I wrote about two and half scenes today, expanding and adding a lead up to the climax/confrontation, and notes for a scene that references St. Francis Assisi after watching a lecture in a series I’m going through ‘The Terror of History’ about mystics, heretics, and the witchcraze. As I’m writing more often I find I am able to write a chapter most easily after I approach some reading material that I’ve chosen earlier on that is related by theme or research. I mentioned in a video blog that one book that syncs very well with the mood and world-atmosphere of my novel is ‘Radiohead and Philosophy – Fitter, Happier, More Deductive.’ I got some more of their albums in the mail today as I fill out my physical media collection.

The liner notes for their mini album ‘Airbag / How Am I Driving’ has a questionnaire with flow charts with absurdist captions, which fits with the analysis in the philosophy book on them. They are focused in their whole spirit about how our society is technology and data obsessed, analytical and, as it dissects the pieces of the world into digital schemes and target markets, it similarly alienates us and threatens to skew us into fragments and points of non-causal collision. Our dominant paradigms disconnect us from ourselves and each other, in other words.

I’m writing about a luddite revolution against an A.I., so I too wish for a more spiritual, connected, earthy and human-feeling world. He wrote, typing on his computer connected to the internet with headphones on listening to music streaming.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” – as Walt Whitman says in ‘Song of Myself’.

The writers group is going great, we have more people attending than ever and the critique circle is really strong. I’ve been able to have something to bring in most weeks and am motivated to continue having something to show others.

I’m reading a bunch of non-fiction, and a couple fiction things. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris is a kind of exposé of the sordid history undergirding Silicon Valley, and it’s a big fat book that’s great so far. I’m about a fifth of the way through. Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis by David Gessner is about looking at Walden mainly through the lens of the pandemic, and was written mostly during the lockdowns. Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson is a good contemporary book on the culture and history of the people who are doing the code-writing.

And I’m listening to Magdalen Rising: The Beginning by Elizabeth Cunningham a book adjacent to Jesus’s story told from Mary Magdalen’s perspective where she’s a Celtic witch. Very interesting and also saucy.

Reading the short novel St. Mawr by  D.H. Lawrence about a woman who becomes enthralled by a horse and starts to lament that men have no spirit in them. I’ve been wanting to read Lawrence for some time and this is probably a really good entry point. It’s amazing so far, and the language, the writing, is phenomenal.

And finally I’m rereading ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ by Aldous Huxley. I remember this vaguely from when I was in highschool, mostly it made the impression of a kind of thing books could potentially do. It discusses ideas and I believe in one of Huxley’s books at least, if not this one, he makes explicit that there’s a conflict in his view between living an intellectual life versus living a life of action, and he critiques the purely intellectual. Huxley is definitely a public intellectual, it’s been part of his family history, so this appealed to me as a kind of wanna be smart kid, and it’s still good, he casually drops references to things I vaguely remember looking up that I am now more familiar with, so. I’m a fan. He also wrote Brave New World, which I’ve read, as well as having read ‘Island’, ‘The Doors of Perception & Heaven And Hell’ and ‘Point Counter-Point’.