forty-nine: my love is bigger than your love (sing it!)
(Apologies, folks -- this was meant to go out Friday, and then buttondown scarfed it. Support was quick to help, but it means some of this will be a little atemporal. -- LB)
This month's title from a July Talk cover that's been inhabiting my head for weeks now. (Note: Band is very good at choosing which songs to cover.)
Song itself is not even being subtle about the satire, but...it's still here because it has workable layers. Every time I've run into someone being small, and petty, and frightened this winter; every time I have been told what isn't possible; every time I hit presumed constriction, my ribcage whips out the guitars and declares my love is bigger than your love with a perfectly straight face. What I'm remembering this month/this year so far is that my love is so big it has objects in stable orbit. And that this can be workable strategy.
It's been an extremely full month: somehow each week is fitting in about two weeks' action at a low and ground-eating pace. I'm still behind on a lot (although: less!), and way too tired way too often right now, but it's started to transfigure into a generative tired: the equivalent of how your legs feel when you've been getting somewhere.
my words are bigger than they have been previously
At the end of last month I counted up the February total words and wasn't entirely happy with the results (a partial combination of Plant School and a huge hairball of life logistics), so for March, I went with "wordcount basically every day". Even on the messiest, tiredest days, a little poetry has slipped through the cat flap before bed.
Word food this month has included: two afternoons a week in the greenhouse, a manageable pace; homemade tortillas from fresh-ground masa; the decidedly too large Cadbury's Creme Egg knockoffs the local gluten-free bakery makes (about the size of goose eggs, seasonal-only because you'd die); and a lot of yoga classes, which are graduating into a really satisfying, slightly ass-kicking way to think a lot about relationships with body in the deeper sense: what we string our cognition on, extended cognition in general, how we do bodily cognition -- and then what kinds of stories bodies write.
This project is sort of apt for being written with and by the body, in body-logics. There's an accreting layer of interactions and character development that make sense purely in the reasoning of the physical, and getting that across in such a non-physical medium is challenging and interesting and actually rather personal? In a way that right now does not feel bad?
I'm still deep into structure and transitions, and seeing the effect of spending three and a half years intermittently buried in poetrycraft. A more generative way of thinking about scene transitions (a thing I kind of hate) is happening: thinking in reading pace, enjambment, and breath, like a short poem would -- but putting thematics, idea work, and motifs where word sound would go. This is working: It's a functioning logic to fit those decisions into.
They're still so smart and ridiculous. I adore them. And am letting them have all kinds of tangents that'll probably get cut, just to make them happy.
when we gonna get excited? (sing it)
Most of the rest of March has been navigating the fulcrums: easing a whole lot of this into a whole lot of that without dropping it on the floor and smudging all the proverbial icing. Did I mention I hate writing transitions? It's all transitions right now, she said.
I wrapped up Tiny Plant School second week of the month, more with a slow drift than any finality: doing two volunteer shifts a week for the rest of March, to get seeds started for the community plant sale & giveaway and score more greenhouse time. My hands are much more confident at this now, and besides, blasting indie rock and talking shit in a greenhouse with dirt all over your hands because you brought your gardening gloves, but ehhh, is an inarguable win condition.
It was a really good program for clarifying what exactly one wants to be accomplishing in this space -- like yes, urban agriculture, climate work, but what?
I spent a long time considering what was speaking to me there, and after chewing that award ceremony last month -- a thing that needs chewing because a lot of people who get things done were very briefly talking about their approaches, and if you find yourself in a room with that much practical takeaway, the smart money listens -- re-signed up for the Food Security postgrad certificate I was planning to start twelve years ago, and then instead Above came out and I sold Ashes with deadline and who had time, really?
Because what I want to do, turns out, is build the elegant little projects I've been building and working on for years, and then on top of them, weave them together, scale them up, and help build policy.
Because I know how to build projects -- hey, we built a whole hot food network for like three years now! Small press skills are real skills, friends! If you can keep a fiction magazine running without pissing everyone off, you can do a lot of things in this life! But this is how I ground myself in everything that's already being done, and translate it into the languages of systems. (The language of systems is absolutely an act of translation, more on this maybe another time.)
Am I in certainty about this? Hell no. Is the fulcrum a scary, scary place to be? Yup. But here's the thing about roads not taken, and regrets: Some of them you can't have back; physics is stronger. But some of them, all you do is make a phone call (and go through a solid month of admissions paperwork) and there you are, it's that easy.
One of the big, suffusing lies of passion industries is that something must be the thing you love. The lie is in the fulcrum of that sentence: the. My love is bigger than, and it loves all kinds of things really, and yes, we can do both.
Many things are quite precarious right now, but I start coursework on the theory and practice of plenty in May. :)
(And a tree tending workshop. I also signed up to learn citizen arborist work, their words (!!!) because this is how we become effortlessly cool people after the Anthropocene.)
this was a story about a girl who could find infinite beauty in anything
A lot of chores-by-hand and logistics means a lot of time for movies in the background, so I finally watched The Brothers Bloom (2008), the last Rian Johnson move I haven't seen, having loved all the rest that weren't Star Wars. For some reason I've been hoarding it to break glass in case of, and that just became a habit?
And--oh. I am reminded how magnificently incisive this guy's writing was before, to be maybe a little too harsh about it, Culture Wars seemingly ate his thematic depth perception. A plethora of beautiful little comments on the nature of story and what we're telling ourselves to make it through whatever we're making it through (see title) and the widening gap between those stories and something real. As Bloom puts it: "an unwritten life."
It's a great movie to watch when you're in a structure headspace: inversions and subversions and an awareness, the whole time, that this is a con from some direction, that the movie itself has told you, and a lot of the play in it, the joy is constantly updating your awareness of that, trying to figure out how. The metatextualness is the fun. There's also a visible Pushing Daisies aesthetic to it. I swear people have flattened this kind of straight-faced, self-consciously narrative goofing around down to Wes Anderson, but no, it was all over the place in 2007-2010 -- a kind of gentler take on the screwball comedy. Hard things looked at with a certain removed tenderness.
I feel like the quiet takeaway from this little flock of films/shows was that life was weird, but people were good. It's a good foundation, really. Life is weird. Fundamentally, people are good.
things read
Reviewing has also creaked back to life this month, which means the majority of my reading has been for other publications: an obliquely connected mix of minimalist literary novels, climate nonfiction, and poetry collections, with a dash of workshop teaching critiques and other-workshop application stories thrown in. (Did I mention it was busy?)
Between them, I did manage to blow through Kerry Greenwood's latest Miss Fisher novel, which was satisfying in all the ways you need late-series mysteries to be -- the right mix of familiar and new. There's an art to keeping standby series characters fresh, especially when the era doesn't really move and they don't age tangibly, and I think it's about gaining forward motion in the situations.
Mystery series logic is frequently the same as sitcom logic: nobody ever seems to get where they're going, nothing ever seems to happen irreperably, but you can get a lot of mileage if the degrees and grades of problem they're working update and evolve, and you can get a lot of mileage on learning. Learning is a kind of time.
The only other non-review good read this month was another interview of serious note: Francis Weller on the topography of grief, how the absence of communal ritual is on a practical level messing us up big, and ways forward through that. It is beat for beat magnificence and just laying some truths out there that I had to dig out the hard way. If you're struggling or close to people who are -- basically, if you're animate right now -- this one's got worthwhile action.
things to read
I have to issue a correction here (first ever!) from last month: I checked in on that Room Magazine review and it's not going to be March, it'll be June. Apologies for the confusion there, but the chapbook is still good poetry now, and you can probably check it out now and then find out later why it's good. :p
However, I do have a pair of reviews to offer in its place:
1) Ken Sparling's short novel Not Anywhere, Just Not, reviewed for the next issue of The Ampersand Review. This was a commission that was almost lost to last year's omnicrisis: a deadline that got pushed out and blown and finally fished out of the proverbial Lethe earlier this month. And it's some deliberate, skilled, masterful structural and implicative work. It's a little seemingly whimsical literary book about a marriage which is actually the cosmic horror of marriage novels because like Jaws, it only shows you the fucking fin and lets you infer the rest. I have rarely seen someone write a dynamic this much like a mouthful of spiders. Fans of Kathryn Davis, Cait Kiernan, and The Physiognomy: even if you're not lit readers, this one's yours.
2) I've reviewed Jade Wallace's debut poetry collection, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There, for the next issue of Spacing Magazine -- which should hit newsstands sometime in April.
Aside from the fact that reviewing psychogeographic poetry for an urbanist magazine makes you Fun And Cool (see: trendsetting the world-to-come), it's a rather accessible collection doing interesting thematic and structural work with its long motif of place. If you are or know someone just getting into poetry and into geographic-emotional textures, this is a really good bet.
***
It ain't getting less strange around here over the next month, so next issue: anticipate more book review announcements, more epistemics (who am I fooling, of course there'll be), and early personal-garden reports. My winter food box got discontinued this week. The garden may have to go hard this year.
Have a good long weekend, all, and a good April!