I've been thinking about voice — about my own voice, and about the word 'voice'. I looked up quotes with the word 'voice' and immediately found a bunch that got me thinking. So many worthwhile quotes, in fact, that I stopped reading after I got to these four:

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. — Neil Gaiman

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together. — Margaret Atwood

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning. — Maya Angelou

I learned patience, perseverance, and dedication. Now I really know myself, and I know my voice. It's a voice of pain and victory. — Anthony Hamilton

The second episode of "Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera" is out! This one tells the story of how I turned myself into an opera freak by forcing myself to listen to nothing but opera music — 100 selected arias in random order, eight hours a day every day while I worked for months — until osmosis took effect and I eventually started recognizing, differentiating and deeply enjoying the melodies. It was an odd experiment that succeeded beyond my own expectations. It resulted in my decision to start this podcast to explore the bountiful connections between literature, history, religion, politics, culture and opera. It's the first of what I hope will be several new Literary Kicks podcasts to come.

A few days ago a friend told me she was worried about my rage. "You seem upset a lot," she said.

Another friend told me the same thing after seeing my photos of a protest march. This friend says I need to "relax" about Donald Trump, Mike Pence, stolen seats on the US Supreme Court, the global resurgence of white nationalism and fascism, atrocities in Yemen and Gaza, abuse of immigrants and refugees, corrupt hyper-capitalism, environmental ruin. I'm letting it get to me, he says.

I'm glad my friends are concerned about my state of mind. But I'm having a hard time these days figuring out how to respond to people who worry about my level of rage, because I don't think the rage I'm expressing is my rage at all.

This is the world's rage. I hear it loud and clear all around me — here in New York City, and all over America and all over the world. I am a writer, and I am a political activist, and so I write about this rage and go to protests. Maybe some of my friends are confused about what it is that writers and activists do ... because telling either a writer or an activist not to express rage in 2018 is like telling a baseball player not to swing at a fastball. Huh? It's our job. This is what we were put on this earth to do.

When I write about the major problems around the world in 2018, I'm not thinking about my own personal feelings at all. Rather, I'm trying to dwell within a shared space, a place of community. But these shared, social spaces themselves have shriveled and sickened as a result of the political fiascos of the last couple of decades. Confusion, cynicism, paranoia and hopelessness have especially come to define the public mood in the United States, which was still reeling from the shock of the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001 and the disaster of Bush's Iraq War of 2003 when the fiscal crash of 2007/2008 happened, hurtling us eventually towards the racist kakistocracy of Donald Trump. Do we ever stop to mourn the common trust that has been lost within the various societies that enrich and sustain us? I don't think we do. It's hard to mourn and fight at the same time. Instead, we channel this unconscious sense of loss into feelings of anger, dislike, refusal, disgust.