Hoi!

Hope you’re doing well, that life is treating you kindly. This month’s pudding is about how I carried a book by Ursula K. Le Guin to Paris in my handbag, while slowly realising that I’m becoming a carrier of stories in more ways than one. Topped up with a bag of links, as per usual.

May it take you places!

From my desk
Words that found their way onto the page.

I spent the first weekend of the year in Paris, but this is not a story about being in Paris; it’s about travelling to Paris. Or, more exactly, about a book I found in a museum in Brussels, while waiting for the train to Paris. After putting our large bags in a slightly larger locker and finding ourselves at the exit of an exhibition sooner than we had hoped, we decided to kill time in the gift shop. Since we hadn’t reached our destination yet, I needed to set some boundaries: I allowed myself to buy one book, but only if it would fit my handbag. A book I could carry into Paris and finish before we set foot on French soil.

Amidst a series of thin paperbacks that scream “carry me with you, I’m light”, I found what I was looking for. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in 1988. I knew this tiny booklet would fit neatly in my handbag without interfering too much with the mess that I’d assembled there: a well-proportioned book, tissues, three half-eaten rolls of Mentos, headphones, painkillers, bandages for impending blisters, about twelve receipts, phone, phone charger, wallet, pens, and a notebook. But also, a lipstick without a cover, making my fingers red every time I blindly search for something. And my friend’s American driver’s licence. Expired, from when she still drove cars around New Hampshire, long before we met. The friend who once gifted me a book by Le Guin, which I haven’t read yet (I will, Julie, I promise).

I read the essay in one sitting, in a café situated in a narrow, medieval-looking street, on a leather couch that was once black. In short: Le Guin turns the story of human evolution, and the stories we tell about ourselves, on its head. Instead of paying attention to the original hero story, the (male) hunter who overcomes challenges by wielding his spear, she puts focus on the group in the background. As the triumphant ape brandished his bone, a gathering crowd carried food and materials from place to place, using a quintessential tool: the bag. Le Guin argues that, even though stories that revolve around linear, singular conquests might be appealing, there’s much beauty to be found in what we collect, take home, and carry back out into the world again: a circulation without clear beginnings or endings. She invites us to imagine narrative not as a pointy arrow, but as a bag, a held collection of found objects that create juxtapositions as they jostle around from place to place.

There it was, laid out on only a few pages, a beautifully contained idea that evokes so many texts I had carried in my bag before. Lucy Ives’ Life is Everywhere, Lidia Yuknavitch’s Thrust, Rebecca Solnit’s When the Hero is the Problem. Texts that put our attention towards the hero’s peripheral vision, braid unfinished tales together to form an unresolved whole, investigate the tiny pebbles that get stuck in our knotted bags. It turns out that, even before this particular book ended up in my bag, I was a lover of baggy texts.

While making our way to the train station, I felt a kick. Or a stroke, really, a feather-light touch. A gentle reminder that I was not just carrying baggy texts around. My body has become a carrier; I’m carrying someone who will need to be carried for a while longer. First by my womb, and then by our hands. I’ll need another bag to be able to keep one hand free for him, and another for the world. The importance of the bag as a tool that enables us to move, both in the literal and the literate sense, has never been so clear to me. As Le Guin so wonderfully puts it:

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag,…and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up,…if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

Le Guin doesn’t have to tell me twice; I believe her without hesitation. I don’t know yet what new stories I’ll tell as I become a mother, what web of stories this child will be born into, how his stories will weave into others, including mine. But I do know I want them to be carrier-bag stories: roomy enough for contradiction, for boredom, for kindness, for the faceless chorus, for all the little, unheroic things that make a life.

From other desks
Words/images that reached me from other rooms.

I have around twenty-five open tabs, as I’m in the middle of my investigation into the perfect sling bag, which I’ll spare you. Instead, here’s a more messy collection of links:

Last fall, I spent a few days with my mother in Milan. I loved strolling through the darkly lit museums with her, as she could retell almost every religious scene on display. I particularly remember sitting with her on a bench in front of Judith chopping off Holofernes' head, painted by the dark lord Caravaggio (or his Flemish contemporary Louis Finson, who was known to copy Caravaggio's compositions). I didn't know there were so many Biblical stories featuring female murderers. My mom told me that Judith and her maid carried the tyrant’s head in a bag; nobody suspected they were hiding something so bloody in this female-coded, ancient, ubiquitous tool.

Speaking of the not-so-fabulous bag stories, I stumbled into the history of the so-called plague bags, very conveniently retold on this fascinating website called Death Scent (yes, a stylish website on the scent of death). “The plague bags would be kept in a pocket or worn around the neck on a string to keep miasma away. Sadly this straightforward name was supplanted by sweet bag by the late 1500s and then, sachet de senteurs, in the 17th century.” ‘Sweet bag’ or ‘sweet meat bag’ (?) somehow sounds more terrifying in this context than plague bags? They look cute though.

As is widely known, Yoko Ono has a thing for bags. Like her ‘Bag Piece’ (1964). Ono said, regarding this work, “By being in a bag, you show the other side of you”. Curious what my other side will look like. Rinus van der Velde also once made a paper backpack called ‘Prop, Backpack’ (2018). It was part of the exhibition ‘The Armchair Voyager’ (2023) at Museum Voorlinden, about the imaginary travels we make in our own heads, without backpacks. While, in principle, I try to avoid recommendations, his second fictional autobiography is coming out soon, which looks incredible (that pizza!). And last but not least, a small beadwork bag Jane Austen worked on from her armchair in Chawton or Hampshire. We will never know what she had to say about her creation. Chances are she might have hated it.

Diptych
Two images that found each other across my desktop.

Thank you for reading, once more! I hope the perfect bag will soon enter your life, or what have you.

Groetjes,
Iris