I’ve been running around hyperactively feeling lethargic. The combined effects of disillusion and drudgery. You can guess what the disillusion is about. How can life go on while this is happening. You box, then you translate Truman Capote. Life truly shouldn’t but it does go on. Back in the early twenty-teens, people used to say “Despair is treason.” It was hope that I had a problem with. I knew exactly what to post to piss off the timeline tyrants. To this day I can’t forgive my former comrades for character assassinating me. Now I’m watching a new deluge of delulu in the third month of genocide. The resistance overstates its military achievements in what news agencies call a war but is really only genocide. And I don’t know how to articulate the feeling that, however much we strive to take a stand or be virtuous, we cannot remain beholden to the same overarching structures, the same worldviews, the same fractals that enable and sustain our bondage. This horror is part of the way the world works. This horror is the way the world works. This horror is where we live. So I’ve been running around carrying the weight of disillusion and drudgery, knowing it is part of me, wondering with longing how to put it down. And, while I work on my left hook or revise the last two pages of “My Side of the Matter,” I’m thinking about who I am and whether to be someone else. That is all I have to say. While life goes on, I’m thinking how to be human in the real world.
Much of what I wrote in 2023—including three Postmuslim essays—has not yet been published, but here are some things that appeared in the last twelve months:
And book-wise:
Arabic translation of The Club by Leo Damrosch: essay on the experience in The London Magazine
Emissaries with Barakunan: audio conversation here