An Open Call For Subscriber Questions and Suggestions

Bring it on.

Hello everyone, this is just a little update on some upcoming projects in the works and a call for subscriber questions and suggestions for topics at Weird Catastrophe.

First, I have one article in the works for publication at an outside outlet, which will also be posted here when it’s finished, regarding the privatization of life-saving cancer treatments by pharmaceutical companies. This is a subject I’ve written about before, but not within its own standalone piece. Stay tuned! I’m also currently reading a couple different history books on the Great Depression in the U.S. which has stirred ideas for an article or two about labor organizing politics that I’m currently writing.

If you are a writer or any other kind of artist, I highly suggest reading a broad swath of literature, but general histories in particular are quite important. The animation director for the original run of Looney Tunes, Chuck Jones, highly regarded for his sense of visual humor, exhorted his animators, not to watch other cartoons, not to watch movies, not to sketch imitations of the already animated — but to read. “Reading. Read everything,” he said. “It doesn’t do you much good to draw unless you have something to draw, and the only place you can get anything to draw is from out of that head. And the only way you can exercise the mind is by bringing new ideas to it so it’ll be surprised, and say ‘God, I didn’t know that.’ That’s the greatest thing in the world! That ‘Gee, I didn’t know that.’ And there you are.”

The same holds true for writing. I often find that ideas for subjects, and importantly how to actually write about those subjects, arrive obliquely, culled from disparate histories and philosophies. The real-life stories told in well-crafted history books can do so much to give you a fresh framework with which to understand the world in a way that a more argumentative work of polemic would fail to do. So if you’re stuck, lacking inspiration or initiative, try reading about the world with the intention simply to understand, not to mine for your next project. Letting those new ideas simmer within you, and then telling your friends about those new ideas can be a great way to sharpen yourself to be ready for the next creative project that comes along. Read read read, and then read again, and then keep reading (article idea: the rising importance of reading in our increasingly illiterate world).

And now the call for your questions and suggestions. Over the course of this newsletter I’ve gotten comments and suggestions for different topics to write about as well as clarifying questions on some pieces. So if you have something you’d like to see me discuss, please comment your ideas on this post publicly, or you can simply respond to this email directly (or message me on Substack) if you don’t want it to be public. Some things I’ve gotten so far from readers:

• A more detailed analysis and refutation of “prefigurative” politics — the idea that by living in the kind of society that we want to see more broadly in the world today we will thereby bring about that very society in the future, and assessing the pros and cons of a more organizational Marxist-Leninist approach to revolutionary change.

• As someone highly critical of smartphones specifically and the internet in general, how do I manage my use of the internet responsibly given that I do use it frequently for my writing and video projects, and are there any concessions I would make in regards to the benefits of the internet?

• My thoughts on the politicization of Covid-19 policies (perhaps a stale topic at this point, and one which I already somewhat touched on with this post about certain people’s ongoing, quite overheated rhetoric about masking policies, though potentially still interesting to discuss).

• An analysis of Russell Banks’ controversial novel The Lost Memory of Skin, about a convicted sex criminal cast out from society (would need to read it first, so this would take some time).

• Recommendations for books, podcasts, alternative media, and the like.

For clarity, I’m not asking for questions or suggestions because I’ve run out of ideas (I’ve got over 40 drafts in Substack in various states of completion that I can turn to when I’m inspired to take them up again, and I can always make a video version of a previous post for those who prefer video content, though this can be pretty time consuming), but rather I’m doing this for two reasons: 1) to gauge what you guys are interested in and thinking about in order to foster a closer connection with my readers, and 2) I’ve often been able to bust out an article really quickly when someone simply asks me for my thoughts about a certain topic. When I rely on my inspiration alone, my output is subject to the often uncontrollable vicissitudes of the muse, but when I hear that someone is interested in my thoughts on a particular subject it can be very easy for me to take up the task swiftly.

For those who are familiar with this newsletter, you know that I mostly tackle socio-political subjects (labor, foreign policy, exploitation, leftist organizing, etc.), certain cultural output that interests me within music, movies, and books, and less categorizable musings on language, catastrophe, psychosis, aging, romance, moving on, inherited land, and the numinous.

So ask and comment and message away! Depending on the quantity and quality of responses, I may write separate articles for each response, or I may corral all of them into a single post that addresses each one.

Thank you.

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