You're Tuned In To Radio Circa 1981

Chester Brown’s Paying For It, his autobiographical account of being a john, is a bit of a Canadian comics classic, and I had wanted to read it for a while. Sook-Yin Lee (former VJ, eclectic Canadian artist/personality), who was his girlfriend at the beginning of the book and has remained an indefatigable supporter, decided to bring the comic to the screen. The film came out this spring, and I wanted to read the comic before seeing it. Finally it came through the holds queue recently.

( it's long, sorry )

Oh yeah and I think I forgot to write, regarding romantic relationships, that Brown doesn't address polyamory at all. Not surprising, but his thing about marriage being a liberty-infringing contract is blown up by ENM. Anyway...

Standard disclaimer: I am not involved in any of this. Discussions of protest tactics are purely speculative; this is not legal advice, and if you commit an actual crime, don't post about it.
 
Courtesy of a friend who may identify themselves if they choose (thank you!) I read this article in Mother Jones about the No Sleep For ICE movement and can't help constrasting it with the #NoKings protest. Not that I'd want to disparage the latter—I think it's awesome that people did it!—but the former is an example of the kinds of tactics that we increasingly need to see.

I have a number of issues with protest marches, especially in North America. We on the left tend towards reification of historical protest movements without ever analyzing what made them effective (or not). A good example locally is the Days of Action, a series of rolling one-day strikes against the extremist right-wing government of Mike Harris in 1996. These were a resounding failure. Mike Harris and his regime steamrolled over the labour movement in Ontario, which never recovered, and despite being directly responsible for a number of deaths, continues to enrich himself by running gulags for seniors. However, these protests were loud, colourful, and most importantly, made people feel like they were Doing Something. Again—it's important to make people feel like they are Doing Something, that is how movements get built. But when a new far-right regime was elected in Ontario, the entire strategy of the labour movement pivoted to re-enact a protest movement that had been an abject failure, and so we lost again, repeatedly and even harder. 

I had the same issue with Occupy, where what had been a successful tactic in Egypt and New York was exported around the world, without regard to local conditions. It resulted in one baffling morning spent wandering the Toronto encampment, where a lone speaker used the People's Mic to communicate with five comrades. The aesthetics of protest triumphed over the old-fashioned idea that protest ought to accomplish something.

Now we are seeing LARPing of the kind of mass demos that have been happening since the 1960s, most of them failures, as the authorities are quite competent in curtailing this kind of activism, either by assassinating political opponents, kettling demonstrators, or conducting mass surveillance to be used in future disappearances. The great success of #NoKings is the theoretical embarrassment for Trump of seeing his own sad, empty birthday parade dwarfed by crowds in nearly every American city and town. To be clear—this is a success, as Trump cares a great deal about crowd numbers. But this is a regime immune to reality and shame, and entirely capable of generating AI slop to convince the death cult members that what they saw with their own eyes wasn't true.

Which is to say: It's good, it's useful, but now the tactics need to change.

To contrast, No Sleep is very targeted in its strategy and goals. Let's be clear: Every employee of ICE is a human trafficker. They should not be allowed to return to their homes and communities after a day's work, because that day's work is Nazi shit. Targeting them where they live and sleep is critical. It reminds us that these are not normal people who are doing a job, but instruments of a police state who are conducting activities that are unreservedly evil and socially unacceptable. It is a reminder both to them and anyone who cooperates with the Trump regime that, in fact, "just following orders" is famously not a defence at the Hague. Most importantly, though, it introduces friction between the regime's aims and its outcomes, rendering it less effective in kidnapping and disappearing people.

I think we are all thinking: "I am exhausted. I can't fight everything all at once. Where are my energies best spent?" At least, I'm thinking that. This is deliberate; this is flooding the zone, making the laundry list of bad things come so fast and furious that opponents don't have time to recover from one fight before we're thrown into another. It's very tempting to get enmeshed in weekend street demos—for one thing, for those of us who work, they can be done on the weekend—but I would encourage everyone to participate in them with an eye to what they're useful for and what they're not useful for. Remember that surveillance will be gathered on you no matter how careful you are. If you or your comrades get arrested, movement resources will need to be directed towards your defence (and you will be dragged through hell because even if you did nothing wrong, the point of charges is to destroy your employment, finances, and relationships). Stay on the lookout for smaller, more agile actions that can add friction, rather than big showy events. Don't get caught up in violence vs. nonviolence discourse, or crowd numbers.

The answer to "where are my energies best spent" is always, "whatever you can do," which for me tends to be above-ground, legal actions on the weekends. This has different significance locally because our supposedly socialist mayor who used to go to protests passed a protest ban, so imo all protest energies in Toronto ought to at least focus a little on breaking this ban so that we can all get our Charter rights back. But this may not be the conditions where you are.

Also stop using the Hey Ho chant. It reminds me of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves but instead of marching over a log, they're walking headfirst into a police baton.

It thinks I might want to go date in the suburbs. Or even the greater Toronto area. What's wrong with this app. It even asked me if I own a car and said no. I can't go there, and the people are scary.

Mike Duncan has finished telling his Martian Revolution volume. sabotabby I don't know if you listened to his interview on It Could Happen Here, but if you were worried about events in your writing happening in real life before publishing your story, imagine publishing a weekly speculative historical fiction podcast where events in real life catch up with your narrative week by week... :P

Duncan has switched to Patreon as his publishing platform, and now there is a discussion thread where he mingles with listeners/fans. He revealed that he was thinking about writing this Martian Revolution fiction throughout the 10 years he spent doing the Revolutions podcast. So that kind of explains why he was able to write the damn thing week by week as he did, (I mean he did plan the big lines of it ahead of time) but holy cow. That was a magnificent story, especially if you have been a listener of the podcast, or if you have good revolutionary history knowledge in general, because you can pick up many references to other revolutions, and I probably didn't even catch two thirds of them. But there was a LOT of the Russian Revolution infused in this story.

For all of you holdouts who haven't ever listened to the podcast, just listen to one episode per week... Start at 3.1 as even Duncan himself recommends, and even though the French Revolution is too many damn episodes, it's worth stretching the pleasure over time. I think I was consuming about 2-3 episodes a week for a long time, so I only caught up to its weekly release a year or two ago, in the middle of his 10th volume (the Russian Revolution) and I was also catching up on his seven years of History of Rome as well, though I did not pay as much attention to that one.

Maybe I should start a Révolution Weeklé, like Whale Weekly, to get more people to tackle it... *cough*

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A friend is planning on starting a Capital vol. 1 reading group, and he asked me if I would read it in French so I could provide a different perspective... Weee! (I first turned him down because I think in English these days, but Marx personally supervised the French translation, rewrote some bits of it, and eventually told Russian translators that they should use the French translation rather than the original German to base their own translation on! So I will read it in French after all.

David Harvey has a course (a recording of which I have as a podcast) teaching Capital... In an interview, he was discussing how he has taught Capital for like 30 years, but not always at the same school, and even in the same school, the cohort of students he would get would change in terms of personal interests and areas of study, so every time he has taught the course, students have been picking up on different parts of the book and/or had different perspectives to bring to it. Imagine how interesting that must be.

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After listening to 10 years of podcasting on 10 different Revolutions, I do wonder though why revolutionaries (and many of their arm-chair wannabes) still focus so much on Marx. I mean I understand that he's a phenomenal writer and the finest analyst of capitalism and all that, but in the end, revolutions, even the Russian one, didn't quite happen because of a good grasp of Marxist theory. Marx /followed/ the French revolution, the mother of all the other modern ones. The Cuban Revolution didn't have much of a Marxist character until the U.S. started opposing Castro and forced them in the hands of the Soviets, along with Ché's own inclinations. I mean the end of the Cold War means that there's a lot fewer people focusing on Marx today, but he's still a big deal in many university revolutionary/activist circles, one of which I am somewhat adjacent to thanks to F.

I dunno, why not make yourself more anxious this week. It Could Happen Here has the ability to send James Stout, an experienced war journalist, to LA to cover the uprising against ICE kidnappings. There's a lot of coverage in today's episode, which I'm currently listening to, but for detailed reporting, listen to "On the Ground in LA."

The scale of the so-called riots will surprise you—they surprised me, and I've been to LA. It's a very big city and unlike during the wildfires, very little of it is actually on fire. The uprisings, which are direct responses to people's families, neighbours, and colleagues being kidnapped by an out-of-control paramilitary organization, are actually only a few thousand people. Which is not to denigrate the bravery of those people—quite the opposite!—but to poke holes in the regime's propaganda.

P.S. If you are going to a protest this weekend, please ignore that "non-violent wave" thing and other similar memes going around. It is an op. If violence erupts and you do not want to be involved, don't sit down. Get out of there. I do not want to see a generation of young protestors with traumatic brain injuries, please. Also avoid bridges (don't let yourself get kettled or arrested en masse), and if you get teargassed, use water, not milk or anything else. Stay safe, I love you.

On the Nose - What Ta-Nehisi Coates Saw
What Now? with Trevor Noah - Have We Missed The Message? with Ta-Nehisi Coates

Two Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews on his book The Message: One with Peter Beinart, and one with Trevor Noah. One more focused on Israel as a political site of struggle in the USA, the other more on Blackness. The discussion on the exchange between Africans and African-Americans on Black identity is particularly interesting, esp. with these two guys having the conversation. It's such a pleasure listening to Coates and hear his thoughts pop in your head. If you just want to listen to one interview, listen to the Trevor Noah one, but there is little overlap.

So I'm catching up to Andor Season 2, and listened to It Could Happen Here's Andor s02e1-3 review episode. Totally worth it! The bit about the Nazi simulacrum was quite a revelation, and the discussion about leftist infighting was amusing.

sabotabby and a former LJer whose old alias I forget brought to my attention, from a Variety interview, that Diego Luna used to volunteer for the Zapatistas. As side notes, Denise Gough is a full-blown supporter of Palestine, and Tony Gilroy a listener of the Revolutions podcast, so this is a pretty awesome crew.

The only huge letdown is that Luna reveals that he talked Tony Gilroy down from doing 5 seasons to 2. What a fool.

So reader, I have to make a confession. Even though I have lived in this city for 25 years, I had never until now visited the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I have known for a long time that it is one of this city's premier alt-culture and print festivals, and it's been held within 30 minutes walk from my place as far as I can remember.

"Over the years, TCAF has drawn prominent names such as Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Daniel Clowes, Junji Ito, Chris Ware, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Chester Brown, Seth, Kate Beaton, Adrian Tomine, Kamome Shirahama, and Bryan Lee O'Malley, and we seek to serve as a platform for international artists to showcase their work."
( Rambling on about TCAF, zines, comics, local architecture )

Just finished: Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls, I don't have tons to say about this comic—it'll take you maybe an hour to read if that, and it's really cute and fun, and then you read the context around it and it's quite moving and beautiful as well. It's basically a language revitalization project wrapped up in a pew-pew-pew space opera story. It's cool that this exists and I want there to be more of it.

Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot. Listen, cozy horror and other cozy authors! I will make you a deal. You get one (1) scene where the asexual protagonist comes out to their appropriately diverse love interest and they talk about their sexuality and consent in a mature, healthy way, infused with Tumblr therapyspeak, and agree to just hold hands or whatever. In exchange, I want y'all to try excise or subvert toxic tropes like having your main human antagonist being a woman who is haunted by a ghost no one else can see and locked up in a mental institution for 25 years, who has no agency at all, and who at the end realizes the error of her ways and is...cut loose to just be homeless and wander forever, I guess????

Like, aesthetically, I hate cozy. I fucking hate it. I try really hard to not judge the taste of people who like it, because intellectually I get the appeal and there's nothing wrong with liking what you like, but it's very much not for me. And when I have to read and rate a cozy book, I try to keep the ideal reader in mind, not me, a grim and cynical person who likes messy characters and tension in my storytelling. I think there are some cozy, or cozy-adjacent books that are done well (Regency and Regency+magic does low-stakes, mostly good characters in ways that I enjoy, for example) and I don't want to judge the entire subgenre either.

But I do think that there's a tendency for specifically cozy fiction to use didactic storytelling (casts include one of everyone and/or a lot of twofer characters, but these identities tend to be very shallowly written except for where they reflect the author's, conflicts are easily resolved by talking things out, good behaviour is rewarded and bad behaviour is punished or reformed, discussions about emotion or sexuality are always direct and never in conflict). So if you are going to write a book that includes, for example, instructions for the reader on how to navigate a relationship with an ace person, or how to approach therapy for a mental illness, I'm going to also need you to examine your work for unintentional messaging in a way that I wouldn't necessarily do if you're writing, say, Gothic horror where the protagonist can't decide whether she wants the vampire to eat her or fuck her. 

Which is to say that in a world where we get to see multiple Zoom therapy sessions, I do not buy that a mental institution merely drugs a character and does not attempt to help her heal at all. I think that sets up a dichotomy between Good Mental Illness (you know, the kind that makes you pretty and kinda tragic) and Bad Mental Illness (where you get your mess all over other people/try to burn down the family house) that is not good or wholesome at all.

Also, the climactic battle at the end was a huge WTF.

If you, like me, would like to join in on Cozy Horror Discourse multiple years after it was live, here are some links I appreciated:

The Material Basis of Cozy Horror by Moreau Vazh
In Praise of Discomfort by Simon O'Neill

Currently reading: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This one starts with a robot valet murdering his master and not knowing why he did it, so, promising beginning. Humanity increasingly relies on robots to do everything, and as a result, is dying out. Charles, the valet in question, doesn't know what to do without explicit orders, and so he reports to Diagnostics, only to find that robot repairs are backed up due to funding cuts that have eliminated the entire human staff. Also he may have developed a Protagonist Virus that gives him agency and self-awareness, which he very much doesn't want.

The voice in this is great—the first two chapters are basically the robots navigating their way through the murder without being able to deviate from their programming, and it's bitingly satirical and very funny. I'm rather enjoying this.

 They are going to beat you, and eventually kill you, regardless of whether your protest is violent or non-violent.

 I dunno, what do you guys want me to rant about? The Freedom Flotilla? LA vs. ICE? The fact that my government is planning more pipelines while sending in the army to deal with out-of-control wildfires? Or, closer to home, Bill 5 or the Toronto bubble zone law, or...?

This is why people curl up and retreat into fiction.

I remain once again mostly behind on podcasts, but maybe have a listen to It Could Happen Here's "Governing Fertility: How Pronatalist Policies Kill." (Trigger warning: It contains fairly graphic descriptions of what happened in Romania under Ceaușescu, which legit gave me nightmares as a kid. 

One of the particular hallmarks of both Trump 2.0, his ex-BFF Elon (who is responsible for approximately 30,000 child deaths in his short tenure as Grima Wormtongue), and far-right populist/techbro movements around the world, is an obsession with forced pregnancy, insemination, and reproduction. Obviously this is viscerally upsetting to everyone who's read or seen Handmaid's Tale, and given that the actual supposed problems with a declining birth date are mostly solved by immigration, which they want to decrease, bears some further examination. They don't just want to ban abortion, but pursue incentives for large families headed by heterosexual married couples, punish the childless, and create eugenics programs. The one thing that they don't want to do is care for whatever children are born, or create social conditions where families can live in financial and physical stability, because then the money would be sad.

The gang looks at a number of movements, including Spain and Japan, but Romania is actually the closest parallel to Trump's plans, and it's important to confront that horror straight in the face so they you know exactly what they want for American families and children. Although, you know, eventually the Ceaușescus got shot in a basement and dragged through the streets so at least there's that to look forward to.

Just finished: real ones, Katherena Vermette. This one ruled. I don't have a lot to add to what I said last week except that I really enjoyed it. If you want a good pairing (or you're not super familiar with the context of the Canadian arts scene), Jesse Wente's Unreconciled provides a great non-fiction one. But yeah, I loved the characters, I loved the poetic, Impressionist writing style, it was emotionally affecting without high stakes or pacing, which is something that genre writers could learn a lot from (more on that later). Vermette seems to be putting out great books with impressive frequency but this is the one I've enjoyed most so far.

The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed. This one was imperfect and ambitious, but I'll take that over boring any day. It's a master class in how to do some interesting worldbuilding; there's a lot going on in the background, and you get it only as a sketch. Oh yeah, there are lizard guns. Why are the guns lizards? Eh, don't worry about it, keep up. It's pretty New Weird in the tradition of Miéville and Tchaikovsky (positive) so I liked that quite a bit.

I have two big critiques, one big and one small. First, the small. This is critically acclaimed, nominated for a bunch of awards, and put out by a real press. And yet. And yet. Alefret, the main character, has one leg. This is clearly established in the opening line. His leg is slowly growing back thanks to an experimental serum that's delivered via wasp sting (again, cool) but it's slow and he's on crutches for the entire book, something that is done very well and really gives a good sense of the character's physicality. And then there is a scene where he is having dinner with two elderly sisters who have a cat. Under the table, the cat brushes up against his ankles and he holds his legs very still. WTF? Which editor let that through?

My bigger complaint is that I don't think she quite lands the ending. As I've said, it's ambitious, a story about whether pacifism can survive a horrific war.
( spoilers )

Cottagers and Indians by Drew Hayden Taylor. This is a one-act play based on the true story of Anishinaabe people trying to re-seed lakes with wild rice, over the objection of white cottagers. And it's amazing, obviously. Everything he writes is great and this is particularly affecting. It's a dance between two difficult, complicated characters, and while the white cottager character could easily be a hideous caricature, Hayden Taylor is too much of a humanist to take the easy road out. There's also a great afterword by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, because of course there is.

Currently reading: Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls. This is a bilingual (!!!) Indigenous futurist comic about two defenders of the earth, beautifully illustrated in a Formline style. If you want to learn Tahltan, I can't think of a cuter way. There's a lot of pew pew pew and it's very fun.