forty-five: when they ask / what do i see / i say a bright white beautiful heaven hanging over me
This month's title from The National, which is unabashedly Dad Rock (seeing them live at Massey was the highest recorded concentration of dads per million I've ever walked among), although apparently they sell merch tee-shirts labelled SAD DADS, so it's Dad Rock with a solid sense of self-awareness.
It's been an occasionally productive, occasionally vain attempt to look up and see light during the kind of month where the dysfunction seems to be pulling overtime, mitigated by very bad holiday chocolates and friend visits. (Right now the score is Friends' Pets Who Love With Biting 2, Me 0 and a pulled strand in my handwarmers from enthusiastic puppy biting. She is six months old and all things are met with teeth.) I keep asking various grouplets if it's just me, if things just look dark because of where my head's at, or if it's rough out there, and the answer keeps unfortunately being it's not just you. Not ideal! I hope the function's outweighing the dysfunction where you are; I hope if that's not so, you have handles to shift and shape it.
A few of mine at the moment:
chaussettes
Knitting was promised, and for once: knitting delivered, because for once knitting's being visually interesting. It's most indubitably sock season here; it's crisp enough in the evenings now that handling wool feels good. Our winter's first fruits:
Those entered my Ravelry queue circa 2009 and the yarn came my way something like 2017, so while much else in the world isn't quite getting cleaned up and set to rights, that is. I absolutely punted on trying to keep the skein tidy while knitting them and lost three days to untangling the yarn when it just got too snarled to manage, but that meant it was a ball now, and that meant I got to use the yarn bowl I splurged on a few months back. Behold the yarn bowl:
It really showed how much this isn't just a frill (okay, it's a bit of one) but a tool. Totally smooth pull on the yarn, even tension, made the whole process easier and much faster. I tend to get a lot of skeins rather than balled yarn? But I might go down to the yarn store, where there's a swift, and get a few of them wound so I can use this thing some more.
various political actions
Living near a main street and given the state of the multiple armed conflicts going around (which: I am not going to write position papers about, because if I'm not someone whose opinion anyone acts upon, I reserve the right to not throw opinion around! Results or death!), I've heard protest chants outside my window most days the past two months. There are a lot of actions in the city right now, aiming a lot of directions, by a lot of people: some of them obviously more put-together than others. Some serious high panicky foolishness going around, too, in a way that reminds me more of the emotional-political climate of 2002-03 than anything has since. It wasn't a fun time; I didn't enjoy it on the first go. No one should ever get the urge to read Get Your War On to self-soothe.
I don't know if I'm being a curmudgeon or it's the organizer in me, or maybe the version who's really thinking hard about the right verb in the right line these days, but I'm realizing I have very little patience for protests that don't know who they're addressed to. A friend and I argue about this a lot (in a friendly way; it's a friend-argument, we do it over beer), but I firmly hold that a protest is the quiet, polite notification of capacity for a riot. Hey, we could, but we're giving you 30 days. It's the counteroffer to military parades, which are also hey, we could, but. And that means you really need to be on the right lawn for it to be more than a waste of that potential energy.
if you're protesting at a mayor on international issues (well, most mayors and most issues) or picketing the campaign debt fundraiser for a midtown city councillor, you're really just firing at random: the trauma is wheeling about, looking for the nearest available target, not the smartest one. They're not the decision-maker, you look a little stupid because you did your lead identification wrong, and you're placing pressure on people who can't fulfill, so it starts these side fights that drain energy and momentum off your movement instead of delivering a neat little package of what now, buster to the person who can influence actual outcomes. Your metaphorical transmission grid is just as important -- if not more -- than your social energy generation capacity. People hate seeing their light and heat go to waste; they love seeing it impact.
There's not a ton to do with this understanding except put it here and then personally organize good and targeted actions, in the time and place when I get back to organizing actions (it was a brief time; I figured out quickly I'm much more suited to building things). But this has annoyed me sufficiently that I picked back up a short story I shelved back in the Rob Ford years, because it had stopped seeming relevant, about two burnt-out activists and the manual they're writing called How to Fight. It's strange and not, seeing the things I already knew when I started it, back in 2012: about social media drama, about boundaries and reach, about ways of relating that already weren't working.
This tells me less about oh look, I'm smart, meeee, and more that not enough on this problem has changed in the last eleven years; we seem trapped in a few distinct questions that as a group, we can't quite work our way around. We are, I'm starting to think, not yet designing smart and targeted actions on a scale so socially macro that we're only starting to apprehend it. Are we at the right door? Who and what can get us what we need?
speaking of which, praxis (professional bites personal)
Behind this, craft continues -- partly in an attempt to be diligent, partly because it's been providing a useful structure.
Poetry workshop wrapped up today, with a small handful of new work to show for it, including my first found poem. Found poetry! It's fuckin' hard! [/DeNiro] I think I like it!
I only write two kinds of poems when I'm writing a poem a week: ambitious things clumsily executed that will need so much fixer-uppering later, or stuff that's polished, but far too glib and insubstantial. The poems, they have not had time to marinate and develop their juices. I've wheeled between the two for the last weeks of my workshop class. I'm always much happier with ambitious bad drafts; it's sincerely harder to deepen something that started out in life too shallow. But the habit seems to be good for me? It's getting shorter and shorter, the time it takes to clear everything else out of my brain and get into the headspace of composition. Back to this in a minute; there is value in establishing the good habit.
I also went (virtually, it was cold and too COVIDy this past weekend; everyone is sick) to Draft Reading Series, which was the last place I read before everything shut down in 2020. It was a program of four poets curated by Lillian Allen, and I spent the afternoon cleaning mirrors, doing dishes, listening to the poets, deliberately thinking in craft: about which work I connected with and which I didn't, and then the crucial element -- why. What about the cadence, what about the line, what about our overlaps or disjuncts on what poetry is and is for was I feeling?
When I think about it, it's been something, trying to learn a craft properly in the middle of complete and total world upheaval. It forces me into the learning headspace/beginner mind, and the learning headspace -- all the presets you have to set in your own approach to get craft out of input -- is a very useful place to be when things are a mess: both a total comfort zone but not passive; agentive; entirely kinetic. It brings your locus of control back inward (tip of the hat to Jay Lake for being the first person I heard talking about locus of control) and that's almost half the battle, sometimes, when stuff's hard. When my head is buzzing, not actively retrench to habit or comfort: find something new. Learn it. Reestablish the fact of my own motion.
things read
It's been a strange and kind of truncated few weeks in reading, partially because I have a few reviews commissioned and was spending time with those, partially because our library system got hacked (repeated refrain: who hacks! the library!) and so I'm in a holding pattern with the (admittedly lots of) books I already had checked out. Not all of them are the book I want at this moment in time.
I did sneak one novella in between the work stuff, though, although I didn't realize Becky Chambers's A Prayer for the Crown-Shy was a sequel, and thus read it cold, which -- wasn't honestly a bad situation. It's, like most of the Chambers I've read, nicely worldbuilt, fairly simple, and sweet without being saccharine, which is not a bad place to be. There's something of the setting that rhymes with Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless: the sense of a set of tropes around solarpunk futures lightly codifying in the same ways I watched paranormal romance tropes codify fifteen years ago. This subgenre now has staples, which is an interesting situation. It means a shift: now you have to at least tip the hat to them, acknowledge or push against, but writing with a baseline is much different than writing without.
things to read
Poem "Sisyphus, Mid-Flight" is now available to non-subscribers at The Deadlands. It is short and bittersweet, and made for a good issue ending, I think?
It's been an occasionally productive, occasionally vain attempt to look up and see light during the kind of month where the dysfunction seems to be pulling overtime, mitigated by very bad holiday chocolates and friend visits. (Right now the score is Friends' Pets Who Love With Biting 2, Me 0 and a pulled strand in my handwarmers from enthusiastic puppy biting. She is six months old and all things are met with teeth.) I keep asking various grouplets if it's just me, if things just look dark because of where my head's at, or if it's rough out there, and the answer keeps unfortunately being it's not just you. Not ideal! I hope the function's outweighing the dysfunction where you are; I hope if that's not so, you have handles to shift and shape it.
A few of mine at the moment:
chaussettes
Knitting was promised, and for once: knitting delivered, because for once knitting's being visually interesting. It's most indubitably sock season here; it's crisp enough in the evenings now that handling wool feels good. Our winter's first fruits:
Those entered my Ravelry queue circa 2009 and the yarn came my way something like 2017, so while much else in the world isn't quite getting cleaned up and set to rights, that is. I absolutely punted on trying to keep the skein tidy while knitting them and lost three days to untangling the yarn when it just got too snarled to manage, but that meant it was a ball now, and that meant I got to use the yarn bowl I splurged on a few months back. Behold the yarn bowl:
It really showed how much this isn't just a frill (okay, it's a bit of one) but a tool. Totally smooth pull on the yarn, even tension, made the whole process easier and much faster. I tend to get a lot of skeins rather than balled yarn? But I might go down to the yarn store, where there's a swift, and get a few of them wound so I can use this thing some more.
various political actions
Living near a main street and given the state of the multiple armed conflicts going around (which: I am not going to write position papers about, because if I'm not someone whose opinion anyone acts upon, I reserve the right to not throw opinion around! Results or death!), I've heard protest chants outside my window most days the past two months. There are a lot of actions in the city right now, aiming a lot of directions, by a lot of people: some of them obviously more put-together than others. Some serious high panicky foolishness going around, too, in a way that reminds me more of the emotional-political climate of 2002-03 than anything has since. It wasn't a fun time; I didn't enjoy it on the first go. No one should ever get the urge to read Get Your War On to self-soothe.
I don't know if I'm being a curmudgeon or it's the organizer in me, or maybe the version who's really thinking hard about the right verb in the right line these days, but I'm realizing I have very little patience for protests that don't know who they're addressed to. A friend and I argue about this a lot (in a friendly way; it's a friend-argument, we do it over beer), but I firmly hold that a protest is the quiet, polite notification of capacity for a riot. Hey, we could, but we're giving you 30 days. It's the counteroffer to military parades, which are also hey, we could, but. And that means you really need to be on the right lawn for it to be more than a waste of that potential energy.
if you're protesting at a mayor on international issues (well, most mayors and most issues) or picketing the campaign debt fundraiser for a midtown city councillor, you're really just firing at random: the trauma is wheeling about, looking for the nearest available target, not the smartest one. They're not the decision-maker, you look a little stupid because you did your lead identification wrong, and you're placing pressure on people who can't fulfill, so it starts these side fights that drain energy and momentum off your movement instead of delivering a neat little package of what now, buster to the person who can influence actual outcomes. Your metaphorical transmission grid is just as important -- if not more -- than your social energy generation capacity. People hate seeing their light and heat go to waste; they love seeing it impact.
There's not a ton to do with this understanding except put it here and then personally organize good and targeted actions, in the time and place when I get back to organizing actions (it was a brief time; I figured out quickly I'm much more suited to building things). But this has annoyed me sufficiently that I picked back up a short story I shelved back in the Rob Ford years, because it had stopped seeming relevant, about two burnt-out activists and the manual they're writing called How to Fight. It's strange and not, seeing the things I already knew when I started it, back in 2012: about social media drama, about boundaries and reach, about ways of relating that already weren't working.
This tells me less about oh look, I'm smart, meeee, and more that not enough on this problem has changed in the last eleven years; we seem trapped in a few distinct questions that as a group, we can't quite work our way around. We are, I'm starting to think, not yet designing smart and targeted actions on a scale so socially macro that we're only starting to apprehend it. Are we at the right door? Who and what can get us what we need?
speaking of which, praxis (professional bites personal)
Behind this, craft continues -- partly in an attempt to be diligent, partly because it's been providing a useful structure.
Poetry workshop wrapped up today, with a small handful of new work to show for it, including my first found poem. Found poetry! It's fuckin' hard! [/DeNiro] I think I like it!
I only write two kinds of poems when I'm writing a poem a week: ambitious things clumsily executed that will need so much fixer-uppering later, or stuff that's polished, but far too glib and insubstantial. The poems, they have not had time to marinate and develop their juices. I've wheeled between the two for the last weeks of my workshop class. I'm always much happier with ambitious bad drafts; it's sincerely harder to deepen something that started out in life too shallow. But the habit seems to be good for me? It's getting shorter and shorter, the time it takes to clear everything else out of my brain and get into the headspace of composition. Back to this in a minute; there is value in establishing the good habit.
I also went (virtually, it was cold and too COVIDy this past weekend; everyone is sick) to Draft Reading Series, which was the last place I read before everything shut down in 2020. It was a program of four poets curated by Lillian Allen, and I spent the afternoon cleaning mirrors, doing dishes, listening to the poets, deliberately thinking in craft: about which work I connected with and which I didn't, and then the crucial element -- why. What about the cadence, what about the line, what about our overlaps or disjuncts on what poetry is and is for was I feeling?
When I think about it, it's been something, trying to learn a craft properly in the middle of complete and total world upheaval. It forces me into the learning headspace/beginner mind, and the learning headspace -- all the presets you have to set in your own approach to get craft out of input -- is a very useful place to be when things are a mess: both a total comfort zone but not passive; agentive; entirely kinetic. It brings your locus of control back inward (tip of the hat to Jay Lake for being the first person I heard talking about locus of control) and that's almost half the battle, sometimes, when stuff's hard. When my head is buzzing, not actively retrench to habit or comfort: find something new. Learn it. Reestablish the fact of my own motion.
things read
It's been a strange and kind of truncated few weeks in reading, partially because I have a few reviews commissioned and was spending time with those, partially because our library system got hacked (repeated refrain: who hacks! the library!) and so I'm in a holding pattern with the (admittedly lots of) books I already had checked out. Not all of them are the book I want at this moment in time.
I did sneak one novella in between the work stuff, though, although I didn't realize Becky Chambers's A Prayer for the Crown-Shy was a sequel, and thus read it cold, which -- wasn't honestly a bad situation. It's, like most of the Chambers I've read, nicely worldbuilt, fairly simple, and sweet without being saccharine, which is not a bad place to be. There's something of the setting that rhymes with Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless: the sense of a set of tropes around solarpunk futures lightly codifying in the same ways I watched paranormal romance tropes codify fifteen years ago. This subgenre now has staples, which is an interesting situation. It means a shift: now you have to at least tip the hat to them, acknowledge or push against, but writing with a baseline is much different than writing without.
things to read
Poem "Sisyphus, Mid-Flight" is now available to non-subscribers at The Deadlands. It is short and bittersweet, and made for a good issue ending, I think?
***
Sort of like this issue? It is only three weeks of action, and most of them under constraint.
Year-end wrap-up next letter: Holiday food, some scheduled reviews, and the year in publishing.
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