fourteen: big little lives

I wanted this preamble to be about living a bigger life, and how that doesn't necessarily have to get hindered by which four walls you're between. November, around here, was rather a big version of what's physically still a little life: lit festivals, readings, meetings, new projects opening up. You can be really busy in a one-bedroom apartment with a little elbow grease.

But I admit I'm finishing it up today feeling more than a little daunted. Yesterday we headed back into quasi-lockdown in Toronto -- 28 days of stronger restrictions to try to get a handle on case counts -- and businesses and people are already breaking ranks on it, trying to find the loopholes instead of doing their part. I've known since July that this was going to be a long winter, and prepared for that; knowing and preparing isn't the same as watching it go.

So--probably a bit of a tonal disjunct, this month. Both these things are true. There is ample opportunity for coping and building, here in the still centre of this disaster. I really wish we didn't have to.

Distance carnivals and distance bread

The usual barrage of Ontario literary events seems to have reasserted itself this month. Everyone's figured out the necessaries to go digital, and I've had a pile of festivals to choose from: finishing up a week and a half of IFOA interviews and readings, to move into a digital field trip to Ottawa VerseFest, and then the Hand Eye Society's annual Wordplay festival, which is usually at the Toronto Reference Library and focuses entirely on games writing.

Because of the virtual format (and the fact that they kindly left things online for a bit, so I could watch them at weird hours, because hey, 2am is time for books) I got to attend more IFOA events than I'd have reasonably had time for in-person -- I saw, for the first time, interviews with some favourite authors: Catherine Bush and Emma Donoghue -- and took in a few group readings at Ottawa VerseFest.

This month, I've also been dipping my toes into the pond of public consultations, which historically has not been something I've done.

I've sat -- on and off -- for years with the question of calling myself an activist or organizer. I organize stuff and activate projects, yeah, but my stuff tends to be small one-off meetings-of-needs, or running assists on other people's projects (which I still think is a hugely valuable thing to do: the act of effective and competent following, paired with some institutional project management knowledge, can be freaking priceless). I am, apparently, more comfortable these days saying I am doing the work of a citizen.

It's partially the same logic as the concept of mitzvot. A mitzvah is a good deed, a reparative act, sure, but it's also a commandment; it's that liminal space of the decencies you are supposed to perform because it's what you do. Acts of citizenship feel like that as well: positive duties, for lack of a better phrase? A bit of this energy:

At this point, my face, vocabulary, and postal code communicate rather a lot of presumed privilege and belonging within the systems that exist, and it would be stupid to step away from that instead of using it for evil awesome.

There are moments. An inclusionary zoning policy consultation where they came back saying "so you said harder better faster stronger, more affordable, more permanently and we're going to do that". A panel on decarceration on the Friday before Halloween batting around how you bring harm reduction ethics to the idea of public safety while the ASL interpreter worked away in his casual pair of bunny ears. There are these moments. :)

Precision work

At the end of October, P. started sketching out a project that would require a lot of research into silent film aesthetics, and asked me, as if it was some kind of impingement on my time, if we could do some comprehensive touring through every silent and German expressionist movie we could lay our hands on. Oh no, I said. Oh help. Anything but this, also let me expound to you for three hours on the particular development of early film in Europe and why it is so hella cool actually can I program this for you like a festival oh please. And so we embarked on a pretty much chronological survey of very old movies, starting with Méliès (as is appropriate, and with whom I have been in creative love since the Smashing Pumpkins' Tonight Tonight first put him into my head in 1995) and some documentaries about the restoration of his slightly longer-form work.

Méliès made about 500 short films over 16 years, and most of them are lost--because he literally burned his original film stock when he lost his theatre and his house. The prints were lost when the French army repossesed the stock in his offices and melted it for war materiel in 1917: gone to silver and celluloid bootheels for soldiers. What we have now is the product of a lot of restoration, and one of the first documentaries we watched, The Extraordinary Voyage, went through the restoration process as well as the making of the original A Trip to the Moon.

I didn't know how badly old film stock degrades: that it literally chemically destabilizes, and acidifies, and turns into glass. It fossilizes like something alive, and you have to near-destroy it to tease it apart again, like a bog body giving up its DNA. The restoration narratives were just as fascinating as the making-of: early colour films (and we're talking early, here: 1902) handpainted in factories by women workers paid one franc a day for painting the same colour onto tiny frames. The still images of film colorists were eerily like early computer programming: it's always underpaid women doing that fine work until money comes in, and those jobs are elevated and snatched away.

It was beautiful and very reminiscent of modern animation studios, and I came away with the very sober understanding that it can take so much work to build something; to colour it with three hundred underpaid women wielding tiny little ink brushes; to restore it with a decade of software advances and trained film professionals gently peeling away each line of acidified frames to photograph a double dozen every night for months or years. It takes five minutes to destroy it because you're angry, or there's a war on. It is so easy for things to get rerouted, misplaced, and lost.

We break history, and it takes a transcontinental team eighteen years, a million dollars, and 13,375 fragments, individually photographed, to put it together again. The restorers did it by hand, same as those paintbrush-carrying women.

Sometimes you just realize, the painstaking magnitude of the work.

Things read

Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel -- unfinished at the last letter -- absolutely delivered. I'm really interested in what she does with clarity of language, really soft resonances (nobody ever says the central image there is about glass houses and how we all live in them and moving in and out of those fragile worlds, so fragilely, but it's right there if you want it), and structure. It's a book that's iterative and contemplative and delivered in parallelisms, and got me thinking about how people treat circumstances as geographies without ever really thinking about what they're doing there.

And for a metric I'm willing to pull out by now, Things reading Miss Fisher books made me want, an unsorted list: roast beef with horseradish cream sauce, hot sweet milky black tea, things in aspic. The prior targets have been thoroughly achieved; I'm working on the aspic things. There's a camembert in the fridge I can probably encase in beet jelly if I can figure out a good beet jelly this week.

Things to read

I'm especially pleased about this one, because it's a bit of a milestone: Cassandra poem "Trojan Road" will appear in a future issue of Plenitude Magazine. This is my first poetry publication in a literary magazine, rather than a genre one. It has prophecy snakes who talk in prose and not metre, though, so definitely still a me thing.

*

The next issue will bump up right before Christmas and almost a year of this newsletter happening, which feels surprising in a year when there's been both so much and so little news.

Stay safe, please be well, and we'll talk in a month.