Links 1.25.2022 — Molly Cook, Weird Studies, Peace Labor May, Tokozenji, SHWEP

Hey, folks. I thought I'd post some links to people and things that have been occupying my mindspace as of late.

In no particular order:

Tokozenji is a Rinzai Zen temple in Yokohama, Japan, that offers zazen via Zoom twice a month, with instructions and brief dharma talks in Japanese and English. I've joined both January meetings, and it's a very worthwhile experience. 

Peace Labor May is a Marxist vlogger and writer from Kazakhstan whose work I discovered last month. I like her open, honest approach to things a lot. She's one of the few voices I've heard directly from Kazakhstan in the wake of the unrest there earlier this month.

I met Molly Cook at the end of December, not long after she'd filed to run in the Democratic primary against John "prisoners don't deserve air conditioning" Whitmire for Texas Senate district 15. Whitmire, who wants to be mayor of Houston, figures he'll run that campaign while also serving as state senator for the 40th year in a row. To which I say: fuck you, man, way to disregard your constituents. Molly, on the other hand, is an ER nurse, DSA member, and tireless community organizer. Read an interview with her here in the Texas Signal.

Weird Studies is a podcast about, well, weirdness. Wide-ranging, entertaining, deeply knowledgeable, and possessed of a spirit of inquiry well-suited to the many varieties of human experience, it's one of my favorite things to listen to when I'm driving, which thankfully is not that often.

The Secret History of Western Esotericism is another podcast, one I started listening to just today (or was it yesterday?). It looks to be devilishly detailed in its analysis of the history of western traditions of ritual magic, theosophy, gnosticism, occultism, alchemy, and the like over the course of roughly two millennia. Seriously, check out the episode list and tell me that's not dense as hell.

If that's not enough to keep you busy, I'll post another thrilling installment of the Thousand Character Classic project tomorrow.

 

Notes on the 2021 DSA National Convention

 I've been a DSA member for a few years now, but this is the first national convention I've attended. My attendance, like everyone else's this year, was virtual, due to the pandemic, but that was fine by me. I also was not a full delegate, but an alternate for the Houston delegation. Any fears I had before the convention began that I wouldn't get to participate—i.e., vote—were quickly laid to rest, as I ended up subbing in for my comrades on several occasions. Alas, my alternate status precluded me from voting on NPC candidates, though the final lineup contains most of the people I would've voted for.

The convention was run across a number of platforms, which made things clunky at best and a total mess at worst. The pace was slowed by an endless variety of procedural fuckery, with people making motions that did nothing but cause headaches, technical issues that led to (temporarily) missing votes, and what seemed to be last-minute rule changes and different rulings by different chairs—things that couldn't always be fixed by the support staff, who must have been swamped from the get-go. (Thanks for all your hard work to keep things running, comrades.) If you want to get a sense of how things moved, Tempest Magazine has an incomplete report of the convention, complete with blow-by-blow notes on motions and such.

Since I don't really use Twitter, I missed a lot of acrimonious shit-slinging regarding some of the convention's controversial occurrences, namely the credentialing of some delegates and the removal or withdrawal of several NPC candidates. There was also a lot of heated debate about some of the resolutions under consideration, but from what I saw—within the confines of the convention framework, not on Twitter or whatever—it stayed pretty civil.

The issue of internationalism, which revolved around one resolution in particular, was a real sticking point. I don't doubt that the folks who argued in favor of the resolution (and who won the vote to pass it) did so in good faith, and I don't totally disagree with them or the resolution, but I'm a little wary of the potential for the DSA to hitch itself to movements and mass parties overseas that may not share the same values, and/or are little more than state-aligned or ineffective organizations. Thankfully, there's nothing binding in the resolution with regard to action, so I'm happy to wait and see what happens.

As a result of the convention, DSA has a national platform for the first time. It's not perfect, but it's a start. There was also overwhelming support for the Green New Deal and eco-socialism, which to me was the most important thing that came out of the convention. While there's obviously no disentangling politics from the climate crisis, the almost unimaginable weight of the latter exerts such gravitational pull that it takes precedence in a way nothing else under discussion can, and everything ends up being seen through the lens of climate collapse. There's no world to win if there's no world at all.

What else? I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Nathan Robinson, editor of the superb Current Affairs, via the convention's virtual tabling feature. I wish there had been a better, more permanent way of keeping in touch with people from DSA chapters around the country, but so it goes. I also wish I'd joined my Houston comrades at the firefighters' union hall to attend virtually together, but the current state of COVID-19 infections around here has made me reluctant to spend more time indoors than is necessary.

All in all, despite the issues discussed above, I'm very glad I attended the 2021 DSA National Convention, and that I got to represent my chapter. Will I do it again in 2023, when the high decision-making body of DSA meets again, presumably in person? Maybe. Reading and hearing comrades debate, I got the feeling that DSA is on the cusp of something, but I don't know what, exactly. We're close to 100,000 members, but what does that actually mean for socialist politics in the US? As I mentioned, the climate crisis demands a full-scale revolution in human behavior in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, and I think that extends into how we act politically. Building the DSA into an old-style party won't cut it, and I think a lot of us know it. What we do with that knowledge remains to be seen, and unless there are a lot of stupid mistakes made in the next couple years, I intend on sticking around to find out.

 

An overdue update.

Jesus, it's been a weird few months.

Even if you somehow leave out the grotesque, incompetent bevy of swindlers, Bible-thumpers, and authoritarian lickspittles that passes for the US government these days, and which is eagerly leading the charge toward a future that'll be as devoid of the aesthetics of a proper cyberpunk dystopia as it rich in the genre's inherent misery, 2017 has been a deeply weird, deeply fucked year for much of the world.

Since I last wrote, Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston and much of the Texas Gulf Coast. I was lucky to be spared, though for a few days there I spent a lot of time on the porch, sleep-deprived, rekindling my old smoking habit, watching the water creep up the steps. When the floodwaters receded, I put in some time with the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, gutting houses that had been flooded and getting direct aid to folks who needed it- and still need it. This shit ain't over, and won't be for a long time. Houston DSA is still helping out, so if three months after the fact isn't too late for you to want to visit the link above and donate a few bucks, know that it'll go to those in need, which means folks that the state of Texas and/or the federal government hasn't gotten around to helping, assuming they ever do.

But even events as hellacious as Harvey, and the subsequent ruin visited upon Florida and Puerto Rico by its tempestuous siblings, are incapable of hindering the human race's drunken stumble toward extinction- though I sincerely hope we trip and fall face-first into some sort of late-species glory on the way there- and so here we are in the middle of November. Let's take stock of what your humble Corpse has been up to, and/or thinks about things.

With the first draft of the Santa Monica translation done, I'm working regularly on the Sita Valles translation. The weather here is typically schizophrenic, which is to say that it's never actually cold for more than a few days at a time. I've lived here most of my life now, and this still pisses me off. I went to the Texas Renaissance Festival this past weekend, something I haven't done since 1999, and had a great time. I've set aside the cigarette habit I was far too eager to take up again when Harvey gave me a rationalization to do so. I visited the city of Québec in September, where I ate a lot of delicious food, learned that I can read French passably (and speak it horribly), used H.P. Lovecraft's history/travelogue as a guidebook of sorts, and pondered the legacy of Europe in America.

I've read some good books, among them Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, and Philip Hoare's The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea. I continue to practice 形意拳 xingyiquan and 八卦掌 baguazhang, the two Daoist internal martial arts I started studying earlier this year. I spend a lot of time with cats, but never enough. The desire to write a novel about Macau and a book about Camilo Pessanha still floats around in my mind, ever closer to realization as ideas pile up and get written down.

Mostly, though, I'm just living. Not in the sense of getting by, but in the fullest sense of the word, replete with positive and negative aspects. The more time passes, the more I appreciate just living, and the more I understand how much that concept encompasses, especially when the world around you seems boring enough to make you scream, or when it's Accept-level balls-to-the-wall overwhelming.

All right, off to martial arts class. Catch y'all soon- hopefully not four months later soon.


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