fifty-five: use the edges and value the marginal
This month’s title from a permaculture principles video that was part of my Food Security coursework this summer: a handful of guidelines for growing food regeneratively in large or small spaces.
This is Principle Eleven. It’s about using the places where two biomes overlap and cause increased biodiversity, but it’s also in my mind a set of big blinking Clue Arrows about the intertidal, about liminal spaces, and on the whole an exceptionally good problem-solving strategy. Overlaps are rich working space, and the edges are the least rigid part of a situation. If you need something to bend for you, that’s where you can bend it. The whole thing is generally good life advice of the Octavia Butler vein — and good art advice, if you just squint enough to see it as such.
Useful, for a month where at worst I’ve felt like a one-winged bird, flapping around in circles, and at best I’m glimpsing something of the architecture coming together: a suggestion that some of this disparate action connects. I really can’t overstate the amount of risk tolerance (good or ill) having written a few novels gives you. Yeah, here’s the part where it feels like all of this is flying in different directions, a jumbled heap of mess, a fool’s errand, a bad idea from the start, and there’s more of it than there is of me, and — I think most people quit here. (Maybe they’re the smart ones, I dunno?) I look at that and I think: Oh, my life plan reboot is at 60,000 words on the manuscript. Patience, steely hand, steady on. It’s on the page, emerging.
winter soil
Around Labour Day the Tiny Household Agricultural Enterprise pivoted hard to canning, and the increasing tempo of Shit You Must Put in Jars Before It Goes Off Already lasted for a few solid weeks. I put up at least one recipe daily, mostly at night when it was cooler: salted caramel peach jam, tomato paprika jam, tons of salsa, a very spicy batch of harissa with extra garlic, serendipitous plum-anise jam (found plums, dirt cheap, never worn), grape jam and then a few jars of grape ketchup from an evening fruit pick that yielded a personal share over seven pounds.
Conversely (and connected), in the garden, almost everything is coming out: At least half those tomatoes in the salsa/jam were a garden overflow situation that just needed to be dealt with in bulk, and still needs to be. I’ve still had enough, between the balcony and this year’s late-breaking CSA, to do a tomato cobbler, eat a lot of caprese salads, and start experimenting with homemade batches of pasta sauce (delicious, recommended, just bop some small tomatoes in a pot with olive oil and herbs and cover it until they give up and burst, takes about half an hour).
Sauce and home-canned chopped tomatoes, I have realized, are not really cost-effective? The amount of tomatoes I put in, like — that’s more than the can of store-brand stuff costs by a mile. It’s a luxury product, here. But at this point, it’ll use the tomatoes, so I’m coming around to it.
This is my own fault. When I put in eight tomato plants, I said: Well, I have salsa recipes. I am literally now eating my words. Or, well. Will eat them later due to the magic of preserving. Canning is procrastination made flesh and I am its greatest fan.
In the middle of that noise, disliking the brown curled leaves and partial emptiness of this garden of mine, I got an email from the local garlic farm on seed stock and thought: Oh. I can do garlic. That soil’s not doing much else for four months. And simultaneously felt that garden snap from something overlaid onto my summer into a cycle, which was great but also gave me a handful of anxiety, because now I’d have to pay attention to it year round, without rest. (Sort of had to talk myself down after that. That’s a fallow season. Unmarked state. It’ll take care of itself. Breathe, woman.)
The question of whether garlic was smart and good planning or the cold hand of capitalism needing to lay off already sent me into a long think about extending things outside their season: efficiency, overproduction, squeezing every last inch out of everything, and how much we reflexively do it, and how much the metaphor is sitting here, two inches from my face, not exactly being subtle at all. The jury’s still out on the whole idea, now that it’s started to oversignify into the question of push or rest? (Newsflash: It’s not about garlic anymore.) I’m mired in thinking about the soil, my tiny permaculture and its animate system: when does it sleep or die? What rhythm marks its breathing? What example am I setting myself if I ask it to stay up all night? Where is this metaphor fruitful, and where does it end?
This is grand mal overthinking, yes, but I’ve also culled all the best bits of my work on that question into the beginnings of a short story draft, so there you go. I still don’t know if I’ll plant the garlic in two weeks. Never send a systems thinker into basic maintenance tasks when death is on the line, I guess.
state of the infrastructure
Building better infrastructures is still the name of the game right now: mental, physical, professional, anything you got, we’re circling it with a keen and wary eye. A lot of asking what serves the occasion, or at least might go somewhere interesting in the XKCD sense.
I’m spending a bit more time in queer spaces, which I will say more about in a later issue if anyone’s actually interested. Even though I lived in the gay village for almost my entire twenties, I have never really participated in scene, absent one meeting for some community project or other at the 519 which involved so much visible intracommunity drama that I abandoned it promptly. So it’s not brand-new territory, but definitely that room of the house I don’t spend a whole lot of time in.
So far: Jury’s out on it. I fear my general conclusions on communities where scarcity’s the glue might stand. I’m showing up, though, to create space for the world to prove me happily wrong.
More concretely, I finally took on the mini-project of firing my bank, which is both a piece of building more sustainable infrastructure (Canadian big banks are relentless oil and gas funders, so there are goals here beyond spite) and abruptly became pragmatic. My lifelong bank has been showing increasing signs that it’s quietly on fire inside, and the credit card I’ve had since undergrad decided to just raise the rates 2% for, well, Reasons — while a record number of people in this city are using food banks to get by. As I politely told the very pleasant credit card company dude: Sometimes yes, there is a bright moral line, and I’m afraid we have found it. He was commendably gracious about the whole thing.
Luckily, I’d already done the prep for this one and got some credit union recommendations, so it won’t take too long to swing into action.
Whether it’s fossil fuels or actually replying to the random people who seem to really want to pick fights on acquaintances’ Facebook pages this month (really, what is doing with all your friends, guys, and do any of you like each other enough to do anything more than blankly stare at that?), there really is no reason to be paying into systems that are actively at odds with the world I want. It’s, at a certain point, self-sabotage: Any effort to try to squeeze good results out of those systems have the added friction of rowing against their inbuilt, intended purpose, and I don’t need that shit at this point in my life. Let’s just make it easy — or easier, at least.
Anyways, if anyone else is feeling like a little bank-firing, the author of said link (hi, Tim!) is an erstwhile reader here, and has sustainable investment resources on hand. It was oddly satisfying, I’ll say that. Felt good like boundaries.
things watched
Slow physical work tends to mean I’ve got something on in the background (hi, canning season), so this was a full category this month.
A Little Chaos (2014), which is both the last movie Alan Rickman directed — a quite fictionalized story of the Versailles gardens being designed — and a film in which you get to watch a very brief scene of Stanley Tucci, as the Duc D’Orleans, trying to cajole his brooding brother, King Louis/Alan Rickman, into eating something beautiful in the wake of grief. It seems like the perfect and most essential part of both of them: Tucci is feeding someone with a great gentleness hidden under show and pomp; Rickman is just breaking the ice of a great reserve to smile. I’ve never seen a minute of film that went straight to the heart of its actors’ core obsessions like that.
It’s a middling-reviewed but really lovely little movie, which maybe works better when you pick up (and it’s not too subtle, really) that it’s a film partly about grief. It has a definite thesis about what to do with loss; everyone is shockingly kind in the face of it. It’s not a world devoid of cruelty, but it’s one of those where it’s so far outweighed by the presumption — and celebration — of active decency. If you’re needing something along those lines? Recommended.
I’ve also watched the full run of Jonathan Creek, which was generally a set of delightful, ridiculous, slightly satirical locked-room whodunits and then got more than a little sad and dark and surprisingly violent. I miss 1990s media very badly; I don’t think this is me Good Old Days-ing. There’s a sense of play in it that vanishes for years after 2001 (obvious reasons). That demarcation line was very visible, watching this series: when it slipped from slightly goofy mysteries into something more pinched, hurt, and cynical. My benchmark for stepping outside all our mangled subjectivity for COVID is (of all things) Drive to Survive, and the constant shock on everyone’s faces as races shut down. This is actually a good slow-drip, distant map of the before-and-after of the early 2000s. It’s lovely in the first half.
Along the same lines, the end of September pretty much ran to the constant rhythm of 1990s and early-2000s British standup. I spent a week going through the entire available back catalogue of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, and oh, shit, there are so many things about the ambient attitude toward women in 2000-ish media that I do not miss — and I remember enough to go, yeah, these are decently progressive for the time. The sense of play and structure and absolute ridiculousness is awesome. Terrible to come this late to something that’s already, let’s face it, deeply niche. There are a few recurring bits here I think are hilarious (“aaaah” / “no, not ‘aaah!’”) and I’m absolutely never going to get a callback on them if they slip out my mouth. (Ah, well. I’ve got better chances on this than when I do Louis Feuillade callbacks. File under: Things I did to myself.)
I’m also a little fascinated by how even when a double act stops working together, they still almost reflexively seem to fill each other into the gaps of their solo routines. There’s a moment in every Stewart Lee special where he does, himself, the voice of some guy pushing back against what he’s saying in the moment, and it slips out in Richard Herring’s accent and delivery. I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose, or it’s just ingrained, like a fingerprint. It’s fascinating, watching how people push and pull and mesh and leave ghosts all over each other.
things played
What got the most of my downtime this month (and my brain told me it was very necessary to take some downtime) was a stack of adventure games. Over the past ten years, I built up quite the TBR pile of point-and-click games and visual novels — some of which I’ve never touched. Mid-September, some necessary wheel ticked over in my brain and I blew through about half the library, quoting my own poetry about the stupidity of hoarding your own pleasures all the way. To go a little easier on ourselves, I think there was a purpose to this: My head’s working through something and this is the conductive medium. So it was probably not a bad thing that I had that stack ready for action.
The absolute standout was The Silent Age, a visually basic but very well-written and well-plotted time travel adventure game: moody, soft, narratively very precise, and with a beautifully intuitive logic to its puzzles. I like adventure games and grew up on the Sierra ones, which can be occasionally punishingly hard on you for missing stuff, but the sense of flow you get from a game that isn’t trying to trip you up, but not making it too easy either — it’s pretty priceless.
You’re playing Joe, a Vietnam vet who’s working as a janitor for a 1974 research lab: you don’t know much about what’s going on in the basement, don’t have the clearance, and don’t much care. Until your co-worker’s abruptly not at work one morning, and you’re assigned his cleaning jobs — which quickly involve following a trail of blood to a gutshot man who claims he’s from the future, and has a time-travel device, and the world is going to end if you don’t do something, fast.
I feel like the best time-travel stuff knows the shape of an elegant causal structure, and The Silent Age pulls it off marvelously; it’s atmospheric, focused on soundscapes, almost exquisitely lonely. You’re so often in a state of background urgency but no real rush when it comes to the mechanics, and there’s something peaceful about that: the feeling of the eye of a storm. The ending was beautifully satisfying, and it’s only about a four-hour play time (novella, we’ll call it?).
words are meaningless / and forgettable
As Martin Gore’s so ably explaining, none of this month’s writing actually wants to be talked about, to the point where my jaw clenches up when I try. I have my orders.
***
So, a lot undefinitive here in Liminal Awareness Month, but I hope it’s enough in terms of fun recommendations and observations to get you through. I’m diving full into a few projects this month, so hopefully I’ll come up with some big floppy proverbial fish, and there’ll be a little more to say next issue.