six: don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by
If I'm counting right, this is about two weeks late.
Apologies for that: my health has been a slightly precarious thing over the past month (disclaimer: not COVID, so please don't worry about that) and I've spent weeks plunged into bodily time, that kind of keeping pace with the clock that happens when you're mostly involved in monitoring symptoms, waiting for appointments, and scheduling the next tests.
I've done some reading, but late April was mostly small heartbeat impressions: we snagged a grocery delivery window after checking day after day for weeks, and (as well as the, erm, necessary supplies) I finally laid hands on some tahini, which means I can make the salted chocolate tahini cookies now. We bought a bistro set to put on the balcony, so we could spend more time outside, and the day we built it the temperature plunged and it started to snow, and it's still snowing here and there. Our favourite small dairy is delivering cheese, and so we got to fleetingly see the friend-of-a-friend who usually sells it at the farmer's market and slide him a jar of cran-blueberry jam as a thank-you.
Days slip, and I'm not forcing it. I have a novel to finish. It'll keep, because so much isn't well right now and sometimes the nice thing about writing is that it's drought-tolerant; it doesn't leave you.
It's fine. We are here.
The kaleidoscopic perspective
I'm still working through things we had out from the library when everything locked down, and so watched Terry Jones's Barbarians over a few nights in early April. It's a four-part documentary series reframing the idea of the "barbarian" through archaeological evidence and the idea that way too many of our historical givens right now are the result of Roman propaganda, and that perspective's worth examining for bias.
It's work with its own set of priorities. The spoiler comes in where Jones links the Roman perspective with an institutional throughline that goes to today, and then one thinks ah, this is the axe that's been ground here. It's not an axe I necessarily agree or disagree with; I don't have the information to. But it's work that's simultaneously informative and interesting and also makes me want to be careful with anything that confirms my own biases too much. The second you go "Oh, there has only ever been one battle recurring" it's time to take a walk (around your socially-distanced balcony, where the bistro table is waiting for warmer weather).
Since, though, I'm playing with the idea that Rome is less of a time and place than a meme virus: this floating idea of authoritarian, centralized, colonalist, violent society that shifts around in place and time, taking on hosts, rooting itself where people are vulnerable and clenching, hard. I am thinking about ideas, and social bodies as bodies and their quiet bodily moments, and immunities.
On the other end of that spectrum, I'm reading Best American Food Writing 2019, edited by Samin Nosrat, and loving what it's doing with perspectives--on who does food writing, who is authoritative about it, but also on what food writing is. Essays about the economics of agriculture: yes, food writing. Short, sharp personal essays about family and memory; food writing!
They're alternately incisive, joyful, meditative work and, in the end, it's kaleidoscoping together into a portrait of all the things food is right now for us, in the just-before-present moment.
I've also checked out (I am reconciling myself to Overdrive) Julie Powell's Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. It's interesting to revisit something from that first wave of blogger book deals--there was a decided tone to those, a casualness that sometimes didn't translate well to print--and while voraciously readable, it definitely fit for me in the category of unreliable-narrator memoirs. All the facts are being reported, but the things the author just assumes everyone will agree and sympathize with occasionally give pause.
But what was also interesting about this book right now is it's functionally a snapshot of the same emotional space we're currently inhabiting: living in the wake of a shattering, perspective-snapping event (in her case, the World Trade Centre attacks), being a mess, everyone around you being messes, and turning to the regularity, the process orientation, the instant results of cooking. Recipes have clear inputs and outputs. They have instructions that won't change on you or wiggle off the page into a whole other set of rules. Their authority is kindly. They want you to be nourished.
I read it, digested, waited a day or two for my awful, queasy stomach to settle down, and made Julia Child's Oeufs en Cocotte. They were easy, and they tasted like a hug.
nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Self-isolation doesn't do much for collaborative projects, but I was happy to have a (tiny) role in building one of the Toronto Public Space Committee's first campaigns: a worldbuilding exercise for when we're not in the tunnel, but on the other side.
Please feel free to adapt this locally, if you think there's a need for it. It's a hard time for imagining, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs being what it is, but things are changing, more rapidly and interestingly than I thought possible in terms of Canadian federal and municipal policy -- in terms of how quickly we really can put up housing for people dealing with homelessness and turn crisis into stability, in terms of what government can do when the political will breaks through. There's a degree of bad decision times happening in Toronto right now, but also a ton of good: things we can pick up and run with in better times, and create positive momentum.
And aside from being the core question of science fiction, what if? is a great curative for the feeling of suspended time.
Things to read
"The Bear Wife" is out in Apparition Lit's Transfiguration issue. It is about being more than you are and bucking the stories about how you should be less and difficulties and love, and also bears.
For those who can read Romanian, I'll have a few short fiction translations coming up in webzine Galaxia 42. No word yet on dates, but I'll mention it again when they're scheduled.
kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight
Apologies for that: my health has been a slightly precarious thing over the past month (disclaimer: not COVID, so please don't worry about that) and I've spent weeks plunged into bodily time, that kind of keeping pace with the clock that happens when you're mostly involved in monitoring symptoms, waiting for appointments, and scheduling the next tests.
I've done some reading, but late April was mostly small heartbeat impressions: we snagged a grocery delivery window after checking day after day for weeks, and (as well as the, erm, necessary supplies) I finally laid hands on some tahini, which means I can make the salted chocolate tahini cookies now. We bought a bistro set to put on the balcony, so we could spend more time outside, and the day we built it the temperature plunged and it started to snow, and it's still snowing here and there. Our favourite small dairy is delivering cheese, and so we got to fleetingly see the friend-of-a-friend who usually sells it at the farmer's market and slide him a jar of cran-blueberry jam as a thank-you.
Days slip, and I'm not forcing it. I have a novel to finish. It'll keep, because so much isn't well right now and sometimes the nice thing about writing is that it's drought-tolerant; it doesn't leave you.
It's fine. We are here.
The kaleidoscopic perspective
I'm still working through things we had out from the library when everything locked down, and so watched Terry Jones's Barbarians over a few nights in early April. It's a four-part documentary series reframing the idea of the "barbarian" through archaeological evidence and the idea that way too many of our historical givens right now are the result of Roman propaganda, and that perspective's worth examining for bias.
It's work with its own set of priorities. The spoiler comes in where Jones links the Roman perspective with an institutional throughline that goes to today, and then one thinks ah, this is the axe that's been ground here. It's not an axe I necessarily agree or disagree with; I don't have the information to. But it's work that's simultaneously informative and interesting and also makes me want to be careful with anything that confirms my own biases too much. The second you go "Oh, there has only ever been one battle recurring" it's time to take a walk (around your socially-distanced balcony, where the bistro table is waiting for warmer weather).
Since, though, I'm playing with the idea that Rome is less of a time and place than a meme virus: this floating idea of authoritarian, centralized, colonalist, violent society that shifts around in place and time, taking on hosts, rooting itself where people are vulnerable and clenching, hard. I am thinking about ideas, and social bodies as bodies and their quiet bodily moments, and immunities.
On the other end of that spectrum, I'm reading Best American Food Writing 2019, edited by Samin Nosrat, and loving what it's doing with perspectives--on who does food writing, who is authoritative about it, but also on what food writing is. Essays about the economics of agriculture: yes, food writing. Short, sharp personal essays about family and memory; food writing!
They're alternately incisive, joyful, meditative work and, in the end, it's kaleidoscoping together into a portrait of all the things food is right now for us, in the just-before-present moment.
I've also checked out (I am reconciling myself to Overdrive) Julie Powell's Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. It's interesting to revisit something from that first wave of blogger book deals--there was a decided tone to those, a casualness that sometimes didn't translate well to print--and while voraciously readable, it definitely fit for me in the category of unreliable-narrator memoirs. All the facts are being reported, but the things the author just assumes everyone will agree and sympathize with occasionally give pause.
But what was also interesting about this book right now is it's functionally a snapshot of the same emotional space we're currently inhabiting: living in the wake of a shattering, perspective-snapping event (in her case, the World Trade Centre attacks), being a mess, everyone around you being messes, and turning to the regularity, the process orientation, the instant results of cooking. Recipes have clear inputs and outputs. They have instructions that won't change on you or wiggle off the page into a whole other set of rules. Their authority is kindly. They want you to be nourished.
I read it, digested, waited a day or two for my awful, queasy stomach to settle down, and made Julia Child's Oeufs en Cocotte. They were easy, and they tasted like a hug.
nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Self-isolation doesn't do much for collaborative projects, but I was happy to have a (tiny) role in building one of the Toronto Public Space Committee's first campaigns: a worldbuilding exercise for when we're not in the tunnel, but on the other side.
Please feel free to adapt this locally, if you think there's a need for it. It's a hard time for imagining, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs being what it is, but things are changing, more rapidly and interestingly than I thought possible in terms of Canadian federal and municipal policy -- in terms of how quickly we really can put up housing for people dealing with homelessness and turn crisis into stability, in terms of what government can do when the political will breaks through. There's a degree of bad decision times happening in Toronto right now, but also a ton of good: things we can pick up and run with in better times, and create positive momentum.
And aside from being the core question of science fiction, what if? is a great curative for the feeling of suspended time.
Things to read
"The Bear Wife" is out in Apparition Lit's Transfiguration issue. It is about being more than you are and bucking the stories about how you should be less and difficulties and love, and also bears.
For those who can read Romanian, I'll have a few short fiction translations coming up in webzine Galaxia 42. No word yet on dates, but I'll mention it again when they're scheduled.
kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight
The first pea sprout.
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