Beautiful Books, Christmas despair, other blogs, other gods

A few months back I pre-ordered from Skeuomorph Press a handmade book illuminating Ursula K Leguin’s brief essay “A Rant About Technology.” Hand-bound letterpress book is an underrated medium. It’s fun to hold art, peruse it, feel the texture, fold and unfold. As a parent I read a lot of lift-the-flap books. More books for adults should have expanding folded maps, pop-ups, etc.

Here I share it in its entirety minus the tactile sensory experience: 

To my knowledge both faithful readers of this blog know where I live. Peruse the book next time you’re over here. 
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A sober analysis of Mamdani’s choice to keep ruthless billionaire pig in charge of NYPD: Jonathan Ben-Menachem for The Nation

Police and their “unions” are a political powerhouse. They have convinced the majority of the populace that they are on the side of safety and accountability. In fact they do not keep us safe and violently resist oversight or accountability. Making police unpopular is valuable work and we all have a role to play in it. The police are defunding our cities. Standing armies are expensive.

I used to subscribe to The Nation. Now I don’t. Too many ads, too self-congratulatory. Oh well. This article was good.

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I pay dues to DSA. I’m not very engaged otherwise. I show up to the odd picket line. I recommend you join too. 

The future is not hopeless and there are a million things to be done, which means no one thing is pointless. 

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Links to other good blogs:

Grant Petersen. Golden standard of blog. Founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works. He writes with simplicity and clarity, mostly about bicycle stuff, but also whatever catches his fancy. In 2013 or so I bought a Bridgestone bicycle for $50, searched online for info on the make and model, found a PDF of the 1994 bicycle catalog and read it from front to back. Why aren’t all catalogs written with respect for the reader and prospective buyer, informative graphics about manufacturing processes, beautiful illustrations, a crossword puzzle? And that’s how I became a reader of that catalog-writer’s blog. Now I own two Rivendell Bicycle Works machines. In conclusion, reading blogs is expensive. Reader beware!

Cory Doctorow’s blog. Unassuming tech nerd. Novelist. Writes about the Internet and other things. He coined the word “enshittification.” His season of the CBC podcast “Understood” is a succinct history of how the Internet went from being fun to being broken on purpose. The blog is mostly just links to things he found interesting. He's an interesting guy so the links tend to be interesting too. 

Ursula K Leguin’s blog. Needs no introduction. In her old age she started blogging. I once tried working through her book Steering The Craft, a textbook for writing. Turns out writing is hard! I tried doing the assignments/exercises in the quietest place I could find in that time in my life. It was called The Moon Bar. Nondescript divey storefront in Kolkata, next to the Diamond Plaza Mall where I used to go for an afternoon matinee of an (air-conditioned) English language Hollywood film to escape the afternoon heat. It was on my bike ride home. Cycling in congested megacities is invigorating like mountain biking. You’re all the way On. When else are you focused on Just One Thing? It’s good for the brain I think. Like fighting a bear or writing a symphony. I realize I’m no longer describing Leguin’s blog. This blog you are currently reading has no editor, is free, has no promise of a topic and therefore is never off-topic. The Moon Bar was kind of like a hobbit-hole: smoke-filled, cheery, partly underground. I miss it now. 

Do you have a blog you check in on regularly? You can leave a comment to tell all of the faithful readers of Ben Wildflower dot com blog about it. 

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Ben’s dirty martini

One shot vodka, one shot dry vermouth, 1/3 shot Kalamata olive brine, 1/3 shot Spanish olive brine. Shake with ice. Strain into chilled glass if you remembered to chill a glass. You probably forgot to chill a glass. It’s fine. Serve with 2 or 3 garlic-stuffed green olives. You will not regret skewering more than one garlic-stuffed olive. Yum. Little garlicky olive interludes in a multi-part liquor-sipping session. Like an Intermission. Salud. 
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Santa Clause is the average consumer’s fantasy of God. An all-seeing panopticon of a deity dividing up the mass of humanity into two tidy categories of Good People and Bad People, using his powers to bestow material blessings in the form of landfill-bound consumer trinkets for the Good People and a coal-filled-stocking slap-on-the-wrist for Bad People. In practice his material blessings are distributed on a spectrum, the wealthiest getting the most and best gifts, the poorest (Bad People) the fewest and worst. A magical arctic clown in charge of workers we’re to believe are not-quite-human and happy with their lot asks little children, “What do you want?” “A commodity,” they reply in the shopping mall liturgy. 

I don’t like Christmastime. Christmas every year creeps up like an impending deadline, a tightness in my chest rising to my throat, something that both weighs on my shoulders and won’t let them drop. I hate the tinsel, the radio Christmas tunes, inflatable lawn decor, microplastic artificial snow, all the glittery baubles and bells. 

I used to find some respite from Commercial Christmas in Religious Christmas. God Is a Baby Born To Die is a far better story than God Is An Offshore Surveillance State Capitalist Who Wants You to Buy Buy Buy. But too much of the empty feel-good pap has weaseled into sacred places (“There are no unsacred places; only sacred places and desecrated places” -Wendell Berry) and a Christmas homily is as likely to reflect on the unfathomable mystery of the Powerless Almighty / God-With-Us / Creator of the Cosmos materially siding with the wretched and the damned as it is to be some variation of, “The real meaning of this annual commercial frenzy is sharing and being with your loved ones so it’s actually good.” For fucks sake.

I breathe a sigh of relief every boxing day. 

I still cling to crumbs of hymns and liturgy that wriggle into my consciousness and repeat themselves, little Advent mantras, in a way that makes me believe the arc of history really can be, must be, will be bent toward justice: “the thrill of hope— a weary world rejoices,” “in his name all oppression shall cease,” “thou who wast rich beyond all pleasure all for love’s sake becamest poor.” Wild shit to politely sing about in your suit and tie.

As a kid I made other kids cry with my convincing proofs of the non-existence of Santa Clause. As you age you’re supposed to accept the dogma of the Consumer’s civic religion that it’s the idea of Santa Clause that’s real and it’s impious to malign the idea of him or deny children the magic of believing in him. I now accept he is real in this sense and we must kill him. Normalize hating the very idea of Christmas cheer.

In real life I’m mostly quiet about the intensified segment of the annual suffocating rage of seasonal affective dark hollowness because people love to say, “Oh you grinch,” or “Don’t be a scrooge.” I breathe in deeply, exhale slowly through my nose, I don’t smash their ceramic figurines or hurl their tree through the window in a rain of broken glass and tangled string lights. I smile and say, “Hm. Merry Christmas,” like a normal person. 

Some of the snacks this time of year are nice. 

If you enjoy this time of year good for you. 

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I recently read this fun little book.

Fragmented indeed it is. Like most posthumous publications it’s a disjointed mess and the Latin jokes went right over my head, but it’s a fun read nonetheless and a beautiful physical book. Other book reviews might highlight the contents of a book. Good for them. Me, I’m going to tell you that gold lettering on green fabric is probably my favorite hardback book color scheme. Cloth bound. Has a bookmark ribbon! Paper texture is smooth but neither thin nor slippery. Good book! We haven’t even gotten to the words yet. 

J.R.R. Tolkien hated cars. As a kid when I first read Lord of the Rings it wasn’t the plot or characters that captivated me, but the descriptions of physical objects: technologies and how they were manufactured, what they could be used and misused for. The books shaped my notions of craftsmanship and beauty; the joys, hopes, and dangers of technological innovation. Some things built for evil purposes can only be used for evil, some things built for noble purposes are inevitably exploited by the wicked, some wicked devices can be repurposed by the wise. The manufacturing processes of the righteous are careful, rooted in ancient practice, improved upon with reverence, attentive to detail, undertaken with deep knowledge of a craft. Saruman clear-cuts and mass-produces. The visuals of the movies are great in this regard. I like the movies. Peter Jackson has too much of a hard-on for warmaking, which sells, so the movies which are really masterpieces in terms of bringing to life the people and artifacts of Middle Earth, managed to be commercial successes. I watched half of one of the Hobbit movies and I was like, “Where’d all this fighting come from? This is supposed to be silly.” But the trilogy is a good watch. 

Yes, I’m aware the subhuman enemies in Lord of the Rings are dark, from the East, a people without history or a future, worshiping a foreign god, problematically Islamic-coded. I’m aware a lot of insufferable wealthy racist fascist assholes love to name shit after Lord of the Rings things. They don’t understand books or love. 

Here’s Charles W Mills' scholarly article The Wretched of Middle Earth. Growing up is learning all your faves are problematic. They can still be your faves.

Here’s a Current Affairs Article about why fascist dorks like LoTR.  I subscribe to Current Affairs. You could do worse things with your money than subscribe to a silly little ad-free magazine. It’s fun to get mail. 

Peter Jackson’s World War 1 documentary praises war. Here’s a poem about the war. Reading this will be a better use of your time than watching They Shall Not Grow Old (war porn— worst genre of documentary. Best genres of documentary are things like Sea Creatures Doing Sea Creature Things or Here’s An Unusual Type of Guy.)

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

You don’t have to pretend to know Latin. Roman poet Horace the Dipshit said it. It means, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” In fact it is not. 

Back to my boy JRR. He hated cars. He saw the absurdity of cars in public spaces. He wrote a little jokey story about them, an editor said, “This is unpublishable,” it didn’t get published, JRR died, now it’s published along with some fun historical and biographical notes. Enjoy some big excerpts. I strung together enough for you get the gist of it: 

Eventually everyone chokes to death on the fumes and they get to the river Styx and the boatman's been replaced with a motorboat and it doesn't cost just one coin anymore. 

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I got some junk mail for GRODGESALE.COM today. Sometimes I forget about the ridiculous domains I have registered. “Grodge sale” was such a funny thought to me I had to own grodge sale dot com. I am not immune to the impulse to Buy Buy Buy. Now I pay $14 per year to own it. Possible I’m a nincompoop. 

Once I typed in “hogslop.com” at a domain registry site. It was taken. “Slop” was not yet a vernacular term for the output of LLMs. What genius beat me to the glorious domain hog slop dot com? Click here to inquire about purchasing this domain from a third party broker it said. You betcha I clicked it. The following email exchange ensued: 

Broker: 
Hi Benjamin,

You recently requested a price for the domain hogslop.com. It would be great if we could connect to discuss your opportunity to acquire this name.

I work with people every day that are looking to acquire great names and solidify their online brand and identity.

Me: 
How much is this preeeemium domain going to set me back?

Broker:
Hi Benjamin,

This domain name is available, and the owner's price is $13,000 USD.

Let me know if you have any questions about the process.

Me:
lmao

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Ok bye.