poll
finds plenty of concern elsewhere in Florida , the only real economic
anxiety for most Villagers is the state of their investment portfolios,
which are thriving in the Trump era. At a meeting of the Financial
Markets and Investment Club in early June, a speaker announced: “NASDAQ
just closed at a record high!”
That meant more wealth on paper for club members like 80-year-old
Larry Harman, a former Chicago-area stockbroker who watches the markets
so closely he founded a separate club devoted to options trading. But
while Harman voted for Trump, and says he gladly would again, his
investment gains are not the reason: “I keep telling people: Come on,
Trump has nothing to do with your portfolio.” Harman, a former Marine,
is much more excited about Trump’s crusade against the National Football
League. “Players taking a knee, that’s bullshit!” Harman told me. “I’m
with the president 100 percent: Throw your hand over your heart and
respect our flag.”
All of the Boomer assholes in that article will be voting. Doesn’t matter how ignorant or racist they are.
Why should they get to decide the future of this country?
If reading this makes you want to fly over there and deck them…
*Shrugs* kind of? We still haven’t had anything like the crisis WWI was. Americans can’t comprehend what it would be like to have millions of their sons die in a pointless war that they lost. And then follow that with an unfathomable economic quagmire. We would need some kind of collective national trauma to plant the seeds of a widespread fascist community that bases it’s idea of national rebirth on racial purity.
What we have now is a realization that the personalities that made up the third riech can totally exist in America. Thankfully there is no national trauma for them to exploit, we have a 241 year history of a successful democratic republic, and the media/free speech apparatus makes it easier to coordinate resistance to these pigs.
Those are good points, but I think it depends on what you take this tweet to mean. I don’t take it to mean that the circumstances are the same. I take it to mean something more like:
Don’t forget that the Nazis didn’t wake up one day and convince everyone Jews (and gays and Roma and and and) dying was a good thing. They dehumanized the groups they hated in stages, and rounding them up was actually not the first stage.
So I take the tweet to mean “dont think to yourself ‘we’re taking our first baby steps into fascism.’ We may indeed not be there yet, but by the time we’ve gotten to ‘rounding up innocent kids for the supposed crimes of their parents, who the government openly calls an “infestation,” and having a favored news outlet that defends this as “summer camp,”’ we’re not on the edge of a metamorphosis, were straight up in the middle of one.”
Well, yes I’d agree with that. But the grounds for a holocaust existed in Europe (and America) for decades prior to the Nazis. What happened in Germany could’ve happened anywhere under the right conditions. If just having dehumanizing sentiments means that “we’re already several steps along the way” then, sure. But we’ve been “several steps along the way” for well over a hundred years now.
I agree that this is a wake-up call that “it can happen here,” but I don’t think we’re necessarily in danger of a government sponsored genocide. It is frightening to see how easy a group of radicals at the top, coupled with apathy from the conservative elites, can do something this monstrous. However…
I think the response and backlash to this has been very encouraging. I wholeheartedly believe in cultivating a strong moral base that will draw attention to and resist these kinds of actions. We should be ready, in case we do experience a national crisis, to defend human rights. I get the idea behind the tweet, but I would still say that we’re fortunately in a far better situation to fight back against this kind of dehumanizing state policy then Germany ever was.
That’s fair. I think we’re actually saying similar things from different perspectives and agree on a good bit.
My concern is more that… the way that i usually hear the history discussed, people don’t really realize that everyone wasn’t instantly taken in by Hitlers speeches. It’s often discussed as if everyone privileged enough not to be targeted was bewitched.
And… that’s not what I gather really happened. He did bewitch crowds, but they weren’t everybody. The Nazis did not win fair elections by landslides.
Which means it’s not the sort of thing where resistance just sort of melts somehow, it’s a process over time where resistance is made to disappear.
And while I don’t think we’re seeing that now, I think it’s very important not to assume “loud resistance exists” equals “they’d never go further.”
They absolutely will, so we need to understand how serious what we’re seeing is.
One way things are different now that I think the author of that tweet is alluding to compared to how things were before is that it wasn’t just dehumanization coming from the public at large but also from people in power. Like sure in the 2000’s there were racist White kids at my high school running around saying racist things against Latino kids but it wasn’t coming from Bush and his administration. Bush won the 2004 election because he was popular among conservative Latino voters.
Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because you can truthfully see that it’s 69° outside and go “nice” rather than immediately collapsing from heat exhaustion
also you can cook and reasonably often set your oven to 420°
Ruling in favor of Carpenter: Roberts (CJ), Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, Ginsburg Ruling in favor of United States: Kennedy, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas#SCOTUS
BREAKING: The Supreme Court holds that the acquisition of a defendant’s cell-site records ARE a Fourth Amendment search, meaning that a warrant generally would be required to obtain those records.
Rush's tumblr archive 