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I have never, I think, expressed this, but for many years I have had the kind of nagging thought that clutters up one's brain but which, without the kind of rare fit-for-purpose task management system I have been looking for for years, never alters one's behaviour: I ought, I told myself, to keep a reading diary which covers not only my reading but also my evasions, cravings, obsessions and every swerve of avoidance I catch myself in as I go about my life, making other plans. This made sense to me because of my "ADHD" - Russell Barkley says it might make more sense to call it EFDD for Executive Function Deficit Disorder - which turns every book into a marathon, a project whose completion and indeed commencement will demand a variety of strategies and some degree of luck. More than that, however, it's because the real books have a story of their own in terms of how you came to them. Vinay Gupta, a "resilience guru" I followed on Twitter for some time before he pivotted off on a trajectory where he would take it upon himself to convince the world that Elon Musk should be declared "Space Faroah", has it that "A thing is as hard as its consequences". And so it is with books. Some books are intimidating - we might put them off for years, and many will die before so much as reading five pages into a book we would scarcely, had we picked them up, have been able to put down. Other books are confrontations. They may change us and we may sense it. But how often does one have the bandwidth to be changed? Writing about the books I order, or think about, or move from a shelf to the floor, or fiddle with, glancing over the blurb, looking for answers on the face of the author in the photo on the dust jacket, was something I imagined might make all of this more conscious. The diary, meanwhile, might make the difference between my swerving away from one book, throwing myself into another, treating every book I read as the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme that was doing the rounds through Covid and perhaps beyond, except that, instead of my turning my head for one woman passing by, there's nothing but short skirts, patterned tights and bouncing boobs looking right at me unconstrained by brasiers: the world is full of topics I want to know everything about and they are all of them parading by.
I ordered _The New Jim Crow_ by Michelle Alexander in the middle of the first year of the pandemic. It was some time after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Just as the pandemic was beginning, in Prague at least, I am guessing in March of 2020, I went with my ex to see a screening of _The Colour of Justice_, a documentary filmed in 2018 in which a number of lawyers staged an imitation trial relating to the similar judicial murder of Eric Garner in 2014. It was shown, I forget where, as a part of the _Jeden Svět_ / _One World_ Festival and, following the projection there was what I assume must have been a Zoom questions and answers with the director. There had been two festivals overlapping at that time, the _One World_ Festival relating to human rights, a documentary film festival I had returned to year after year from the time I had seen _The Internet's Own Boy_ and _Citizen Four_ in what was likely to have been my first year back here in Prague, 2014, and _The Festival of the Strong Stomached Viewer_, which I was attending for the first time on the recomendation of my ex. The latter, which was relatively brief and confined to one cinema in žižkov, the one district in Prague where, if you had had a little to smoke (no great challenge in this area), you could mistake for Berlin, was full of students, and its single screen was rammed. _One World_ went on for a week or so and, since the films were informative and solidly in my kind of territory, being fairly political, informative, engagé, I had a full schedule, watching two films some days, often on my own. It's a trip looking back over this timeline, but it seems that, though it would later repeat on-line in the autumn, complicating my attempts to retrace my steps, _One World_ initially took place, or perhaps was merely scheduled to take place, from the 5th to the 14th of March, 2020. It's possible, if not likely, that it did not finish as planned. Three districts in Moravia were ordered to go into some form of lockdown on the 15th. The first people to recover from Covid 19 were announced on the 16th, the first person died from the disease on the 22nd, and 31 would be dead by the end of the month. Festival /Otrlého Diváka/ took place from the 3rd to the 8th of March. From memory, we went to two of the screenings. One, the _Filmový hovnocuc_ or _Movie shit sucker_ (a hovnocuc is a big tanker truck with a vacuum pump you order to clean out your cess pit) was compered by one or two young enthusiasts who took the mic in costume to introduce and contextualise a series of dumb excerpts from low-grade genre films. The other was a low budget space film featuring an alien made out of what looked like a Swiss ball with arms. Mid-way through this latter film, a beachball or two was thrown into the full auditorium from the projection room above in celebration of this wonder of special effects in order to be knocked around for a few minutes. Whether it was because of the different demographics, an unpopular, somewhat too earnest subject matter (ie. the fact that there are no black people in the Czech Republic and nobody gives a shit) or a slightly later schedule, there were few people at the French Institute or wherever it was for _The Colour of Justice_ and I felt sorry for the director, sat there at home looking out at eight to twelve people socially distancing across the medium-sized generously-sloped auditorium. I asked the second or third question and the two people holding the mics were recogniseably grateful to have an evidently informed "expat" asking a question relating to the development of events from Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement. It might have been the last film I saw in that festival, and the starkest in terms of the drop out in attendence but I remember craning my neck around in the great hall of kino Svetozor where I had watched Citizenfour in the aisles having gone in late at the same festival back in 2014, and seeing a mere handful of people. It hadn't by then quite clicked yet. I was reading the news as obsessively as I ever had. I was "informed", and I had even come across mentions of a dangerous new virus, perhaps even mention of a potential pandemic, or reference to MARS or SARS. Still, I remembered talk of bird flu. I remembered swine flu. But though I had by that time come to understand - via Vinay Gupta and his circle as it happened - that some major problems facing humanity were terrifying _until_ you understood them but that pandemics were not one of them: here, it was those who grasped how pandemics worked, how zoonotic viruses evolved, how they spread in our globalised world once they jumped the species barrier, who were really sweating. Still, I am pretty sure that, as I turned to look at the cinema audiences, which were as small as they would be now at anything but a "Barbenheimer", the penny didn't drop.
It's a trip looking back. Any sense of chronology is broken by Covid for a start. But it's not only that. More even than during the pandemic and its social distancing, I was on my own in 2013 into 2014, in a way that few people will know how to empathise with or understand. And this period of judicial murder when we start to name names, as we should name names - Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd[1] reaches back, in my understanding of it, to that period of time. I came back to Prague in January 2013 and by that summer, after I had returned to the UK to get diagnosed with ADHD at a private doctor I couldn't afford in a clinic around the corner from Harley Street, I got a job at an international school. It was my first _professional_ job. One I had to dress up for. I hated that. But still more did I hate the consciousness of hierarchy, the pretense, the brown nosing and politics and the feeling that everybody knew the etiquette and I didn't. It was a British school, more or less. Czech-owned, Czech-run in some ways, but the curriculum, culture, and the administrative centre of gravity were all British. Having first come to Prague to get away from Britain and when it meant for me, I struggled with that.
It would have been 2014: year four had a topic on civil rights. So how's about this: the British curriculum had a topic relating to civil rights and for all that might have meant on British soil - a term which, if we were to go back as far as the fifties and sixties, still more indeed the 19th century, could have been interpreted pretty broadly without offending British sensibilities if that is what is at stake - it is what has typically been meant by the term "civil rights" in the United States of America which will form not only the bulk but the entirety of the topic. Pyramids and pharoahs?: we are in Ancient Egypt. Mad emperors and vomitariums or whatever it is (I have had experience with a variety of different educational systems and the choices are always arbitrary)?: we're in Ancient Rome. Civil Rights and Black people fighting for their rights?: now, we must be in the United States and in a period before the mid-sixties. I was in charge of the library and may have been charged with ordering books. I can remember having a conversation - possibly a number of conversations - about Harriet Tubman. I confess I had to look up the name. My understanding of the conventional, broadly liberal, narrative of the civil rights struggle (the one I will be adumbrating below) was one I had come to by watching documentaries from my teens, I suppose; subsequent to that I had a habit of reading white-facing broadsheet newspapers and intellectually-inclined journals and magazines such as the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, and, later, the New Yorker. I knew a good handful of names from the struggles of the sixties and had some notion of what abolition [of slavery] had meant in the US though not, as I would learn only years later, in the UK. I had a better than average grasp of the subject (again, narrowly defined as US civil rights). Tubman's story, however, had eluded me. The teacher, Miss Tub-Thumpah, was, she told me, passionate about civil rights and a great admirer of Harriet Tubman. I had no real reason to doubt her. Her route there was likely different from my own but civil rights had, I think, been a fixture on the curriculum for a long time by now, as it was a fixture on the tacit list of historical subjects educated British people should know something about, as judging by the schedules of the broadly edifying publicly-funded television and radio channels, and she had been teaching for some years.
Miss tub-Thumpah was white. As indeed, was everybody else at the school at that time, barring two children from Nigeria who had a hell of a time. This meant that at the end of the year, the all-white class was to sit down in front of an all white audience to perform a song and dance routine of Rosa Parks sitting down on a bus ("She sat down on a bus." "She sat down on a bus?" "She sat down on a bus!") This was, if I am to be kind, better than the school I would work at some years laterwhere the Czech head of the humanities told me on my first day there that she could see no reason why children could not make use of blackface to play Louis Armstrong. Equally, this musical tribute to Rosa Parks was arguably in many ways better than the Martin-Luther-King-Day-as-colouring-activity I have seen in classrooms elsewhere. Still, by now I was developing something of a critique.
In an article just under two weeks after "unarmed, 18-year-old Mike Brown was killed by Darren Wilson", Roxane Gay writes: "We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity." As indeed, there had always been more atrocity. How many people had been beaten by truncheons by gangs of police before the infamous beating of Rodney King was caught on video tape?[2] By 2014 I had been on Twitter for around four years. Beyond even the half-mad and sometimes maddening gurus talking pandemics and natural disasters, the unnatural disasters that would be all the more prevalent with climate change, and economic and civilisational collapse more generally, I had been doom scrolling long before Covid and Trump. I was engagé and disconnected. I remember following the 2014 Gaza War[3] as I remember being up late in to the night in 2015 after parliament voted for air strikes. I was all this time going deep into the Snowden "revelations" and the impact on democracy I had been certain social media would have since I first saw the impact of Facebook on the weird little community I was in the centre of - and apart from - in the West Midlands from 2006. All of it, besides, built on the foundations of the intense constellation of interests I had had from the time I watched what I still consider to have been the real stolen election of 2000 and the assault on civil liberties that followed it not only in the US and in Britain.
Whether it was sitting alone in a movie theatre as a straight man watching a renowned Scandinavian television series about gay men in the AIDS crisis,[4] documentaries about the Syrian war, kids growing up in Afghanistan or "the Majdan", or doom scrolling in my tiny little garret, I found little enough sympathy from the Czechs I was still primarily hanging out with. I may now think of them as a mugwump nation, disconnected from and indifferent to the world around them, busy consuming and selling their data to the lowest bidder, but it would have been little different in the West Midlands. Still, if I was drawn more than many to the sufferings of the world - autists are known for having a profound sense of justice and often have a less well known distributed sense of self such as might be found in the writings of Derek Parfitt; those of us with ADHD meanwhile, are known for needing plenty of stimulation - I was, as is sometimes said to be typical of those of us who are not neurotypical, simply a canary in the coalmine: it was not in fact getting much harder to ignore the troubles of the world and those who were in denial before were in denial now, but there were many people whose sense of justice was reasonably developed but who were in no real position to influence the events which were often far away from them who were now brought up close and personal with so many of the ills of the world. In retrospect, something had to give.
I spoke of having a critique. I was getting into my late thirties by now and I had been thinking hard for years. What had always made me different - what would have made me different anywhere, not only in this little, homogeneous country with its culture like a stagnant forgotten unmatched parenthesis of an ox bow lake long ago depleted of its carp - was that I didn't know how to _not_ think. Most people, I must have realised sometime around this period and certainly not before, think more or less volitionally, and so - barring odd insomniac nights and days they might have took something they might better have avoided - think more or less unsystematically about things they more or less want to think about. I had a thousand tabs open in my mind all the while; few if any of them strictly volitional. In the context of an international school covering the topic of civil rights, here is more or less what I thought at the time. My thoughts, more or less, represent a curation of the views of those I thought had a perspective, an analyis, those were close enough to know as well as a handful of those far enough away that they might be thought not to have been biased. Why we choose to tell the stories we tell matters. As does the way we tell them.
The story of Rosa Parks is often told so that anyone would think she just took it in to her mind that day to sit at the front of the bus. Parks, I knew by then, was organised. This is, in and of itself, significant. I learned something more from Michelle Alexander in a long passage towards the end of _The New Jim Crow_ in which she critiques, and criticises the benighted civil rights community and the organisations she has worked for herself:
Rosa Parks was not the first person to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Civil rights advocates considered and rejected two other black women as plaintiffs when planning a test case challenging segregation practices: Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith. Both of them were arrested for refusing to give up their seats on Montgomery's segregated buses, just months before Rosa Parks refused to budge. Colvin was fifteen years old when she defied segregation laws. Her case attracted national attention, but civil rights advocates declined to use her as a plaintiff because she got pregnant by an older man shortly after her arrest.
Civil Rights in general, meanwhile, tends to be covered in a way that reminds me of _Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?_ which wittily riffs over the pre Civil Rights Act days with a soundtrack that mixes blues and spiritual slave songs with bright washes-whiter country tracks and the _Forest Gump_-like feeling that all kinds of evils were the result of stupidity rather than conviction, calculation, corruption and malice, and, their having been beaten by relative intelligence in the shape of George Cluney, may safely now be forgotten. But from a British perspective, these evils are distant in both time and space. Never will you see the prominance of British or English culpability in the slave on a British curriculum. Nor indeed, will you see how the civil rights protests and successes in the United States inspired the minority Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Martin Luther King Jr., meanwhile, is lionised so that he needn't be confronted. A handful of words are excerpted from a single speech so that his dream becomes what it avowedly was not, _the_ American Dream (the degree to which his notion of equal rights was American may be fruitfully debated since it was certainly not "anti-American", another dread contested phrase, but _the_ American Dream was differently specific, all John Wain and Marlboro Man, and excluded him: the phrase "manifest destiny" does not have the ring of a bolt on, something that might later be discarded like trainer wheels on a bicycle; what was "self-evident" to the founding fathers was that white men were created equal, though some were to lead and others were to follow, differently than anywhere else but after the same fashion as many another place including England indeed).
Back in 2014 I put up news relating to Ferguson around the library in much the same way that I set up a competition to give out copies of Cory Doctorow's _Big Brother_ to enlighten the kids about the dangers of mass surveillance and manipulation.[5] I had been around education for some time and was starting to see that poor answers only clogged up good questions like anti-nutrients binding to neurotransmitter receptors. All of the questions Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and others were addressing themselves to in the nineteen sixties, were still worth asking; if not all then most of the things they had been fighting for either remained problematic today or had mutated or been adapted into new forms.
"Before too long," wrote Roxane Gay in 2014, "another city will become another spectacle because another unarmed black man will be gunned down by another overzealous police officer." If I were to be nitpicky the word overzealous feels weak here; not only weak in fact - indeed I choose the word out of a reluctance to criticise Gay who I consider to be honest, empathetic, generous, and magnanimous - but conceptually incorrect. It may be that until 2014 the word overzealous might have felt appropriate, if generous, to describe the kind of mentality that could lead to the inevitability of the kind of iterative injustice being described here. At a push, it could be used on one of the three incidents described in Gay's article involving African American men and police officers, the shooting of Kajieme Powell. What seems certain is that, by 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin at a time that many millions of people were stuck at home experiencing little else but the spectacle that Roxanne Gay describes, there had been a sufficient number of witnessed iterations of ostensibly routine traffic stops being wilfully escalated to murder, that it would come as no surprise that the man who knelt with his shin bone on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 23 seconds with his hand in his pocket, had worked with his victim, that he reportely knew him pretty well. Nothing explains this pattern of repeated slaughter but systematic racism, intentional dehumanisation and oppression.
Writing about _The New Jim Crow_ I started to piece together my understanding of matters of race. What began as a simple reading diary grew into something more - another writing project that would expand into the beginnings of an essay of sorts over the overbusy spaced out days I was able to sit down at it for an hour or two, sometimes busying up my mind the more so I couldn't sleep. Trying to piece all of this together I looped back over old thoughts and memories, picking apart how I had thought about race over this last period in the Czech Republic, a homogeneous, overwhelmingly white country in Central Europe, and how I had thought about it before in Britain, the country I was born in, a country which has been decreasingly white since the empire came home from Windrush, famously, and the Second World War, where television (and good food and good music) was significantly more diverse than my surroundings ever were.
I had a powerfully solitary Covid following a long period of disillusion and disappointment. I ordered the book from the London Review Bookshop. Britain had finally triggered the Brexit process and so it was held up in customs for some time with Alex Haley's _Roots_ and _Beloved_ by Toni Morrison. I started _Beloved_ several times but it was more somehow that I was orbiting it or it was orbiting me. This was the end - the collapse - of a long period of fitful, compartmentalised, grandiose plans for The Great Un-American novel,[5] a novel as software project, a software project as novel, a period of profound disillusionment and draining, circuitously ineffectual striving. I wound up with the book on a Vineyard in Moravia where I was grafting, for free, and sheltering in place in a monsoon month or so in October into November of that first year where I vaped marijuana, smoked a pipe full of thick cut tobacco and, filthily, standard Golden Virginia rolling baccy. Then and another time or two, it stalled. I struggle with stories involving ghosts: always have. I watched films about Morrison (I would say _The Pieces I am_ is a must see but that I am fundamentally opposed to the notion there should be any such thing as a must see), watched interviews with her, listened to podcasts about her (_Backlisted_ likely as not deserves a mention here). I read pieces written about her and her work (Anne Enright revisited some of her novels in the London Review of Books some years ago). Likely as not, I ought to start somewhere else with her than _Beloved_.
_Roots_, which at 888 pages in the edition I have, is substantially longer than I expected and longer than most books I ever read and has as a consequence had fewer vicissitudes. Knowing little enough about it but that _Roots_ the [first] television series was considered a classic, I threw it into a list which was, a year or so after I had read _Why I am No Longer Talking to White People About Race_ and learned more about the British role in the slave trade, going to learn everything there was to know about racial injustice in a peripheral and homogeneous country on the edge of Europe. I might well have done better to have cleaved closer to a list of African women writers I had found in a piece by Gary Younge some years before.
Things kick up for various reasons. I had, no doubt, been doing a lot of the work of confrontation I required for taking on these topics in a meaningful way, but what really brought it up for me towards the end of the summer, it must have been, was watching Fight the Power, a BBC Documentary about hip hop that had none other than Chuck D as executive producer. I had been led there from The Fediverse, a decentralised, free and open source social networking protocol[8] I have used on and off for a number of years (I must have set up my first account soon after it launched though I don't have the internet to check when that was: sometime around 2016, I'm guessing). That itself could take a lot of unpacking since The Fediverse is a very specific aggregation of speech acts of avatars thought typically to be associated with people [the original draft of this sentence utilised a lot of strikethru text not permitted by the Gemini protocol]. There is, first of all, what might be the natural / native demographic: a certain type of tech worker who is sceptical of corporations, aware of [one or more of the many thousands of] dangers of data mining / mass surveillance / surveillance capitalism; predominantly white and affluent with plenty of time at all hours of the day and night to "chat" and pontificate, this is nonetheless a demographic which is, in some specific ways primarily relating to sexuality, gender, and neurotype, diverse; they are prone to a different style of tech-utopianism than may be found in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, The Fediverse was expanded and, to a degree, diversified, once again rather specifically, by successive waves of migration when one or another of the corporate social networks did something so self-evidently invasive or unethical that even a portion of their millions of generally abuse-tolerant users looked elsewhere: this one bans nipples, that one fails to ban a prominant fascist calling for genocide, or whatever it might be. The Fediverse had always known periods of "discourse" and there had always been a number of personas and personalities who seemed to have clout for their social justice credentials but the tone policing and performative privilege checking and "woke scolding" had got to be such that it reminded me of two things. One was the Tao Te Ching which seemed sometimes the only thing to consistently make sense to me since the time, just before Covid 19, when I began to read and reflect on it regularly:
THIRTY EIGHT Truly good people are not aware of their goodness, And are therefore good. Foolish people try to be good, And are therefore not good. [...] Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness, there is kindness. When kindness is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost, there is ritual. - translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English with Toinette Lippe THIRTY EIGHT A man of the highest virtue does not keep to virtue and that is why he has virtue. A man of the lowest virtue never strays from virtue and that is why he is without virtue. [...] Hence when the way was lost there was virtue; when virtue was lost there was benevolence; when benevolence was lost there was rectitude; when rectitude was lost there were the rites. - translated by D.C. Lau
There are many translations of these passages, and many commentaries upon them, but I suppose it is the reflexions upon them - the moss on the stones that relate to different passages in the little sequestered, fenced off, often overlooked, and frequently padlocked zen garden of my mind - which I think of rather than the passages themselves: the reflections on Hrabal and Havel and the Charta 77 crowd, on social media and the commentariat, the Czech Republic and the people I have met here. What I sometimes think I see when I look at Mastodon and the like is that, however much we may learn that race is invented, we reinvent it and police the boundaries over and over again.
There is more I could say on this. More I could think on it as that is more what I am doing as I write these lines. It is not about any kind of conclusion, more about the process.
And anyway, I had planned, some weeks ago in a busy semester now (there has not been the bandwidth), to note that while /The New Jim Crow/ ends with an extended quote from the incomparable James Baldwin, from /The Fire Next Time/, which is absolutely now on my to read list:
...You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity...
I finished _The New Jim Crow_ on the 24th of September, just as the new semester was starting up at university. I had taken time out to go and pick up Eric Bennett's _Workshops of Empire_ on the 21st and must have picked this up right afterwards. A very different subject matter, albeit one I had also been working towards for some years. Here we have the Iowa Writing Workshop and some of the reflections I have made about what amounts to the professionalisation and institutionalisation of the creative writing industry - the way writers are chosen and filtered out. This all relates to work I am doing - slowly, painstakingly - on a piece of writing I call _Kafka was a Realist_. We'll come to all that, no doubt, given time, but here again now, in Bennett's study, appears James Baldwin, two pages into the introduction. "The ban on committed literature", Bennett states, "was enforced not only by the white men dominating the intellectual scene, but also by women, like [Flannery] O'Connor, and by writers of color."
How we can put together writers like Flannery O'Connor, now definitively outed as a racist, though she appears to remain for many in the canon, writing in the approved manner, and Baldwin, I didn't fathom for the rest of the book. There is a story to be told, without a doubt, but it's by no means as simple as that. It never is.
On to _Roots_. The book. The first and second series. And circling Hrabal. A handful of flirtations: Jeanette Winterson's _Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?_, which I may have picked up in a gentrified cafe attached to an art centre that's being wound up for the developers to come in, Craig Thompson's _Habibi_. Israeli stories. Comma Press's _The Book of Gaza_.
On it goes. Commitments, compulsions, distractions, evasions, obsessions. I'll see if I can't make a note of it now and again without this logging becoming the only thing I am capable of writing with the time and energy that will be my due. This last, dragging on over the months, took it out of me.
[1] At the time of writing, the Wikipedia page on "List of Unarmed African Americans killed by law enforcement officers in the United States" compiles to 97 pages. A similar list, this time of Black women victims of police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States under the title of SayHerName which runs from Eleanor Bumpors, killed by police on October 29, 1984, to Priscilla Slater, who died in police custody on 10th June, 2020, contains 104 such entries. My own selection was checked against Wikipedia but consists of those names that have resonated with me, that I have heard and read in various contexts. Almost inevitably, because of the period we are dealing with and the manner in which many of these people's lives became real for millions at the very moment of their violent death, I have seen many of their face, heard their voices.
[2] I remember the news about Rodney King whose vicious, prolonged beating at the hands of a number of LA police officers was filmed in 1991 when I was 12. I remember the LA riots that followed. The murder of Stephen Lawrence two years later affected me more profoundly in terms of my understanding of racial problems. If it seems at first glance to buck the trend described here since it was not filmed, I remember harrowing reconstructions, video of the obnoxious accused squaring off to protesters (including, famously, iconically, members of The Nation of Islam) and video filmed, secretly, if cack-handedly, by the police, in which they acted out what by then nobody thought were "mere" violent fantasies.
[3] It has been a long two weeks since I first started writing this piece. My writing is typically interrupted; my character, temperament, and "wiring" is such that I typically need weeks in which I am required to do nothing but write (which means that I am required to do nothing, since nobody requires me to write) in order to finish a piece of this length and ambition (small enough here on both counts). I was writing my way into this piece, initially as a reading diary, at the beginning of the academic year. In this time, events in Israel occurred which drew my attention entirely. They will, I have no doubt, help to change the next few years. They will likely also contribute to a pandemic of conformity and pusillanimity such as we saw in the wake of "9/11".
[4] It was called, I see now, _Don't Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves_ and I remember it as being a little superior to Russell T. Davies' also excellent _It's A Sin_.
[5] I ordered a number of copies and gave one to the winning student, who had figured out how to send an encrypted mail to me work Gmail account.
[6] I have not read the version of the piece collected in _Opinions_ and it may be that the word was introduced or negotiated by an editor. It seems at any rate a particularly Guardian kind of spin. The deaths of six black people including one woman and two teenagers, are mentioned in the article. A photograph accompanying the article is of the one white male mentioned, the journalist James Foley who was beheaded in Syria in 2012. There is little point in discussing individual choices such as this as there may be may number of reasons for them. Over time, however, when one reads more and more such articles, patterns do emerge.
[7] I used the phrase for a while in a progenitor of whatever is the project this is becoming.
[8] I have three accounts on The Fediverse at present. Two of these are on servers running Mastodon, at present the most popular software which makes use of the ActivityPub protocol to deliver the frankly Twitter-style microblogging services which make up the bulk of the posts on the Fediverse. One of these is an account I set up for work ran by the kind of hosting service which may undermine some of the claims made for the benefits of the decentralised nature of the Fediverse; it may be barely moderated at all. The third server runs HomeTown, a fork of Mastodon. A fork is a derivation of a software project which starts as a clone of the original (at a given point of its development) which is then developed with different design goals or an altered, somewhat incompatible philosophy. Since most free and open source projects accept "patches" ie. improvements from ad hoc contributors, it is typically only when development of a project is stalling under its owners or where differences of opinion become large enough for a viable alternative team to form around an alternative that a fork tends to be created. HomeTown is, if I understand it correctly, a little less resource intensive than the bloaty vanilla Mastodon and has somewhat upgraded moderation tools. The server running HomeTown is independent and rather strictly moderated in a manner which could likely be written up verbatim and offered up as satire. The other Mastodon server is an anarchist instance a friend of my transferred to after Elon Musk took over Twitter where I set up an alt account after my HomeTown server stopped federating (voluntarily stopped interoperating with) his first server, one of two oversized and under-moderated flagship instances ran by Mastodon's developer.
Entered on [2023-09-24 Sun 19:10]