Spiral scratched

Well, it's been a while since I've posted on the blog; as usual for a variety of reasons. Most recently the lack of an internet connection due to an unfortunate unpaid bill put paid to any chance of updating anything. This was swiftly followed by a pulled tendon on my wrist.

Aside from that, the year has been going swimmingly in some ways. I've been doing a lot of reading, including fiction, for the first for quite some time and in a systematic way. I've been reading the Johannes Cabal series of books by Jonathan L. Howard which are both clever and amusing as well as a series by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris about the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. This is like a steampunk version of Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May books which are also worth reading.
On a political level, I've been revisiting Loren Goldner's writing whose analysis of the trajectory of the last 100 years of capital is incredibly persuasive. Particularly worth reading is:

The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain but so is everything on his rather basic website. As if that isn't enough I'm also working my way through vol. 2 of Capital and the German Ideology.

 

My current favourite blog is Jon Rappoport's which is endlessly interesting and informative. While not a Marxist or socialist of any sort, his research exposes much of the underbelly of capitalism. He has a particularly good take on the NSA/Edward Snowden story which explains more than the mainstream narrative.

 

In terms of my fiction writing, The universe wants to play with you is a lot more developed in my mind than I've actually managed to put down on the computer; I will get round to finishing the next section over the next few days. I've also started writing a sword and sorcery short story called swords, stones, bones and metaphysical wizardry. It's what J. K. Rowling might have written if in her teenage years she had read Robert E. Howard, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, T. H. White and William Burroughs (amongst others) whilst listening to punk rock, German prog and being a football hooligan.