forty-six: my firm intention is to live forever

This month's title from The Edge of Love (2008), a movie about Dylan Thomas behaving badly. (There are no movies about Dylan Thomas behaving well.) It doesn't go well in the movie itself. But we're not talking about outcomes here; it's New Year's soon and we're setting intentions in the face of them, so.

(Note: Along those lines, there were supposed to be a lot of pictures in this edition, but Tinyletter, not keen on us sticking around until the February closing date, has wiped image capacity, it seems. So I'm going to link to the pictures as I can in other spaces. Alas for our newsletter aesthetics.)

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This was a month spent largely winding down 2023, and in small ways, winding up 2024. I have posted the year-end publications, which -- I'll be straight-up -- left me bitterly unsatisfied for the rest of the day. What a year, she said, for so many of us not getting what we wanted, needed, or asked for -- which seems to be a little general? Every time I admit I have had a hard, bad, filthy year in small-group spaces, it turns out so has everybody else. The director of one of the orgs I volunteer with ended up reading this out in our last meeting of the year before the holidays. We all just sighed and giggled and -- yeah. Felt a little less alone in our little boats of frustration and survival and failure.

So amidst that intense dissatisfaction, I've spent December interspersing a final kill of deadlines with a lot of end-of-year chores: dragging old review copies down to the used bookstore, organizing a closet once! and for all!,

I have this vivid fantasy that if I clear all the things I've flaked or been late on off my desk, square my obligations with the world, all the things people are flaking on or being late on for me will magically appear, like a law of sympathetic magic. I know it doesn't work that way. It's what's in my reach.

I keep going to my Tarot deck at night for reassurance, far too deep down the hole of it all. (Yes, I am a pragmatist; no, I only believe in specific ghosts; and yes, I read a surprisingly mean Tarot -- an uncanny one when drunk.) My deck has a history of real impatience with me in an anxious state: ask too much and it'll start telling me to solve it myself and also shut up, thanks. This month I can shuffle thirty times and pull the same card over and over again: The Magician. Candle burning at both ends in one hand, infinity sign over their head, every suit before them on the table, covered in flowers. It keeps telling me: You are infinite. That's the answer. You have everything you need.

building stuff (praxis!)

I don't know why this abruptly got busy, after a moribund autumn: It's possible everyone saw the end of the year coming up and went oh, shit. But opportunities arose to promptly put my money where I put my mouth in the last instalment, and I've been taking 'em.

The longest-term one: I've taken on the chairship of one of my Not Far From the Tree volunteer committees for next year. What does this mean? Mostly just shifting into a bit more project management, being the person who's accountable for keeping things on track and holding the whole mini-machine in my head. I am going to see where everyone's at with capacity and idea work, and then we are going to build stuff. I am emailing other organizations to see if they want to build joint stuff and get more than the sum of our effort. This feels amazing. As usual, got PhD dreams on a term paper budget, but we'll end up at least at an MA.

We've also, thankfully, brought the Chili Project back to life this month (it was on hiatus for much longer than we planned, due to all kinds of tsunamis of life crap for the organizing crew). If you are in Toronto and want to cook hot homemade food to help unhoused neighbours out? Here is the signup form. Email torontochiliproject@gmail.com first, just so we can get you the intro email with all the information so everything on that form makes sense. It's one of the easiest shields against helplessness I know. You make hot food, it feeds people: direct action.

I also did City budget consultations this year -- they've planned a series of roundtables prior to the budget, instead of just the deputation period after -- and lucked into a breakout room full of organizers: with TEA, with St. James Town Community Hub, with downtown BIAs. We did not always agree but Toronto the Good remains excellent, fierce, and deeply committed to this place not sucking, and keeps showing up to make that happen every time there's a chance. Basically everyone wanted to defund the police, and not necessarily as an ideological staple or from a place of theory, just as pragmatics. The wind's changing on that, tangibly so: I was not the only person saying but funding this other stuff prevents policing, so what makes sense here?

Our local police union is clearly freaked out by the whole thing, because they did a mass-mailed flyer in early December, trying to get people lobbying the mayor's office on their behalf. There is something very Tony Soprano-in-therapy about cops coming to your mailbox to say it's someone else's fault: a specific cultural touchpoint of violent grown men sulking. I'm hoping it backfires in other homes as much as it did in this one -- and again, not just punitively. The other services -- the ones that make a space worth living in -- need the cash.

la saison des fetes

Christmas this year was met with a reasonably authentic 1920s British dinner (roast beef with red wine and rosemary sauce, roast brussels sprouts, beans, Yorkshire puddings; a camembert encased in homemade aspic, port, and divinity candies for dessert) and ate it listening to Arvo Part's Da pacem while the fog hovered outside, wiping the city white. It's been nonstop misty for days in Toronto: a fog descended sometime on the 23rd and as of this writing hasn't lifted. The air is pure damp.

Part of the concept here was -- okay, bluntly, groceries are very expensive right now, a roast is one of the cheapest good cuts of Big Meat on offer (do not ask what lamb costs right now at our butcher's), and so it was a good centrepiece for menu design. But setting aside pragmatism for pleasure, I've been wanting to replicate some 1920s recipes for at least four years now, with pandemic and assorted crises always derailing the plan, and this year by god I was putting something in an aspic. By god I was making potted shrimp. This was not going to turn into one of those things you say you wish you'd done.

And: To my unending delight, both of them 1) worked and 2) were amazing. The shrimp is sweet and lightly ginger-touched and immensely satisfying. The aspic is rich and deep and bright -- there's a teaspoon of vinegar in there that I think makes the whole thing happen -- and has this sweet, almost spicy bottom, and it hits the sharpness of the cheese in a way that makes texture, flavour, roundness, contrast come together in this tiny flash of light. I was so gleeful that it set, and then I couldn't stop eating it.

Like all good cooking experiments, it's opening doors rather than closing them. I can't stop thinking okay, what else wants to be put in gelatin like a D&D creature? Does substituting a chevre get a smoothness in there, a texture difference, an umami? If I hover around the fishmongers until their pulled lobsters are on for cheap (it happens), can I take all that beautiful delicate stuff and dream up something light, a little lemony, mostly tarragon? Someone has a new toy. It's fun to have new toys. :)

This general dinner adventure was preceded by this year's (as is traditional) Solstice Parade, which was not a parade and bonfire this year but a wandering art installation, because there's construction across the parade route and the usual bonfire site. (In someone's solarpunk short story this would all be far too thematically obvious.) The lack of bonfire was felt. The presence of drums anyways was also felt. I came home itching for both fire and marching, lit half the candles, and sat up until 2:30pm talking about 1970s Soviet ambient jazz and space marines and hauntology. P. has discovered Derrida. It is extremely entertaining to watch other people discover Derrida. The same kind of feeling as when someone bites into a weird flavour, and you just wait for their face to change.

l'écriture

Among all that, it's been a very steady month for wordcount. The continued hackage of the library isn't helping my process any (seriously) -- there's a lot of research material I'll be pouncing on once they unhack it -- but between two projects, the one I'm meant to finish and the one that's taking up large portions of my head, I'm in one of those stretches where I've set a daily goal and keep actually sticking to it, and have been getting mildly fixated on the concept of wordcount calorie conversion: How much input (snacking, reading, mental, emotional, physical) it takes to produce the unit of one (1) word. Fuck coercion; what is the resource requirement of each good word I'm making?

This may well sound obvious. I started my writing life in a working culture that was very much, at least on the surface, about harding it out and the stereotypically-Puritan act of taking pleasure and basic needs hostage against production -- if you got them at all. (Seriously, do not spend your early twenties hanging out around people who drop comments about "earning my oxygen today" and call their bodies "meatpuppets". Even if you don't believe it, you'll be washing that shit out of your hair for years.)

It's turning out to be a better approach: If I want the result, just give myself everything I need to get there and stop fussing the rest of it. Working sources of nutrition this month include bad Pot of Gold Christmas chocolate (it's gluten-free, folks!), The Graham Norton Show, moody documentaries about family cultures and connection, sporadically dive-bombing some cleaning chore to balance the physical energy back out, cheese (of course), and long coffees with friends weather permitting. Going to continue to work this beat in the new year: scarcity don't work, try the other thing.

le tricotage

We continue to faire le tricot. This month's crop has included a new pair of handwarmers to hit the intermediate space between the pairs I have (one's too warm for some situations, the other not enough) and finally finishing a larger project -- the 1960s-style cotton-linen camisole I spent all summer working.

This took all summer largely because it's a sizing experiment: a pattern simple enough for me to work out how to shape for my own figure. There's really not much point in knitting things that don't quite fit, so it was time to do some dedicated study. It's been mostly done for three months; I just had to get enough RAM free in my brain to learn seaming and do the seaming, the instructions for which were for some reason sticking in my brain. The result: I don't know if I 100% like the neckline, which is very much too wide. But the shaping around bust and waist? Nailed it. :) I think I learned what I needed to learn here.

Otherwise it's been back to socks: A lovely, soft superwash merino I got from a pop-up back in September, just on a whim, because I liked it. We are attempting an argyle (if textural only). I will report on the argyle when image capacity is restored.

things watched

Early December, I did a full rewatch of The Crown. I don't even quite know why; I'm generally really uncomfortable with it as a massive piece of preachy and rather saccharine Real People Fanfiction, and it's put me off multiple times over the years to the point of stopping watching it midseason twice. This is possibly the combined effect of binging all of the Graham Norton clips I could find (this is worthwhile if you're sad; British actors with a drink in them on late-night are delightful) and wanting to see more British actors do stuff in a low-stress way I can half-watch here and there because I am knitting, but also I think there's a scab I pick in terms of why it doesn't work for me so strongly. I'm trying to figure out what my reaction is, while also getting some Olivia Colman sans brutal murders. (We are not in a Broadchurch state of mind here; all violence needs to be lightly rendered and far away.)

I think I'm getting closer: I hadn't quite realized on the prior watch how didactic this show is. People sit around and explain their own or each other's inner motives to each other; they sit around and explain the rather obvious and slightly rigid, repetitive metaphors to a soaring Hans Zimmer score. Action doesn't move, it's narrated. There's a lot of explain, and the illusion of an oddly paternalistic narrative eye: the narrative viewpoint that knows all these people better than themselves. In other words, it's got the logic of Twitter: We will tell you at flowery length who you are and what this symbolizes and why it is profound, over and over again. It's an awfully reductive way of thinking.

There's an argument that very little being done and a lot being filtered -- a mode of speech that's entirely focused on the symbolic and the performative -- is actually a reasonable structure for a show about a constitutional monarch: form is following function. But on this go-round it also started to feel like sloppy craft: writing that wants to go for the kind of eyekick you get at the end of a two-hour movie, the flash of interpersonal insight, but to do it all the time, multiple times a week, and the effect can't help but lessen with the frequency and lack of setup. Especially as the actual, organic selves of its characters develop and start to break the frame, the structure doesn't adjust with them -- a really cool thing could've been done, I think, if the way this was shot and told moved with the ways its adherence to stiff, symbolic, explanatory, top-down roles starts to shake and crumble. We could have had some Big Art Fun here! As it is, the structure remains the same, even as what it's talking about moves away, and it just starts to feel like story that hasn't developed topography and range -- before diving at the end into a moment of such self-indulgent, self-involved, sentimentalist propaganda that it took me more than a minute to recover. It's such a missed opportunity.

I liked Peter Morgan's The Queen reasonably enough but in hindsight, I'm starting to feel like he hasn't rethought and repaced a structure for The Crown; he's just doing the same two-hander, action-offscreen, character-study-through-reaction thing more and harder and longer-range, in the same way Downton Abbey turns into flailing loops of Gosford Park and eventually just falls in on itself. (Brandon Taylor has a really incisive newsletter essay on thematics, repetition compulsion, and stasis/motion in fiction that mentions that thing Fellowes does too.) There's narrative intent, and then sometimes there's just that the creator did something people liked, and so got paid to do it more, but hasn't for whatever reason -- I won't guess, I don't know his life -- punched through the problem. And the more you see it loop, the more you realize the character study wasn't insight after all; it's all just projection, really. It's all just putting words in other people's mouths.

So it was ultimately interesting if a bit dour (man, it's a fatalistic show full of saddo people). But it also reminded me that royal families and their weird, actual personal histories are great starter medium for a really satisfying Wikipedia hole. They get around, they're really closely documented, and they touch a lot of things.

I got from George V of England all the way through the modern history of Norway and into the 1889 Russian Influenza pandemic possibly being actually a coronavirus (!), not strictly flu (there's strong sero-archeological and primary-source evidence, they don't entirely know yet because they're still doing the sciencing), to how we've forgotten more things than we remember or maybe even knew we know, and why that might be, and then right on through to the nature of collective memory and time. Cue seven sentences of a novel in progress, seven good ones. (This one comes to me in scattered bits of signal and pieces. It knocks on the door when it's ready. I just nod and write the stuff down.)

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things to read

The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction released early this month, in both print and ebook: it's available in through Kobo, Amazon Canada, Amazon US, or worldwide through other providers. This is probably the last port of call for “Sunday in the Park With Hank”, the very much experimental 1920s New York ghost story I had in The Deadlands last July. It's a great-looking TOC, one with range and flex; I'm looking forward to diving in once I have a copy in hand.

Speaking of shelf life, the print editions of Apparition Lit have caught up to the present day this past month, which means the print version of "The Bear Wife" now exists in the world. I scooped up my contributor's copy this month. They are, I think, still on for a very affordable price.

a medley of administrativa

Like everyone else, I got the notice that tinyletter is shutting down in February, and so once that comes around, this whole list is going to be ported -- somewhere. I haven't made a firm decision yet about a new newsletter service, mostly because I'm deeply opposed to paying for that kind of software, and I'm also deeply opposed to software designed to monetize this newsletter. This is not for money; this is for talking. Let us please hold a match to the tendency that thinks everything exists to be squeezed.

If anyone's got strong leads on better spaces to take this party, I'd be glad of them; if not, I'm going to be looking elsewhere too, and may well report back when I find something.

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Otherwise: I hope you are having a good rest, or good company, or whatever meets the needs in your corner of the world. I'm not a person who normally blames the year for what happened in it, but maybe let's all wipe this one off our feet and walk though taller.

Bonne annee, guys.