forty-two: liquefy me / liquefy these walls
This month's title brought to you by The Rheostatics. It popped into my head for the first time in at least ten years sometime around the Ides of July, and stayed there for a few days, humming a bass line in the moments when I wasn't paying attention. There's something slightly dreamlike about songs written out of/inspired by modern novels (this one's based off Paul Quarrington's Whale Music). They always feel like a John Cheever story was supposed to make you feel when it came out, I think: wide sky, water, an arm raised for endless swimming. A perpetual, soft-coloured, eerie/cozy dislocation. The more I think about 1950s short fiction, the more I think: yeah, they were trying to communicate the gaps between your skin and the world too, same as the modernists, just -- different context, different time; different world and skin.
August is perpetually that state of affairs here: a month where I find it impossible to hold rigid schedules, sleep schedules, or really anything like a structure. It all goes soft and aqueous in my hands. I was on an academic schedule for like one too many years back in my twenties, and caught the habit: in August everything melts apart, and then in the week leading up to September, it finds a new direction and springs. In the right conditions this is more than a little pleasurable: if a stopped clock is right twice a day, it stands to reason that every so often, a ticking one ought to find itself wrong, just for the rest.
This year, it's turned into a poetry season: unexpectedly chucking the day's schedule to write a poem all afternoon, promo one more at lunchtime, send out a package at five, and drift through the evening with a few loose lines still clattering about the place, ready to rear up at 3am. Being exhausted at 2pm and wide awake and working at 2am. August wants what it wants. We go with it.
things played that you should probably play too and there are four of you I'm specifically looking at
One of those up-too-late-in-the-breathless-quiet activities: I spent an inordinate amount of time in early August playing Inkle's Heaven's Vault (2019), a breathtakingly beautiful interactive fiction game about uncovering history, sailing spacebound rivers in a wooden winged ship, and translating a very logically put-together ancient hieroglyphic writing system, aka all stuff I like, adore, and am nourished by.
I don't use my Linguistics degree a ton these days, but: oh god, the moment of sheer satisfaction when I started to figure out the particle system, or how Ancient denotes the possessive, plural, negative. It's a gorgeous feeling to watch that orthography come into focus, slowly, using techniques that people actually use in the field, winding your brain into the logic of this society by how they describe, inscribe, form new concepts in a way that felt a little like Egyptian hieroglyphs but also a bit like Old English compounds -- the poetry of them. When I looked around afterwards for reviews, some people mentioned writing out their own working grammars and dictionaries; I never did. I was so focused on acquiring the feel, the headspace, the peculiar logic of Ancient's construction and trying to embed it into my instincts.
There are a lot of choices in this game, ones that aren't too visibly posted, and so I'm not entirely sure where I could have gone left instead of right, metaphorically speaking. Part of me really enjoys that: I like choice trees that feel organic, relational, where little bits of affect and assumption matter -- just like real life. I can flag a few consequences from some early tendencies: Apparently I'm devoted to keeping priceless artifacts out of the equivalent British Museum, because I don't trust those guys farther than I can throw them, especially because they're actively hostile toward certain readings of history -- but in a firm way, not a spiteful one. I wasn't about to hand over the material evidence until I knew nobody was going to run a cover-up, that's all. I think I was being reasonable. And quickly, increasingly, my version of the protagonist (well-realized, with a voice and a past and a context of her own) was steadfastly loyal to her community -- and that opened some doors, and closed off others.
Anyways, I know there are more than the statistical mean of linguists and historians around here, and: this one? Yes, yes, yes. :) It's a beautiful, deep, rich experience. And there is a beautiful spacefaring wooden sailing ship with wings, and I want to live in it forever, with my fingers laced between words.
plenty and waste and agricultural time
The other thing I hit mid-August was that point in any CSA summer when you have so many vegetables coming in you can't actually dig out from under them, and abundance starts to feel like stress. When I actually gave this thought, this is normal: Congratulations, I am experiencing a harvest season, centuries of people spent these same weeks salting and canning and drying year after year and probably going for fuck's sake at each other, across a hemisphere. Smoothed supply lines are the aberration; this is the actual living rhythm. It's harvest! We have stress and food!
So I went into a spate of cooking towards the freezer like someone digging her way out of prison with a spoon: three recipes a day for a week solid. Like, this is the difference between cooking and food processing. I was not anticipating the pleasure of these meals; I wanted this food processed. There's going to be a Future Me who really doesn't want to be in the kitchen sometime this fall or winter, and she's basically got her wish at this point: home-cooked leftovers for weeks.
It's interesting how it changes your culinary choices when you just want not to waste. Oranges became marmalade instead of sliced orange salad with mint and basil. Cabbages became double-batches of cabbage rolls (freezable!) instead of coleslaw or haluski. So much soup enters the chat: it's easy, compact. Apples, basically infinite for some reason (they've shown up every week in my Foodshare box, whatever the season, for years), get dried as apple rings, mushed into applesauce, strained into apple-ginger jelly, and folded/spindled/mutilated in every way I can imagine.
While I dug out from under, the whole thing had me thinking: about how much is enough, what the steady state of something is; about that study where happiness increases to a certain salary point and then afterwards it's just naaahhh. When the fear and discontent sets in. I've been thinking how it changes my choices in other arenas when I'm living for a future time, just wanting not to waste what I've got, instead of being here now. There's real tension in making memories or making every minute count; it's a problem, to live in abundance conditions with an austerity headspace. So alongside way too many vegetables, I feel like I'm being handed an object lesson on what to do with yes again.
The solution at a certain point became obvious: Start inviting friends over for dinner, like I used to. I had a real good habit, in years pre-pandemic, of texting people and going I have too much farmshare, are you hungry? Show up and eat this for me. No one is ever against being asked to throw themself on those exploding vegetables. The solution became: Hand over what I can't handle to the community fridge. Trust that things already in your hands can leave them and your needs will be met.
That said, for Reasons, in the middle of this I also finally went out on a Not Far From the Tree pick and came home with ten more pounds of apples. I haven't gone picking since maybe 2019, and that was a wrong state of affairs both emotionally and in terms of putting my money where my mouth is, considering all the ways I'm telling other people you should go picking. The body needs useful sociable work, not just the mind, by which I mean my body and not a generalization. It was the most fun. I only ever meet excellent people up a tree.
I'm going to head out again for crabapples and grapes soon, and make jelly or pectin or--who the hell cares, I just want to be out there, in the tree.
things read
The highlight of my month, unquestionably, was John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless: a book I could never find in the long years it was out of print, and hoarded a bit since the recent reissue. I am both glad and mad I waited, and then broke glass in case of: it's the kind of science fiction I was made for, as a reader and a writer. It is so dense and yet clear. I am forced to pay attention to every word, like a poem, and then rewarded for paying that much attention. I want to do that. I want to read more like that.
Mid-month, I took another run at Louise Penny's Three Pines books, and remembered why I bounced off the first one. There is a very specific type of woman these books hate, and lavish time and fine attention on hating -- and the problem is that hatred shows up everywhere, flowing underneath all these sentiments about the importance of compassion and tolerance and love.
The murder victim in A Fatal Grace is basically your common garden narcissist -- and not honestly a consistently or well-observed one, by how her inner voice is narrated; it's an angry outsider's version of what's going on there -- but everyone around her is simultaneously terrified, contemptuous, and vicious about her. It's not enough to say she's a bad person, or makes bad choices; she has to be characterized explicitly, and repeatedly, as a monster. Any time she comes up, the characters and the narrative go full Captain Awkward Bitch Eating Crackers. Her house is evil, her family cringing and grotesque, everyone goes out of their way in a police investigation to make sure police detectives know they aren't bothered at all that she's dead, she is compared to the boogeyman under the bed. It's everything, all the time.
And aside from people are not like that about death -- this is stressful, guys! Especially in something that's supposed to be a cozy, and is telling me with its mouth about good works and generosity, while with its hands being so unrelentingly, straight-facedly mean. Grinding-someone's-face-into-glass mean. And yeah, Still Life did that too, enough to take me deeply aback and dig around, and last time I confirmed that yes, Penny struggled with alcoholism, self-delusion, and other behaviours she speaks very poorly of as a younger woman. It's not a hard connection to make, or even in some ways an ungenerous one. The worst condemnations are usually shots at Past Self.
I suppose if you're in the habit of running idealization/devaluation cycles on people, including your own shadow, you've got a right. I suppose an author has the right to murder, over and over again, the past self she hated. But Jesus Christ, I don't have to watch.
On a better note: I rewatched, then reread Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden -- a book that was a huge, perpetual favourite when I was very young, but which I haven't touched in decades. I'd had a notion that it was sort of -- an anti-Gothic, or a Gothic sent on kinder polarities: Mary Lennox comes from one haunted house (the British Raj) to another, Misselthwaite Manor, and the story about the girl and the house is that they heal each other. She couldn't heal the first; she heals the second. It had me looking back at "La Bête" and going oh, whoa, that got in my brain.
The larger realization, though. Maybe it's pandemic perspective, more than time, but: that book's an education in mourning. I never realized. But it's got good process: connect with other people. Connect with the wind. Get your hands, as much as possible, into the dirt.
things to read
More a chance to be read at than read, but: the award ceremony for the Muriel's Journey Poetry Prize will be held on Saturday, September 9 at 2:30 PST / 5:30 EST, virtually, as a part of Word Vancouver. I will be reading honourable mention poem "what Mama says" as part of it, alongside the other winners. If you're into an afternoon or early evening of poetry, I have read the other winners in the secret copyedits document. They are good poems and worth hearing out loud. :)
August is perpetually that state of affairs here: a month where I find it impossible to hold rigid schedules, sleep schedules, or really anything like a structure. It all goes soft and aqueous in my hands. I was on an academic schedule for like one too many years back in my twenties, and caught the habit: in August everything melts apart, and then in the week leading up to September, it finds a new direction and springs. In the right conditions this is more than a little pleasurable: if a stopped clock is right twice a day, it stands to reason that every so often, a ticking one ought to find itself wrong, just for the rest.
This year, it's turned into a poetry season: unexpectedly chucking the day's schedule to write a poem all afternoon, promo one more at lunchtime, send out a package at five, and drift through the evening with a few loose lines still clattering about the place, ready to rear up at 3am. Being exhausted at 2pm and wide awake and working at 2am. August wants what it wants. We go with it.
things played that you should probably play too and there are four of you I'm specifically looking at
One of those up-too-late-in-the-breathless-quiet activities: I spent an inordinate amount of time in early August playing Inkle's Heaven's Vault (2019), a breathtakingly beautiful interactive fiction game about uncovering history, sailing spacebound rivers in a wooden winged ship, and translating a very logically put-together ancient hieroglyphic writing system, aka all stuff I like, adore, and am nourished by.
I don't use my Linguistics degree a ton these days, but: oh god, the moment of sheer satisfaction when I started to figure out the particle system, or how Ancient denotes the possessive, plural, negative. It's a gorgeous feeling to watch that orthography come into focus, slowly, using techniques that people actually use in the field, winding your brain into the logic of this society by how they describe, inscribe, form new concepts in a way that felt a little like Egyptian hieroglyphs but also a bit like Old English compounds -- the poetry of them. When I looked around afterwards for reviews, some people mentioned writing out their own working grammars and dictionaries; I never did. I was so focused on acquiring the feel, the headspace, the peculiar logic of Ancient's construction and trying to embed it into my instincts.
There are a lot of choices in this game, ones that aren't too visibly posted, and so I'm not entirely sure where I could have gone left instead of right, metaphorically speaking. Part of me really enjoys that: I like choice trees that feel organic, relational, where little bits of affect and assumption matter -- just like real life. I can flag a few consequences from some early tendencies: Apparently I'm devoted to keeping priceless artifacts out of the equivalent British Museum, because I don't trust those guys farther than I can throw them, especially because they're actively hostile toward certain readings of history -- but in a firm way, not a spiteful one. I wasn't about to hand over the material evidence until I knew nobody was going to run a cover-up, that's all. I think I was being reasonable. And quickly, increasingly, my version of the protagonist (well-realized, with a voice and a past and a context of her own) was steadfastly loyal to her community -- and that opened some doors, and closed off others.
Anyways, I know there are more than the statistical mean of linguists and historians around here, and: this one? Yes, yes, yes. :) It's a beautiful, deep, rich experience. And there is a beautiful spacefaring wooden sailing ship with wings, and I want to live in it forever, with my fingers laced between words.
plenty and waste and agricultural time
The other thing I hit mid-August was that point in any CSA summer when you have so many vegetables coming in you can't actually dig out from under them, and abundance starts to feel like stress. When I actually gave this thought, this is normal: Congratulations, I am experiencing a harvest season, centuries of people spent these same weeks salting and canning and drying year after year and probably going for fuck's sake at each other, across a hemisphere. Smoothed supply lines are the aberration; this is the actual living rhythm. It's harvest! We have stress and food!
So I went into a spate of cooking towards the freezer like someone digging her way out of prison with a spoon: three recipes a day for a week solid. Like, this is the difference between cooking and food processing. I was not anticipating the pleasure of these meals; I wanted this food processed. There's going to be a Future Me who really doesn't want to be in the kitchen sometime this fall or winter, and she's basically got her wish at this point: home-cooked leftovers for weeks.
It's interesting how it changes your culinary choices when you just want not to waste. Oranges became marmalade instead of sliced orange salad with mint and basil. Cabbages became double-batches of cabbage rolls (freezable!) instead of coleslaw or haluski. So much soup enters the chat: it's easy, compact. Apples, basically infinite for some reason (they've shown up every week in my Foodshare box, whatever the season, for years), get dried as apple rings, mushed into applesauce, strained into apple-ginger jelly, and folded/spindled/mutilated in every way I can imagine.
While I dug out from under, the whole thing had me thinking: about how much is enough, what the steady state of something is; about that study where happiness increases to a certain salary point and then afterwards it's just naaahhh. When the fear and discontent sets in. I've been thinking how it changes my choices in other arenas when I'm living for a future time, just wanting not to waste what I've got, instead of being here now. There's real tension in making memories or making every minute count; it's a problem, to live in abundance conditions with an austerity headspace. So alongside way too many vegetables, I feel like I'm being handed an object lesson on what to do with yes again.
The solution at a certain point became obvious: Start inviting friends over for dinner, like I used to. I had a real good habit, in years pre-pandemic, of texting people and going I have too much farmshare, are you hungry? Show up and eat this for me. No one is ever against being asked to throw themself on those exploding vegetables. The solution became: Hand over what I can't handle to the community fridge. Trust that things already in your hands can leave them and your needs will be met.
That said, for Reasons, in the middle of this I also finally went out on a Not Far From the Tree pick and came home with ten more pounds of apples. I haven't gone picking since maybe 2019, and that was a wrong state of affairs both emotionally and in terms of putting my money where my mouth is, considering all the ways I'm telling other people you should go picking. The body needs useful sociable work, not just the mind, by which I mean my body and not a generalization. It was the most fun. I only ever meet excellent people up a tree.
I'm going to head out again for crabapples and grapes soon, and make jelly or pectin or--who the hell cares, I just want to be out there, in the tree.
things read
The highlight of my month, unquestionably, was John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless: a book I could never find in the long years it was out of print, and hoarded a bit since the recent reissue. I am both glad and mad I waited, and then broke glass in case of: it's the kind of science fiction I was made for, as a reader and a writer. It is so dense and yet clear. I am forced to pay attention to every word, like a poem, and then rewarded for paying that much attention. I want to do that. I want to read more like that.
Mid-month, I took another run at Louise Penny's Three Pines books, and remembered why I bounced off the first one. There is a very specific type of woman these books hate, and lavish time and fine attention on hating -- and the problem is that hatred shows up everywhere, flowing underneath all these sentiments about the importance of compassion and tolerance and love.
The murder victim in A Fatal Grace is basically your common garden narcissist -- and not honestly a consistently or well-observed one, by how her inner voice is narrated; it's an angry outsider's version of what's going on there -- but everyone around her is simultaneously terrified, contemptuous, and vicious about her. It's not enough to say she's a bad person, or makes bad choices; she has to be characterized explicitly, and repeatedly, as a monster. Any time she comes up, the characters and the narrative go full Captain Awkward Bitch Eating Crackers. Her house is evil, her family cringing and grotesque, everyone goes out of their way in a police investigation to make sure police detectives know they aren't bothered at all that she's dead, she is compared to the boogeyman under the bed. It's everything, all the time.
And aside from people are not like that about death -- this is stressful, guys! Especially in something that's supposed to be a cozy, and is telling me with its mouth about good works and generosity, while with its hands being so unrelentingly, straight-facedly mean. Grinding-someone's-face-into-glass mean. And yeah, Still Life did that too, enough to take me deeply aback and dig around, and last time I confirmed that yes, Penny struggled with alcoholism, self-delusion, and other behaviours she speaks very poorly of as a younger woman. It's not a hard connection to make, or even in some ways an ungenerous one. The worst condemnations are usually shots at Past Self.
I suppose if you're in the habit of running idealization/devaluation cycles on people, including your own shadow, you've got a right. I suppose an author has the right to murder, over and over again, the past self she hated. But Jesus Christ, I don't have to watch.
On a better note: I rewatched, then reread Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden -- a book that was a huge, perpetual favourite when I was very young, but which I haven't touched in decades. I'd had a notion that it was sort of -- an anti-Gothic, or a Gothic sent on kinder polarities: Mary Lennox comes from one haunted house (the British Raj) to another, Misselthwaite Manor, and the story about the girl and the house is that they heal each other. She couldn't heal the first; she heals the second. It had me looking back at "La Bête" and going oh, whoa, that got in my brain.
The larger realization, though. Maybe it's pandemic perspective, more than time, but: that book's an education in mourning. I never realized. But it's got good process: connect with other people. Connect with the wind. Get your hands, as much as possible, into the dirt.
things to read
More a chance to be read at than read, but: the award ceremony for the Muriel's Journey Poetry Prize will be held on Saturday, September 9 at 2:30 PST / 5:30 EST, virtually, as a part of Word Vancouver. I will be reading honourable mention poem "what Mama says" as part of it, alongside the other winners. If you're into an afternoon or early evening of poetry, I have read the other winners in the secret copyedits document. They are good poems and worth hearing out loud. :)
***
Time is due to right itself in maximum one week; more structure, knitting, paperwork, at least one publication announcement as we rush into September. See you then!
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