Writing when the world's on fire

siderea quoted Scalzi on the matter,

It's hard to focus when the world is on fire, and with novelists in particular, I suspect that sometimes it's hard to focus when you've got the suspicion that your fiction is almost frivolous in the context of what's going on right now.

and replied with a quote from Watership Down (read it at her journal).

What Scalzi's text brought to my mind was a line from a Brecht poem, which I memorised as a teen because if felt approriate: "Was sind das für Zeiten/Wo ein Gespräch über Bäume schon ein Verbrechen ist/Weil es das Schweigen über soviele Untaten einschließt." (What times are these/where talking about trees is almost a crime/because it means being silent on so much outrage.) (Text and [different] translation here.)

In other kind-of-literary things, I read a part of Kon-Tiki Thursday evening, after I happened to find an unread 1958 edition on the book exchange shelf in town, and the chapter where Heyerdal describes the weeks in the middle of the Pacific, with life everywhere, with no sign that humanity, much less the 20th century even existed, frustrated me so much that I went to bed at half past nine in a rotten mood.

Having had a weather-related migraine attack on Thursday morning did not help any.

I feel that I should write some revenge fic on the world and the times, as I used to, but, writers block still ongoing.