A few recent thoughts.

• The power of "instead": One of the transdisciplinary lessons from Agile is that it's harder for most people to specify "this is what I need" than to look at a suggested solution and talk through "here's why this doesn't work for me." Another way to see this: generating initial idea-seeds is a useful gift, even if we don't implement any of them, if discussing them leads to us figuring out what we really want. "Instead" is a goldmine.

• Margaret Killjoy's fiction: I was talking with friends about Margaret Killjoy's fiction the other night and realized I should gush about it someplace where more people will see.

  In late 2016 and early 2017, the two books that remedied the political doom in my head were Cory Doctorow's Walkaway (you can read the accompanying novella Party Disclipine for free) and Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark (I have not finished this yet but have found a lot of solace in it). Now I've found a third: Margaret Killjoy's novella The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion. It's so perceptive "about the lure of authority" and about all the microreactions we have when we meet new acquaintances and decide how much to trust them, and thrilling (although if a bit of horror gore squicks you out, you might want to sit this one out). Like Killjoy's "Men of the Ashen Morrow" and "Everything that Isn't Winter" it's also a closely observed story about violence, loyalty, vulnerability, sacrifice, and the ways we try to influence each other when we don't have traditional capitalist/bureaucratic hierarchies to bring to bear.

  In "Everything that Isn't Winter", our point-of-view character is a resident and guard of an egalitarian commune, itchy and melancholy about their own too-well-developed capacity for and comfort with violence. I found it refreshing to see the competence demonstrations, loyalty, sacrifice, tradecraft, and suspense I'd usually see in military SF deployed in a story about the defense of an egalitarian commune in the woods.

  The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (available as an ebook for NYPL patrons to borrow via the SimplyE app for Android and iOS) particularly spoke to me in its attention to the subtleties of power and influence, especially in nonhierarchical organizations -- it brings the fantastic lens to "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". What does it feel like and what happens, within each of us and among us, when our inability to persuade others to take urgent collective action collides with the heartfelt desire to avoid dominating others?

  Killjoy's fiction, like Walkaway and Party Discipline, shows us not just arguments people might say or think in the service of a freer life, but the forms those lives might take, the feelings and relationships that would emerge. Narrative gives us people to love and to imagine ourselves in community with. Recently I read lazenby's essay on the body as compared to art or love:

  Art, as Ruskin wants it to be seen, is a co-equal portal of creation through which it is possible to glimpse a world that is something other than the vigorous hybrid of cleverness and sadism....

  In rather the same way that art does not rely on the logic of power or the power of logic, its example allows us to see still other ways of thinking....

  I attended a Regina Spektor concert a few weeks ago that felt numinous. Live music, like great narrative, is one of those magic things for me. If you have been feeling airless and sewn to the ground, I hope you find a chunk of magic somewhere that helps you.

• Wedding bells: My friends got married! Awwwww.