eleven: free space

"I felt excellent and in a cheerful mood and reluctant to leave free space...as for the so-called psychological barrier that was supposed to be insurmountable by man preparing to confront the cosmic abyss alone, I not only did not sense any barrier, but even forgot that there could be one." -- Alexei Leonov, cosmonaut

This month's mostly been reading: the whole newsletter, honestly, could have fit under the things read heading and died an honest man newsletter. But it's also been a space of quiet in this corner of the world: solidly in a looser set of COVID restrictions, doing yet more home repairs, planning winter projects, gulping breath before the second wave our public health officials have basically said is coming in some form. A space between obligation. I too am reluctant to leave free space.

So: a little more scattered in its components this month, but hopefully there's some loose theme going on to what's been on the brain.


singular, unbroken current

I swear to you I was minding my own business. Spanish zucchini soup on the stove, slicing farmshare tomatoes for salad, and then YouTube ran me facefirst into Nick Cave's "Jubilee Street", which I hadn't heard before despite all the other Nick Cave on my hard drive. And in being thoroughly captured by it and looking up the lyrics, I found a piece by Emily Flake in the New Yorker from two years back that is--simultaneously one of the best pieces of writing on music I've ever read (here's the other; I carried a quote from it in a notebook with me for years) and which understands exactly what you have to do if you want to make good art.

I'm not going to pull a quote from this, like I would usually, because it needs to be read exactly from the beginning until exactly the end.

I should say: I do not experience impostor syndrome as traditionally writ. There is nothing about me or my work that I think, anymore -- and for a long time, now -- is inherently and essentially flawed. It's hard to believe yourself an impostor when you know your capacity to grow, learn, or make repairs, and then it's all just learning. So my perspective on this might be untraditional for the standard tropes of Who Working Artists Are.

Thing is: There are so many things you have to leave by the side of the road to be a good artist (good by whose lights, Leah? well, my own really) -- to, in that piece's words, be the best preacher you can be. There is a vein of the discourse on arting that thinks this means some kind of austerity, that it's no television and short nights of sleep and fewer pleasures and willingly forgoing the privilege of being honest with your opinions. It isn't. What you have to leave by the side of the road, in my experience, is the impostor syndrome itself: your self-hatred, your self-consciousness and insecurity and shame, your shortcuts and the convenient pieces of bullshit that are socially acceptable enough that people will comfort you and connect with you over them. Telling yourself that you're faking something doesn't improve the work. Or your life.

That sounds inspirational. It's not. It's a harder and deeper proposition than the obvious narrative. But when you can do it, when you get closer--oh. I'm transforming, I'm vibrating, I'm glowing, I'm flying. Look at me now.


I want to live like common people

This month brought another major spate of research reading for the closing bars of the novella project -- the last bits to check on before I can wrap up the draft -- which included Ryerson City-Building Institute's Density Done Right, an April 2020 report about better densification for Toronto's very stratified detached-housing neighbourhoods.

What struck me: the foundational values of planners who are behind gentle density and missing-middle development (basically: build more low-rises and walkups instead of towering high-rises and single-family detached houses). It's there, almost as invisible as water: that it is good and desirable to be among your neighbours. If you have gentle density you can concentrate service providers (schools and libraries!) and get them used more widely and well; you can rely on public transit and walkable cities instead of cars, which pollute; you can support local businesses. All these things assume, of course, that the people living there want to be together.

It's something I noticed because of pandemic thinking. There are a lot of people who, I think, do not so much want to be in cities designed for public sociability right now and some ways I can't really argue that? But I grew up in a neighbourhood where they didn't put sidewalks on some of the streets or run public transit in any meaningful way, and that's a message. In every suburban neighbourhood's blueprint, there is the space beyond the charted bounds, and it is entirely decorated with monsters. If you eradicate even the thought of common spaces, you can freeze them out.

I don't think this project is the place to design better futures on that front -- the version of Toronto in this particular future is glimpsed only sidelong, and would sadly be very much like that -- it's something I'm going to keep in mind for later. Urbanists Need Fiction and So Can You.

The other major piece of research was the latest Ontario's Five-Year Climate Change Action Plan and while some of this is older -- it dates from 2016 -- it's amazing how much of reducing emissions on the individual level is just going to energy-efficient light fixtures and insulating your pipes already. It's something I remember from my time working in politics, but so much of this stuff isn't fancy. As per our last issue: systems that don't work right, systems made of workarounds, have consequences. Tiny repairs are the soul of the world.


Things read

I'm still picking my way through Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher mysteries, which really are great summer reading: you can down two or three of them at a go and wake up feeling fresh the next morning.

This past week I've also finished Kathryn Davis's Duplex--I can't remember who recommended this, possibly Kathryn Cramer?--which is magnificently accomplished and should be mine and yet not. It's made me think deeper about what recognizing skill looks like in work you don't entirely click with, or entirely understand.

My reaction to this book wasn't unfamiliar. I had this with Carol Emshwiller: the obvious and undeniable assurance that she placed every word deliberately, the feeling of arc and significance moving underneath the novel's skin, palpable if you put your hand on it, but what that significance entails absolutely missing me, or me missing it. With Emshwiller it's an effect I took as generational: our foundational assumptions about how the world worked and what lived in the unsaid-things space were just so different that what she was signposting as The Important Thing was not at all important to me, it was scenery, and so what I saw was nothing there. To her it was, I assume, the world.

What's happening between me and Davis might be similar. There's a lot in Duplex about the subtle horror and wonder inherent in girlhood and womanhood, about that state as peril and ephemera filtered through some weird and gorgeous metaphor. I'd get the metaphors if I had the referent, I think; what Davis is pointing at may not have been my experience, or my time, or place. She is being too deliberate in her diction, her worldbuilding, to not be doing all this on purpose.

This summer, a few times, I've heard other readers talk about the experience of feeling excluded from a story or poem. It's--maybe more malevolence and agency than I tend to apply to texts (reading not the schoolyard or a relationship of authority, text does not know I'm there and is not talking at me personally) but it's interesting enough to me as an approach people take that I've been thinking about it. What relationship we have with books. More to the point, what relationship we have with things we don't understand.

I think it means something, as a reader, to follow the tail of a story you don't entirely understand in trust it'll get you somewhere interesting; that you'll pick up a talisman along the way, whether it was the one the author explicitly offered or not. Whether you look for your own value, whether you're curious and lean in to learn more, or defensive, or reactive, or bored, or ashamed.

The parallels are obvious and very much, for me, top of mind this past week: It matters what you do with what you don't understand.

(I did want to know more about the sorcerer in his smooth grey car, speeding, ruthless, before he collapsed into that other story.)


Things to read

Free space this month: the next publications are, as far as I know, slated for autumn! I'll keep everyone posted.

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Next letter in three weeks: some garden pictures, some food, something lighter. Stay safe, all.