About
My name is AK Krajewska. I'm a busybody neighborhood ecologist, poet, philosopher and occasional theurgist. I live in San Francisco, California.
rinsemiddlebliss is a place to collect my writing (and possibly other projects) in one place on the internet. In addtion to the broadly defined category of blog posts, I also post poetry, fiction, book reviews, and long form shitposts.
I have a lot of shifting hobbies and interests and I make no promises to write about any kind of consistent topics. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
The subhead quote is a bit from Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney.
Like everything else in town, you just hear about it until it bumps into you. You have to put yourself at the mercy of the geography, and hope the down-hills and up-hills, working propitiously with how much you feel like fighting and how much you feel like accepting, manage to get you there. You’ll find it eventually.
Contact me #
To start a conversation, find me on Mastodon.
About the images #
I make pen and ink drawings and word art. All the art in the header images is my work, and all the pen and ink illustrations, unless specifically labeled otherwise are also my work. All the photos, except where explicitly labeled otherwise, are also mine or given to me by their photographer. If you'd like to use any of the visual art from my blog, contact me to discuss licensing.
About reposting or reblogging #
If want to reprint, repost, reblog or otherwise reproduce my essays, fiction, or poems, contact me to get permission first. As a rule, I'm happy to grant permission to not for profit web weirdos and print zines for poetry with attribution if you ask first.
Previous projects #
Angry About Literature (2017) #
An irregular newsletter about books and literature. I only ever sent four issues, which are now archived on this blog.
You may have at some point said, perhaps even in these words, "I am intrigued in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter!" Well here they are, my ideas about books and the words inside them and what they mean and what they mean to me. You may remember me from such places as the @dys_morphia on Twitter or a dinner party where I will have been very slowly drinking a glass of wine and telling you, eventually, either about Dhalgren or Gravity's Rainbow or the evolution of primate infanticide oblivious to the glazed-over look on your face. If a newsletter version of that sounds like a good time, you've come to the right place. (You will receive at most one email a week.)
Residual Heat (2014) #
Poetry book published under my pseudonym Aga Black. I printed a limited run of paper copies for friends and family. You can still get an ebook of Residual Heat on Amazon. I have also published all the poems on this blog.
Residual Heat is a volume of poetry grounded in the sensuality of the body, localized in the environment of San Francisco Bay Area, and aching with longing for the Other. Through images of disasters, fog, fire, lighting, electricity, and radiation it explores the boundaries of the natural and industrial in the post-industrial landscape.
Games and Trips (2011 - 2014) #
A blog, originally on Tubmlr, mostly about video game culture from a feminist point of view. Eventually it also veered towards weightlifting from a feminist point of view.
A poetry teacher once said to me, claiming to quote Plato though I have never tracked down the alleged quote, that poets were banned from the Republic because “There are only two things poets like: games and trips.” That phrase has stuck with me because, indeed, those are the only two things that I like. This blog proceeds from a feminist point of view. I mostly write about gaming, gamer culture, and weightlifting.
Octopus Army (2002) #
A literary zine with a postmodern sensibility. I was the text editor and my friend Maggie was the visual editor. The zine did not allow any pop culture references or politics, and didn't distinguish between fact or fiction. Fitting with the octopus theme, we published 8 issues. PDFs of them must surely be around somewhere.