forty: realists of a larger reality

Good day! This letter is both late (because I was traveling) and long this month, because I am going to dissect a book in full Reviewer Two aspect in a way that I hope is as interesting to you as it was to me. This month's title apropos to both: the unorganized theme of June has definitely been about how large we're willing or able to have our worlds be.

air quality

It's been a strange month in existing as a human in an ecology. At the beginning of June, wildfire smoke rolled into the city and hung around for most of a week. I kept the windows shut; it still smelled like being in the middle of a campfire and felt like the longest, loudest forest funeral procession. Everyone was weird and sad and tense, and two weeks later, still depressed. Everyone got raw.

I am told this isn't just me fitting a skewed lens on the universe (I checked): friends in regions that get more intense and frequent wildfire activity have said yes, they deal everyone a broad trauma hit, everyone gets awful and bad and sad. This is explanatory and yet not really an answer I wanted confirmed because oh no, we are in some bad future trouble. Anyways, if anyone wants to launch an immediate study group to get much, much better at self-awareness, community support, and grief, yeah, call me.

countermeasures

Between that, CSA season is on and canning has opened. I melted two fancy farm bunches of rhubarb and two cheapo ones from the cheap table into a batch of Rhubarb-Earl Grey jam, made by night because it was too hot in the daytime, and used the canning water to feed plants the next morning. That constructed, space-habitat Circle of Life feeling was so satisfying I wrote a poem about it, because the trouble with poets is we talk too much (and a poet might come along and say / "Ain't that just like life").

The traditional flat of strawberries was got, and turned into strawberry-balsamic (and the rest just into my face, I didn't have good quantities for a second batch). This was the first recipe I've done using the calcium water pectin method, and it's a little spendy and fussy, but I see what people like about this: quick, good set on low sugar content.



The smoke in the sky also launched a lot of people into an impromptu spring cleaning: trying to get out through other means what couldn't be actively tidied. Bags got repaired, worn-out clothing donated for the fabric recycle, stalled home reno projects completed, boots dropped off at the shoe repair to rebuild their whole soles. The shoe repair guy says this is supposed to be his quiet season; he's just as slammed as he is every September. At some point before fall, my boots will be bootable again.

work work workshop

The big thing this month, though: Last week, I went down to North Carolina for the Sycamore Hill Writers' Workshop, a pretty intense week of story and chat and being on a mountain doing mountain stuff.

In that week, I critiqued ~100k of short fiction; used up half a bottle of J. Herbin fountain pen ink in cassis on manuscript notes alone; slept maybe five or six hours a night; saw one skink, one roadside goat, many bats, about a dozen varieties of butterflies and moths, bluebirds, woodpeckers, cardinals, trees trees trees; and got an actual visual reference for the idea of kudzu. I learned a lot about how people write and read, which'll probably be percolating through my brain for a good while yet. It was a sheer firehose of information; I'm still waiting to think coherently about any of it, having been home for two-going-on-three days.

The mountains of North Carolina are really wild and beautiful; the overwhelming sense of forest, old and strange, is everywhere. The mountains outside the porch where a few of us settled most nights to read manuscripts would haze, with mist or distant wildfire smoke. The political situation carved across the highway billboards and Saturday afternoon, small-town, three-person protest marches, where you can still get strictly gluten-free lunches with no fuss or trouble, felt complicated indeed. It was at least ten degrees cooler up on the mountain, sweater weather by night, and then we descended into this sweltering, sticky, confused world.

It was interesting; it also felt like an immensely precarious balancing act/mental speedrun. I have no idea how anyone does Clarion and runs this gauntlet for six weeks. I am so glad I did it and also I need a nap.

things read

This month was mostly non-fiction, interspersed with a little more E.M. Forster (Forster always, always has such a good grasp on everything); there were a bunch of interesting titles that clogged together on my library hold list and had to be swiftly dispatched.

I got a lot out of Danya Ruttenberg's On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. I followed her on Twitter for a while when I was still spending my time on Twitter, so had a notion of what to expect -- basically, a primer on Jewish ethics of relational repair -- so for me this was more vindication than epiphany. I have all this cultural training already, and am sometimes baffled and upset that others don't, because hey, what's normal to you is normal to you?

For anyone who's stuck in the gap between wanting to do more than verbal apologies and cycling dynamics, who wants to mend relationships, it's probably quite useful. You can tell Ruttenberg still spends far too much time online: there's one chapter about public harm that descends out of the relatively clear pop-scholarly voice into full social media brainworms, defensiveness, and thought-terminating cliches, and many of her examples can be veiled potshots at Twitter Villains of the Week, which honestly left a bad taste in my mouth. You legitimately cannot have that thing both ways in a book about social repair, choose one. But on the whole, there's sound process in here, and I think it's important that she laid this out so cleanly.
 

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The most interesting read this month -- and it's not interesting in a positive way, but that's still interesting? -- was Abigail Carroll's Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. This was a recommendation from Jon and Jen, which, I will say, came with a few caveats and not as a total endorsement, so what I'm about to do is not coming from a place of blame. I was Well Warned, let's put it that way.

It's a very mixed read, largely because alongside some fairly painstaking-looking research about the food habits of Colonial American settlers is -- a strange and inexplicable historical blindness: a stubborn refusal to actually think about anything she's dug up in primary sources, or put those anecdotes together to form some portrait of how cultures, foodways, and people influence each other in the real world and outside a very narrow band of presumably Northeastern, middle-class Americans. She argues that "the shape of the meal is the shape of society", and then insistently declines to think about that shape beyond its barest surfaces.

I have never read a history book by someone who seems to believe so uncritically that everything her sources say depicts the objective image of society -- whether it's a manners manual, an opinion column, or any of the other texts noted cranks turn out in any decade to try to make what's really happening look more like what they want it to be. It's an incredibly odd experience to read an analysis of a country's foodways that's so determined on not analyzing anything.

In place of analysis, Carroll's weirdly fixated on social class performance as an explainer for all sorts of (much simpler) culinary behaviour. I am someone who thinks about class a lot, and code-switches my class presentation frequently! And I was still thinking: oh, dude, no, that's not why people do things, and this is an Arby's. Any preference or behaviour imported from Europe (an enthusiasm for high tea in the 1700s, French cooks and meal structures containing courses in the 1800s) is described, frequently unnecessarily, as pretentious, flamboyant, elite, exclusive, invasive. There's seemingly no clue why anyone might enjoy different foodways, or a midafternoon meal where you chill and talk to your friends: see them as improvements, as aspirations, as pleasure; the only possible motivation is social climbing and the gut-churning anxiety that if you don't execute this class ritual correctly, you will be found out and cast out. There's never thought for more benign motives. Her emphasis is on recounting the elaborate social rules for each occasion, as if describing prison bars. And yet -- of course. She's reading etiquette manuals as descriptive copy.

But there are significant signs that the blind spot is in the author. For one -- and it's a small thing but a telling one, especially in a book which seems to have been copyedited a bit poorly -- she can't stop dunking on her primary sources' irregular spellings, in eras when spelling wasn't actually quite as codified. The inherent rigidity of taking time out to denigrate the class performance of people who are dead is quite something to behold. And those attitudes carry into her treatment of the content: The shift from having cakes and doughnuts for special occasions to a regular breakfast food when bakers get cast-iron stoves and leavening agents -- and those recipes aren't all-day affairs anymore! -- is glossed as "imparting an air of refinement to the morning meal while leaving behind the social pretense of the teatime ritual", without an eye to the fairly practical idea that when you put the ability to get treats in people's hands, they're gonna make treats, because people like treats and who the hell cares who's watching at breakfast? It's probably no one! On the other hand, the reduction of a charlotte russe (a nice thing!) from a homemade custard that crowned 19th-century dinner parties to cheap, mass-produced sponge cakes with a maraschino cherry that children buy at candy shops is it being "Americanized and democratized". This shit ain't even subtle.

Even some of her grudges I agree with -- the move away from fresh-prepared meals to packaged food to save labour in the face of an inexplicable 19th-century servant shortage (more on that later) -- are only really handled as grudges, without much reflection on what the people buying into these new systems might see as their benefits, how they come to terms with them, refute them, arrange their lives because of them, where those pressures and positives actually came from. In Carroll's read of food culture, food is identity, identity is static, it is formed in isolationism, and it is a constant siege.

Likewise, the map of Carroll's analyses stops at American shores. There's no consideration of how food trends in the countries supplying successive waves of immigration -- or the general social shift in habits when a poor society starts to feel wealthy -- impact those eating practices. That insistence on ignoring global contexts verges, occasionally, on silly: In the Victorian era, when a French chef is a point of pride in English households and steamships have just been invented, making American tourism in England and the Continent both plausible and popular -- and Americans are making their money selling Southern slave-grown cotton into England particularly -- Carroll can't conceive of the wave of French cooking in America as anything but some variety of cultural aggression or desperate Revolution-era refugees seeking American freedom. There's no thought that anyone traveled, anyone has economic or social relationships that span the Atlantic; that anyone tried a thing and liked it, and wanted it for themselves. The Americans of this book's eye are vain, pleasureless, and largely seem to stay at home. Others visit and comment on them, like random ambulatory international report cards; they're not credited with any impetus of their own in fetching their French chefs or broadening their own experience.

The Puritans are likewise referenced once, as hapless victims of unprovoked religious persecution; their tendencies to austerity and very well-documented foodways back in England aren't examined at all as a foundational piece of American food habits, even when Carroll gets into a detailed examination of how snacking between meals was coded as immoral and the austerity mindsets around that. None of this is connected to decades of colonial quasi-starvation. Miniature food cultures sit in silos in this history; they aren't seen as causing, effecting, or impacting each other.

It's when Carroll does throw out novel, interesting information that this incuriosity gets frustrating: items like early colonists' somewhat self-serving horror at some indigenous groups' view of fasting as an endurance sport, a show of character and control that prepared for hard times with a slight moral element, are mentioned and then just left completely unconnected to that Puritan austerity, the rigid forbidding of snacking that's seen as a doorway to larger vices (written off as just Christians being Christians) and an analysis of lunch as a cold meal that's chalked up to business being king (approvingly, as are all mentions of increasingly sped-up American work habits, with no mention of slavery management manuals and their influence either). She's set up all the pins to connect a settler population kicked out of their native foodways with an indigenous culture that intermittently fasts as a subsistence strategy, and what grows out of their interaction, and then just leaves it there. There's something in there, and Carroll's response is to walk away. I waste, I gnash, I die.

The almost deliberate blindness to foodway influences coming through non-white populations stretches farther. Even within this obsession with class and status, slavery is near-invisible here. The servant problem of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and how it affects the kind of cooking and dining middle-class households could do, is discussed candidly for a while, and in complete absence of the Jim Crow Laws being upheld in the Supreme Court right at that moment. Servants of course come from Europe, and the problem was they just were bad at their jobs because they didn't speak English yet, and were angling for different jobs, which was actually forgivable because America!. It's only when you get to the picture from the cooking college set up to train new servants, you notice the unspoken: all these women are Black. You would not guess it from the text. In the text, America is uniform, even, and smiling.

And this is the main fault of this book: Carroll is bizarrely unable to decenter her national myths, read around them, or think about her historical Americans as having the same habits, needs, yearnings, and obsessions of the people in any other colony; after independence, she can't think of America as a country among countries. She can't seem to think about America, which is a bad problem when you're writing a history of American foodways. I don't to a certain point quibble with historians for having different politics than I do, but if you're going to be a historian and write history, I feel like it's a necessary precondition to be able to think through your own politics.

So I don't think Carroll set out to write a full-on work of neo-Puritan American triumphalist propaganda. But she writes as if -- and I'm sorry, this feels mean, but it's all I've got -- you fed a ChatGPT window on only neo-Puritan American triumphalist propaganda, and then asked it to describe the world and something as intimate as human beings and meals, our complex relation to food and society and each other, especially in a colony, where foodways are disrupted, hybridized, and reborn. This book might be what you get: weird, flat, smiling, distorted, flinching, nationalist, and oddly angry at everything. I have rarely read a book about food that engages so little with pleasure, or the intimate intersection between ingredient, process, and palate, or the idea of a meal as a thing that's made, first, by the people who prepare and share it. It is so contemptuous of almost everyone involved.

And it's a shame, because this could have been really cool. There are elements in what she chronicles of the bare facts of American foodways -- what emerged from that cultural interaction of disorientation, hunger, and the mess colonialism makes of everything -- that absolutely resemble a long, slow collective eating disorder. They set up a great deal about modern American attitudes to food and desire; they absolutely prefigure diet culture. They might even have something to say about what colonialism does to foodways in general, if taken broad and looked at alongside India, North Africa, etcetera. But Carroll either can't or won't explore the most interesting parts of what her evidence suggests, or what you might read from some understanding of people's frequently complex drives and desires; instead she falls back on America! as a thought-terminating cliche and retreats into Normal Rockwell cliches, and statements that people in other countries snack because we are "emulat[ing]...an idiom of American prosperity and freedom." (Funny. I thought I was just hungry.)

So as I said: It was interesting. It told me a lot about a certain American mindset I don't get much access to, because the Americans I know don't tend to carry these massive and rather demeaning assumptions: every action as a symbolic and aggressive assertion of national identity, a sulky insistence on dehumanizing others, an obsession with the rules, and a pervasive, lurking sense that at any moment, one will be socially and financially cast out. It's a book about food in the paranoid mode, which is -- not something I ever thought would exist. It's interesting. I had issues.

things to read

That said, if you haven't had enough of me taking aim at the whitewashing of American history, new poem "Notable Escapes" is up at Strange Horizons this month. It took its title from a heading in Houdini's Wikipedia entry, which just begged to have something done with it. He is a much more interesting guy than even he gets credit for.

Another piece is in the pipeline: new poem "what Mama says" is an honourable mention in Vancouver's 5th Annual Muriel's Journey Poetry Prize. This is a rather unique contest -- started in honour of social justice activist and poet Muriel Marjorie, with an entry fee of describing how you're contributing to your community. I'm quite floored to be part of it this year. There'll be a chapbook out from Three Ocean Press and an event at Word on the Street Vancouver in September; more as I have it.
 

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And now, your moment of Zen: From North Raleigh, new growth.



See you next month!