links/2023w07.1

• Fantastic resource: a bevy of comics strips for your RSS pleasure: Comics RSS

• Adding to "To-Read" list: ‘A Mystery of Mysteries’ Review: Edgar Allan Poe, Through the Pale Door | WSJ

• And another...: The Daily Heller: The Maus That Roars | Print Magazine

• Banksy’s Startling Valentine’s Day Mural Exposes Domestic Violence as a Dark Reality Ignored on the Most Romantic Day of the Year | artnet

• Osaka man arrested after paying phone bill in the middle of crime spree | SoraNews24

• "Our findings suggest that the crunch caused by the war in Ukraine may, in fact, have fast-tracked the green transition by an astonishing five to ten years": War and subsidies have turbocharged the green transition | The Economist

• Nintendo-Yakuza love hotels being the narrative I never knew I needed: Nintendo’s Forgotten History With the Japanese Mafia | CBR

• New Watterson!! Calvin & Hobbes creator returns after 28 years with illustrated book ‘for adults’ | Polygon

"give it all..." (maybe, probably)

Next newsletter taking shape – thought I still have to decide on the main essay/ramble, but it'll come to me, probably.

For some reason – idiocy / punishment gluttony? – I decided it would be a good idea to resurrect three abandoned projects as my sides (I take Wednesdays and the weekend to work on these side things, with the goal that they be as different from the MainFictionThing as humanly possible). Still have to decide on a final form, but I do want to have some kind of "mainstream" (read: not my usual weird shit though still, probably weird shit – just written in mostly complete sentences) series / world to revisit over and again. This trio might be it, them, maybe.

Balancing a desire to write something in this space every day (these do, if nothing else, provide me a way to work on something else when I'm stuck in the main something) and to save it for Sunday but I keep coming back to Annie Dillard's words in THE WRITING LIFE:

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now."

Annie Dillard https://www.worldcat.org/title/19268199

Consider these words to be thus given, spent.

Dick Tracy Valentine, date unknown.

1940s Superman valentines

HEAVY HEAVY – Young Fathers

A surefire sign that an album will end up among the EarBliss: I turn it up. I wanted to turn HEAVY HEAVY up even louder than the Apple-allowed: this thing rips out of the speakers, grabs your throat and your heart and doesn't let go. Vinyl ordered and I'll be checking out more of their work (wish I'd found them sooner). Turn it up.

nothing is sacred (until all the words are written and even then)

Lesson of the workweek thus far being that no component is sacred until the whole story/project/whatever is done (and, as the title would suggest, even then): I've (again) committed the cardinal sin of letting a passage languish in Mississippi a day too long (as Bob Dylan would say) and attached to it too permanent a responsibility before the whole was even close to revealing the totality of its narrative and rhythmic needs / permutations. Answer to problem of lack of forward motion lay, of course, in the spaces between the passage I was treating as holy and, as such, the scalpel has come out, the delete key (or copy/paste into a "Cut" file, as is my usual method) is working at full functionality and the words are flowing again – at least until the next time I decide to ignore my own advice which will probably be sooner rather than later.