Steven Pate

The Risk of Serialized Reality

“For me, the word literary is only useful as a way to denote books that are meant to be read on their own, with focus and deliberateness, where the experience of each word and sentence is ... https://stevenpate.micro.blog/2025/06/18/the-risk-of-serialized-reality.html

Worldbuilding: How Speculative Fiction Broke Out of the Genre Ghetto

One week after planting this golden chain tree, the resident doe and fawns have put lie to its supposed deer resistence. Here’s hoping they were merely drawn to its novelty.

Toolmen (Mandy Brown)
“I’ve spent the last year reading, thinking, and talking with workers about AI and I’ve concluded that AI is not a technology—it’s an ideology, and it must be engaged with as such.”

The Gatekeepers Strike Back: https://stevenpate.micro.blog/2025/05/31/the-gatekeepers-strike-back.html

Sometimes I get to walk to work. This is my favorite relay to go.

Musings on an inefficient life
by Sylvia Keesmaat

Fascinating read from Counter Craft about writers writing less led me to wonder: what are we losing when our best writers are writing things other than novels? https://stevenpate.micro.blog/2025/03/14/fascinating-read-from-counter-craft.html

Search is an invisible platform that shaped the entire web. And it’s changing.

Fascinating read from Counter Craft about writers writing less led me to wonder: what are we losing when our best writers are writing things other than novels? My first reaction is something akin to despair. But is is it really all that much?

www.firstthingsfirst.org

Finished reading: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad 📚

El Akkad has found the words for what has been happening in Gaza, and describe its effect on all of us. Essential and heart-wrenching, like prime James Baldwin but right off the stove and no time to cool down.

Finished reading: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino 📚

This might have been my favorite book of 2024 if I had read it last year. Adina Giorno was born the moment the Voyager I spacecraft launched. Before lon... https://stevenpate.micro.blog/2025/02/28/finished-reading-beautyland-by-mariehelene.html

Finished reading: Wild Forest Home by Betsy Leialoha Howell 📚

Well-written glimpses into the work of a PNW wildlife biologist working for the National Forest Service are woven into the backdrop of Howell’s personal j... https://stevenpate.micro.blog/2025/02/19/finished-reading-wild-forest-home.html

Finished reading: The Traveling Feast by Rick Bass 📚

A lovely idea: a writer makes the occasion of a dinner an excuse to speak with and write about his favorite living writers. Many of his favorites overlap with mine, and I really enjoyed this.

Finished reading: The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig 📚

With prose so sharp that it can feel brittle, Doig carves narratives that feel simultaneously intimate and epic. The Sea Runners a stupefyingly relentless account of fo... https://stevenpate.micro.blog/2025/02/12/finished-reading-the-sea-runners.html

Finished reading: In the Pockets of Small Gods by Anis Mojgani 📚

Opened this with no knowledge of book or author. It hooked me immediately and never let go: is a readable, genuinely moving and at times profound collection of poetry with a through line of processing grief. Wonderful.

Snow beginning to recede on the skylight of my office.

Finished reading: Slow Down by Kohei Saito 📚

I liked his account of degrowth’s rationale and it is not just another word for “austerity,” and I even followed his rehabilitation of the ecological bona fides of Marx himself as far as that goes; but I wanted more detail about how it might be achieved.

I didn’t plan on diving into an 850 book about music, but I flipped to a the chapter called “Tezeta”, learned like seven fun things about Tony Allen in two pages, and knew I was installing myself inside these covers for a few weeks. This is so great.

Gary Snyder

One of my favorite reading experiences of 2024 was reading Earth House Hold by Gary Snyder.

“Don't be a mountaineer, be a mountain.
And shrug off a few with avalanches.”

How is there no biography of this man????

“The mass of the earth, for example, generates a tide that crosses the surface of the moon, just as the moon itself gives rise to a tide in our oceans. In the former case, this is a wave of solid rock four metres high propagated over the moon's crust.” (44)

Reached for a bit of warmth for the Solstice, but found Abbey preaching the truth about ice cubes in Desert Solitaire.

Forty Years of Dalkey Archive (Part II of V) Covering 1984–1993

Forty Years of Dalkey Archive (Part II of V) open.substack.com/pub/dalkeyar...

This is going already really fun.

What caught my eye in the store today: