eighteen: Artax gets right out of the swamp
I write from within Deadline Mire, so briefly and in short little bursts with much glancing back at the email. March was as busy as I thought it might be, with some extra surprise! obstacles involved--and some extra helpings of good news. We're going to keep this one short and sweet, I think? Inbox beckons; so does the draft.
engaging the facts
I attended my first ICFA this past month, which even virtually was like that moment where you try to stuff all the smarts in your mouth and feel your cheeks want to burst. It was also very odd to see certain (familiar!) faces for the first time in months or years. It's been five years since I attended a US-based convention, and people have aged in the meantime; the gap between physical bodies and the images you build based on words has grown so wide. It's strange to think of how much wider it will get before I'm in the same room with those people again.
One of the points that'll stick with me is Jeff VanderMeer characterizing, in a webinar on the anthropocene, hope as the action of engaging with the facts; hopelessness as disengaging from them. The idea of hope as not a state, but a motion obviously appeals to me, a person who likes active verbs and acting on them.
So I'm thinking about engaging with facts, and the idea that ultimately, we frequently have no idea why a reaction/rejection is happening. We theorize; usually people seem to theorize based on the part of themselves they're most insecure or self-conscious about, the thing they feel doesn't fit. There's a lot of projection that happens in the questions that start why not or why didn't they like. So, fact-finding is on the brain: how we begin to find that which we are to engage with through the stories we tell ourselves about why things aren't working out; what a quantity of work it can be to chart one's own bullshit.
This ties into the absolute best thing I watched this month: Sarah Jaffe being interviewed by Dave Zirin on her new book, Work Won't Love You Back. It's a huge, sprawling, frenetic interview that touches on passion industries, the emotional blackmail of how they subvert labour rights, resistance, and why Tom Brady is a bad robot. It is fast, fun, and dizzyingly amazing.
Things read
On the occasion of my laptop giving up in a puff of smoke in early March (2014-2021, ave et vale), I finally started reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Rather than a how-to book, this is one of those rare ones that pulls together just about everything: a net of contextualities centred around that one question -- why does social media feel bad? -- expanded outward into both roots and branches. So: show up for the dissection of how social media works and doesn't, and stay for the deep dives into 1920s philosophy, modern art, and ecological farming.
For the modern art piece in particular: her descriptions of various installation pieces and the artists' logics behind them have me thinking about those ways of communicating that look inscrutable on the outside--there was a good small conversation about poetry in this vein mid-March--and how, when you actually talk about them, peel them open, remove the idea of authority and intimidation, they are so much. So much of art in general is just coding-decoding-recoding, and we pile questions of social positioning on it that frequently just aren't there when one approaches with straight-up curiosity.
I also blew through Emma Donoghue's The Pull of the Stars, which managed to take some very timely topics -- three days on a Dublin maternity hospital ward in the middle of the 1918 influenza epidemic -- and make them something I could read without flinching. This is not especially a subtle book, but it's unsubtle in the right ways, compassionate, and terribly absorbing; one of those books about hard things that isn't trying to hurt the reader to impress on them how hard this is. It did me good to spend time with that much competence for a few hours.
Things to read
Presuming it funds -- and I'm presuming it funds, because look at that lineup, both editorially and for the first few issues -- I'll have a poem in one of the first issues of new death-and-dying speculative magazine The Deadlines (under the aegis of Sonya Taaffe, a poetry editor of style and taste). "Rows of Houses" is about privater hauntings; it owes its title (and not much else) to Dan Mangan and some of its sway to Nick Cave.
The Kickstarter link is here. If you're the Kickstarter-backing sort, this is well worth making happen.
On a much longer timescale: if you've been following some of the mutual aid and prison abolition research I've talked about here and on Twitter, that project just got a vital and much-needed boost, via an Ontario Arts Council works in progress grant. This has always been a project that's going to need care to pull off well--the trouble with writing to relevance is your ability to hurt people with sloppiness is astronomical--and that grant is going to buy me the time to bring the care it deserves. This one's important. I'm basically thrilled. :)
engaging the facts
I attended my first ICFA this past month, which even virtually was like that moment where you try to stuff all the smarts in your mouth and feel your cheeks want to burst. It was also very odd to see certain (familiar!) faces for the first time in months or years. It's been five years since I attended a US-based convention, and people have aged in the meantime; the gap between physical bodies and the images you build based on words has grown so wide. It's strange to think of how much wider it will get before I'm in the same room with those people again.
One of the points that'll stick with me is Jeff VanderMeer characterizing, in a webinar on the anthropocene, hope as the action of engaging with the facts; hopelessness as disengaging from them. The idea of hope as not a state, but a motion obviously appeals to me, a person who likes active verbs and acting on them.
So I'm thinking about engaging with facts, and the idea that ultimately, we frequently have no idea why a reaction/rejection is happening. We theorize; usually people seem to theorize based on the part of themselves they're most insecure or self-conscious about, the thing they feel doesn't fit. There's a lot of projection that happens in the questions that start why not or why didn't they like. So, fact-finding is on the brain: how we begin to find that which we are to engage with through the stories we tell ourselves about why things aren't working out; what a quantity of work it can be to chart one's own bullshit.
This ties into the absolute best thing I watched this month: Sarah Jaffe being interviewed by Dave Zirin on her new book, Work Won't Love You Back. It's a huge, sprawling, frenetic interview that touches on passion industries, the emotional blackmail of how they subvert labour rights, resistance, and why Tom Brady is a bad robot. It is fast, fun, and dizzyingly amazing.
Things read
On the occasion of my laptop giving up in a puff of smoke in early March (2014-2021, ave et vale), I finally started reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Rather than a how-to book, this is one of those rare ones that pulls together just about everything: a net of contextualities centred around that one question -- why does social media feel bad? -- expanded outward into both roots and branches. So: show up for the dissection of how social media works and doesn't, and stay for the deep dives into 1920s philosophy, modern art, and ecological farming.
For the modern art piece in particular: her descriptions of various installation pieces and the artists' logics behind them have me thinking about those ways of communicating that look inscrutable on the outside--there was a good small conversation about poetry in this vein mid-March--and how, when you actually talk about them, peel them open, remove the idea of authority and intimidation, they are so much. So much of art in general is just coding-decoding-recoding, and we pile questions of social positioning on it that frequently just aren't there when one approaches with straight-up curiosity.
I also blew through Emma Donoghue's The Pull of the Stars, which managed to take some very timely topics -- three days on a Dublin maternity hospital ward in the middle of the 1918 influenza epidemic -- and make them something I could read without flinching. This is not especially a subtle book, but it's unsubtle in the right ways, compassionate, and terribly absorbing; one of those books about hard things that isn't trying to hurt the reader to impress on them how hard this is. It did me good to spend time with that much competence for a few hours.
Things to read
Presuming it funds -- and I'm presuming it funds, because look at that lineup, both editorially and for the first few issues -- I'll have a poem in one of the first issues of new death-and-dying speculative magazine The Deadlines (under the aegis of Sonya Taaffe, a poetry editor of style and taste). "Rows of Houses" is about privater hauntings; it owes its title (and not much else) to Dan Mangan and some of its sway to Nick Cave.
The Kickstarter link is here. If you're the Kickstarter-backing sort, this is well worth making happen.
On a much longer timescale: if you've been following some of the mutual aid and prison abolition research I've talked about here and on Twitter, that project just got a vital and much-needed boost, via an Ontario Arts Council works in progress grant. This has always been a project that's going to need care to pull off well--the trouble with writing to relevance is your ability to hurt people with sloppiness is astronomical--and that grant is going to buy me the time to bring the care it deserves. This one's important. I'm basically thrilled. :)
*
That's it for this month; by next issue, there will be tulips. Stay safe, and see you then.
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