This month, I started my coursework for Year 3 of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School, focusing on shamanism and shadow integration. So let’s begin our links roundup with an article from Temple founder Christopher Penczak, addressing the key question for my spiritual practice in these times: what can magickal practitioners do about the destruction of American democracy? In “Things to Do to Be Ungovernable,” Christopher writes:

I’m not big on “resistance” as a word. There is magickal truth to the idea that what you resist, persists. What you are anti-, evokes its opposite to perpetuate the identity of being against it. Like antimatter and matter, and explosive results that can destroy all. As a magician you have to hold both as tools and over-identification with one results in your own harm and often your transmutation into your opposite.* The magician is not the positive or negative end of the magnet, but the person holding and using the magnet itself.

I’m big on Destruction. Binding. Transmutation. Transcending. Going around/under/over if you can’t go through. Noncompliance and non-recognition of authority. Ignoring deliberately, as an act, not passivity. And most importantly outcreating. The future is in new visions of the world and creative solutions that can entice and inspire. Destruction as in catabolic function, not wanton cruelty.  There is a show, an illusion that has always been a part of the world and we have to be better in being illusionists for good, for inspiration, ethics and justice. We have to present an option that everyone wants to choose. We not only have to outcreate, but use those tools to sell the new vision to others.

Horror fiction author Lincoln Michel offers encouragement to despairing writers in his Substack post, “Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop”:

I’m not saying that you can’t enjoy an airport novel or a microwaved burrito or the design of a corporate logo. They all have their place. I’m saying that your art is no more in competition with such content than it is with Candy Crush, bad reality TV, or social media doom scrolling. Yes, in an abstract sense there are a finite number of humans each with a finite amount of time in their lives. It does not follow that a statistically significant number of people are going into a bookstore and thinking, “Hmm, do I buy my 25th commercial thriller by James Patterson or this experimental work by an author I’ve never heard of?” The readers of your work are different readers. Your work was never going to appeal to all or even most people, not even if you were the reincarnation of Tolstoy or Toni Morrison. The AI evangelists with NFT avatars who tweet about wanting to eliminate artists weren’t ever going to read your work. The people who only care about multimedia corporate franchise “universes” or who simply have interests other than reading weren’t going to either. So why bother worrying about what they do with their time? You don’t need to think about that…

…Why make art in an age—like most ages—in which few care about it? Make art because making art enriches your life in ways other than money. Practicing an art form changes you and enlarges you. It makes you look closer at the world, think deeper, live better.

I think often about Alexander Chee’s essay “On Becoming an American Writer,” in his book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, where he says that he’s had to write through several apocalyptic historical moments: the AIDS crisis, 9/11, Trump’s first ascent to the presidency. The question his students always ask him, as if it were new, is “How can I write at a time like this?” At his Substack, The Querent, Chee recently revisited that question:

I take a moment for a thought experiment, every so often. As I try to do everything I have to do in this life, I sometimes try to imagine doing it without a job or an income for over 650 days, all while facing down missiles, bullets, starvation, the destruction of my home, torture, the murder of my family and friends, no water or working toilets or medical care, buying food off of a black market and enduring repeated forced relocations in a landscape that has been bombed so much it is a different color from space now than it was even a year ago. And still doing what I can to fundraise for myself online from people outside the country, on social media. Or to stand in lines that might get me shot.

When I think of the people still alive in Gaza, I think of how if they can survive this long, how incredible they could be if left to thrive. And yet now even the doctors left are being starved. The reporters too…

…An hour before my student had asked this question about how to write now, we had been discussing Close To The Knives by David Wojnarowicz, his 1991 essay collection that included the text of a flier from a 1989 ACT UP protest, the die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral protesting the Catholic Church’s message on AIDS, sex, women, queer people. The flyer detailed the Seven Deadly Sins, a list of 7 prominent conservatives, Catholics and politicians culpable in the AIDS crisis. I recognized this as the kind of flyer I used to write up as a part of ACT UP SF’s Media Committee. I think Wojnarowicz was trying to expand the radius of people who saw it and even to send the flyer into the future. He was flyering us from inside his book and each time someone opens the book it is like welcome to this demo, here’s a flyer. Sort of like these flyers and posters I found at the Met Online.

He died a year after the collection was published. In putting the book together he was doing what he did with a lot of his work, which was to take what he could and put it in front of an audience, a way to say this is how we fought, this is how we loved, this is how we died, do not forget us, learn from us, keep going.

On that note, some links for Gaza:

In “A Map to a Place That No Longer Exists,” published this week at Jewish Currents, Palestinian Abdullah Hany Daher writes about the surreal horror of navigating a city that’s reshaped daily by bombs:

Sometimes at night I try to picture our house in all its specificity: the way afternoon light spilled through the window, the cool hallway in summer. But the picture blurs, and panic sets in. What if I forget? What if the place that no longer exists vanishes inside me too? I’ve learned that memory, like a building, can erode without care. It starts with small things—forgetting the exact sound of the front door closing, the smell of rain on the balcony—and ends with a kind of internal demolition, the slow collapse of memory, the sense that pieces of yourself are being erased.

Here, houses are more than walls and roofs. They hold footsteps, smells, echoes of conversations. They keep the map of your life. When too many are gone, the city itself begins to forget.

“Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war,” the Guardian (UK) reported last month: “an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.” From the same article:

The general who led military intelligence when the war began has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day, adding that “it does not matter now if they are children”. Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024, said mass killing in Gaza was “necessary” as a “message to future generations” of Palestinians, in recordings broadcast on Israeli TV this month.

Also from the Guardian on Aug. 14, “‘Censorship: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine”:

More than 120 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.

In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies”.

…[T]he special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group (HEPG), a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.

When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether.

…In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.

I guess writing does matter, or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress it.

Check out the album Lider mit Palestine: New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love on Bandcamp.

Yes, Reiter’s Block is a Garth Greenwell fan site. I know I’m a little obsessed. But Greenwell’s musings on the purpose (or glorious futility) of the artist’s life help me unhook myself from external metrics of success. Whether as a reader or a writer, I’ve learned from him to suspend my expectations of the experience I want to have, open generously to surprises, and be curious even about what feels awful. “Garth Greenwell Is Too Much,” an interview by Jordan Kisner at Pioneer Works, puts these qualities on display:

We talked about what happens when a person makes art “the central activity of a life”—not family, not religion, not place—and how to determine when that devotion is just too much. When I posed this question about too-much-ness, Garth almost completely refused it. “My whole aesthetic practice is predicated on: if something is too much you do more of it,” he said…

[GG:] …There is a kind of absolute ruthlessness about aesthetic practice, and if I catch sight of something that I’m after, I’m going to pursue it. That ruthlessness consists in refusing to allow the question to intrude, “Will anyone go along with me?” And I do believe that especially when you’re drafting, you only arrive anywhere by going absolutely as far as you can go.

So I don’t ever think about that, is it too much? I know that that question will arise at some point. But my first novel has a 43-page paragraph. My second novel has sex scenes that many readers have been unable to go along with. If I try to anticipate resistance to what I’m after, I’m just giving up the game. That is really central to my aesthetic practice. You just do it and you are absolutely ruthless about it.

We neurodivergent people know all about the too-much-ness of learning everything possible about a niche topic. My husband and I are so compatible, we discovered when we merged our book collections that we both had copies of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s essay collection Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, which includes three entire essays on font design.

In that spirit, I share with you “The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan,” an article by Marcin Wichary in Ares Luna. That block-capitals font you take for granted on your computer keyboard is a descendant of “Gorton,” also a staple of 20th-century metal elevator panels, road signs, and the moveable plastic letters on restaurant menu boards and office building directories. Wichary’s article tracks down the mechanical reasons why this workmanlike font became so popular.

Finally, some creative writing that made a strong impression on me this month: Amelia Loeffler’s “Osteoporosis Ghazal” in palette poetry is an elegant, poignant meditation on the symbolism of milk. “In the supermarket I am surrounded by so many cures, it is too late.” At the Marsh Hawk Press website, Michael McColly’s “Lessons for a Tukkikat” describes how coming to terms with his uselessness as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal was crucial to his education as a writer. Payne Ratner’s fairy-tale-like horror story “Eat Jimmy” in The Masters Review spins out a metaphor for parental abuse, with an ending that made this post-Christian reader feel that maybe Jesus’ sacrifice has some meaning for me still.