sixty-five: but if i can't swim after forty days
I hadn’t heard this in twenty years before YouTube served it up to me on a cool and humid Saturday morning, end of June. Rec algorithms occasionally have their virtues. I’d lost it and I missed it.
I have always had a weird affection for some of the 1990s Christian rock that hit mainstream radio. I don’t have enough Christianity floating around my life to be bothered by its subtext. If you just read them like a straight person-to-person, person-to-world song, they’re magnificently sincere and have a very specific poetry. I want people to talk to each other the ways some of those songs talk to God. From the present standpoint, I get that part of the trouble with that is — relationships with God don’t ask us to withstand any particular human complication. There’s no mutual need, no compromise involved; in that respect, they’re easy. But can you imagine going in with that kind of trust and honesty as the starting point?
my world is a flood
And I haven’t even been reading the news, because I value my operating neurology. Fuckin’ whew.(And, more pragmatically, I didn’t spend all this time setting up ways I can make impact to overwhelm myself with stuff I can’t impact, and thus screw up my own follow-through. Enough forced errors are going to come my way that — yeah.)
Mischief managed this month included the patching/painting of the leaky ceiling, a sudden and intense back injury relapse which may have been autoimmune funnies or a passing soil virus (?), Extreme Heat Week, Extreme Heat Week the Sequel (now in theatres), and an abrupt notice that apparently my phone model’s developed a habit of melting from the battery out, so: one battery replacement being wrangled. The world is excelling in its commitment to entropy right now. I’m keeping up on the work of repair, but just barely. The laminate floor repair kit sitting on my table was supposed to happen this month too, but too many things jumped the queue.
The three days where my back seized up (culprit still unidentified) were — a strange and revelatory haze. One afternoon I was on my way home from physio with rather pleasantly sore legs from a session at the farm the night before, daydreaming about lamb prosciutto (a thing at my butcher’s now; can’t justify without ironclad use cases) and that evening everything in my body just slid into the proverbial ocean. I woke up the next morning in the kind of totalizing pain that doesn’t permit thoughts, never mind continuity or a personality. I went through probably twenty hours of old quiz shows in those three days and remember none of them. My brain wasn’t really processing; they were just — something to provide a little counterpoint to a pain management routine that is patient, pragmatic, and apparently runs on autopilot.
Pain is its own time zone. I looked up when there was enough of me gathered together again, and three days had passed. And then after another truly shaky day, I was. . . fine? But thoroughly weirded out by the way the clock had shifted and stopped, and entirely disentangled.
After two and a half weeks, I still haven’t quite regained the same predictability of time. It’s stayed slippery all through the month: sleep cycles moving around as if unconsciously reaching for the cooler hours, 5am waterings marking a kind of midday, bedding down in available silence. You used to have to become a master swordsman, cut down all your enemies, and retire to the woods, weary of war and the petty concerns of the temporal sphere, to get privacy of thought like this. Or, as we used to call it, a summer. It’s good. I spent entire Augusts like this in junior high, having weird dreams all day and writing fiction all night to the sound of early grunge radio stations piggybacked in from Seattle. It’s not unpleasurable. I missed it lots.
backlisting
Last month’s podcast clearout continues, and in early July, it was joined by working down the list of articles and papers I’ve marked read this when you can actually think, it’s important. It turned into a surprising mishmash of book history, cognitive theory, sociology, practical organizing reports, policy documents both current and under review, poetrycraft, and climate science I’ve been kicking down the pike for months to years now. It’s a decided way to see where your head’s at, what you throw on the read later important stack.
Here’s a good one on the historiography of the speculative / other decades’ futures and the tensions of prediction:
Claiming to assume the role of future historian is patently absurd, an impossible feat. But because we all know this — audience and author alike — we understand we have strayed from the business of making serious claims about what will happen, and drifted into the wider, looser terrain of what could. Our focus has dilated, expanding from what's most probable to what's merely possible. To predict is, often, to prescribe; to propose, however, is to enter dialogue and play.
I appreciate that the author is a visiting researcher at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. This is awesome. I am picturing a decorous grad lounge, a few underfunded and shabbily decorated offices, and a shielded room in the centre for staring into the abyss which stares also. 😀
Brief, but also vital, is “repetition is tedious”:
The thing that no one ever tells you about your calling is that it’s boring. Oh, everything is interesting if you’re interested… shut up. Yes, it will be exhilarating and fun and fluid and and natural and meaningful. It will also be tedious. It will hurt.
It’s paywalled, but the important shit is visible.
Having finished up all the revolutions I care to hear about (it’s just same shit different terrain at a certain point, and after you pull the broad systemic patterns, it gets a little depressing) I got back on the prowl with Of Poetry, whose recommendation route I also can’t quite remember, but I think Catherine Rockwood, who’s interviewed twice there, and interestingly, had something to do with it (thanks, Catherine!).
This is my favourite poetry podcast of the moment: I’ve been parceling it out on nice Sunday afternoons for about a year now. The general brief is kitchen-table conversations with poets, and you get to learn a lot not just about craft but people’s various interests and obsessions, how people come to poetry, the million different ideas people have about what it can and should be, etc. It’s a zillion ways of looking at a blackbird, and has me trying a few fun new things formally: a palinode, a proper-ass haiku for once.
I am getting closer to Present Day with a few of the podcasts, and it’s interesting (also daunting) to note that no, I was not just thoroughly in my feelings last October: that is about when people start to go visibly ideologically rigid, anxious, projective, and insane. A sense of coping mechanisms and hypervigilant threat visibly creeps into conversations entirely unrelated to the geopolitical world. Lovely to get to check my work sometimes; pretty terrible that the emotional radiation is basically preserved for all time now, or at least until our formats expire.
***
Since I can’t live long without squirrel-like fat stores of important! read later saved for winter, I also belatedly remembered that even the most distanced, short university program comes with university library access. And that means: Interlibrary loan! Friend to Novelists, best of creations. Everrrrry library in the wooooooorld. 😁
The heap of academic titles I’ve had under find this! later! was promptly dispatched to bother various librarians. I apparently had a bunch of books about practical pedagogy on the important! later! list once upon a time (and one about Michael Jackson as a wider sociological symbol nexus just because it sounds hella cool). I don’t remember what that was about back in 2021 or whenever. It’ll be about something new, I’m sure, now that I can read them.
a small academic inflection point
I also wrapped up the economics course, which was in so many ways such a non-event that I’ve formed no meaningful impression of any of it. It was so irrelevant to what I’m working on, and asked me to do so little: work or thinking or really anything. The only punctuation was another student having a climate doom trauma barf at me on the messageboard in the second-last week (no reason I could detect there), and I found myself yet again explaining to a total stranger that no, all the other people are not angry cartoons, and no, everybody and never are big words, and we don’t know each other very well, and when you say we that is not a word about how big your feelings are (I’m serious; a person said that without irony, and it scared me), it’s a word about multiple individual human people, and at that point I got very tired and just wanted to go home now. I like humanism a lot (people matter, behave accordingly). It’s hard when I remember it generally arises and does its best business during times of widespread, reflexive, atomic-level dehumanization. Fucking Christ.
Next semester is my independent research term: Taking the actual work I was doing on urban orchards over the winter and building it out into something targeted and relevant. This is kind of the thing I came to the entire program for: building up delicious policy rationales for doing good shit that actually helps. (I suspect this technically falls under make the revolution irresistible but revolutions attract counter-revolutions. Work smart! Be sneaky instead.)
I’ve realized I don’t know what to do with the last semester after that. There’s nothing on the docket I actually want to take. I might have to sidle over to the Food Studies centre at U of T Scarborough and see what they’ve got on, and if I can do an external credit to finish this off in a way that’s a little more intellectually challenging and a little less desultory. One hates an anticlimax.
using my education
Public policy consultations still happen in the heart of July, so I showed up to a few this month: mostly in service of the Million Fruit Tree Crusade. I am a one-woman claque, except everywhere I go, at least two people go yeah, that’s a great idea, that’d be awesome, so it’s working. We will call it the Vindaloo Organizing Manoeuvre. Charge your! advocacy with the good cheer and big-tent spirit of a bunch of British football fans going for a takeout.
I always think consultation advocacy will be work, and then it turns out, it is fun and a weirdly effective secret way to get stuff happening. When I’m in a shit mood I go to a meeting works for all kinds of things, turns out: you are in a room with people who care with their hands about the city you all share, and nothing is better medicine.
This month’s major one was the Parks Facilities consultation, and I knew four other people there so we had a grand old time asking and suggesting about what we think prosocial, generous facilities need (mine: updated air quality equipment for public health/smoke days, a food security lens, fruit trees). I’m serious, the same people show up to advocate for stuff in a city of over 3 million people, so if you want to get things done and don’t go to your town’s community consultations, consider doing it. It’s a fabulous process insight, and your voice will be bigger than you think.
growing season
Mid-July saw the sequels to both Too Hot Week and Smoke Week (with, unfortunately, overlap), and saw me remembering the kind of heat where my body stops registering hunger and I realize at 3pm I haven’t eaten a thing. Not ideal. What a way to feel both climate and change, both words, making their course through one’s body.
But: there is produce. Where I could, I spent time aiming for an equitable balance between what goes into meals and what goes into jars. The canning campaign kicked off on Canada Day — I had 10 lbs of cherries to get through, and cherries mold if bruised — so I pulled a late night to make sure I didn’t actually lose them.
I don’t actually eat that much jam — it’s legitimately too much sugar for me more than occasionally, which is ironic considering how much I like making it — so I went for a few lateral flourishes: Smoky pickled cherries with rosemary, rhubarb-Earl Grey compote.
The peas are holding on: I pick a handful every day, usually at 5am when it’s as cool as it’s going to get outside and thus the smart money is to wake up and do the watering/weeding/fertilizer. The herbs hate the heat. I am starting to get proper tomatoes, and beans in flower. Baby pole beans look a lot like Morse Code: dot dot dash.
At the farm, a whole batch of lettuce bolted, which means it goes a little bitter; the plan was to compost it or give it to one person’s rabbits. I do not care if lettuce is bitter, so I took as much as I could carry. Slightly bitter red lettuce isn’t too far from radicchio; it’s just a matter of adjusting your flavour profiles to accommodate it. If you still have a few handfuls of cherries left over, or a spare nectarine, or halloumi cheese with lemon, you’re halfway there.
writing (antipope edition)
(I love the word antipope. It’s heresy but + competence. Heresy: You got this! 👍)
I have truly no idea when this section might come back. The public sphere really doesn’t feel like the kind of environment right now where one can talk about precious (dare I say sacred?) things without having them flattened, projected upon, folded, spindled, picked at, or mutilated, and everything I’m working with is so vital to me that I just can’t have anyone mishandling it. If it’s mistranslated back at me right now I will flip my entire shit.
Justifiable reasons aside, it’s a lot of overwhelm out there (see: trauma-dumps, mischief, just a straight-up ambient anger that really, truly daunts me), and I can’t convince the parts of me that matter that this can be talked about without pre-ringing it with guns. Which sucks, because in the normal scheme of things I usually like to discuss process, compare notes, and share a little victory. Having to conceal your pain is pretty hard. But I hate having to conceal my joys.
I understand in the grand scheme that this is part of the action of all kinds of vicious social cycles: We all pull the evidence of having rich inner lives out of the public square as preemptive defence against picky angry violence, and thus people see no evidence of the rich inner life, we all disengage a little more from the truth of each other, and the practice itself starts to die out due to lack of social habitat. And then no one is singing to each other with the awe and honesty given usually to a God you trust. It is also true that lives are not lived in theory and if anyone is careless about this most-beautiful thing I will glass them, and that is frowned upon by both community and the law.
So I am still in a mood for being fair to me. I don’t know how long that’ll hold. But it’s happening until shit appreciably sobers up.
things read
I started the month with another Rose Macaulay, Staying With Relations. It’s mostly set in Guatemala and the broader region — Central America on up to the California coast — and it’s really interesting to see that space in what is very English fiction, a century ago. The introduction pinpoints the major pop in this book: descriptions of place. The jungle here is a nearly sentient thing.
While we share the fascination with the ways people insistently misparse each other, this wasn’t my favourite; the third act felt structurally like it was running out of breath, or maybe I was just very tired that night.
Likewise, Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time. It’s a bit of a rough read in some respects — I’m finding anything that recapitulates the trauma-frozen moments of 2020-21 like that right now; little pockets of ice recapitulating arguments we were all there for and don’t really need to hear again a few years on — but the elements about gardening as a practice, as a structure, as a social structure are interesting. There are some good bits of literary biography, succinctly told. This is yet another book that has some things to say about the Enclosure Act, which is apparently on everybody’s mind around here. It was useful in the way it’s gratifying to know other people are going the way you’re going: green things, community care, and the commons again.
My latest Iona Whishaw came in midmonth (aw, it’s cute how I think that; it’s like my grandmother calling Coronation Street my stories). At this point in the series — book number twelve! — they’re getting more than a little predictable and I will probably be done soon if nothing mixes it up. I think that’s the natural lifespan of series mystery novels: If it’s still working, you don’t knock it? And how long does each piece of a formula work? They remain immensely readable. They’re very quick-paced books that don’t particularly feel deep in any way, but have the trick of never feeling shallow. I never get actually bored of them. But it is absolutely sticking to the same plot structure, and I might have run out of my appetite for that.
Finally, I stopped hoarding pleasures and cracked open John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting. It is so good to spend time with someone whose books are this smart, and this kind, and respect the reader this much: chiaroscuro, allusive, kindly prose that touches softly upon even (and especially) awful things. I hated that bad things happened to these people. I love prose that goes all the way down through the mantle of the page. I adored it.
And just finished this afternoon: Matthew Green’s Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages, which is a nice if slightly choppy piece of history writing. There’s not a ton of throughline — it follows notably documented lost cities and towns from prehistory (Skara Brae) through the 1950s — but it’s well-constructed, evocatively written, and has a few non-glib thoughts about ruin porn, the actual drivers of. Apparently there was a whole Victorian artists’ colony who would fetch up at what was left of the port of Dunwich regularly for inspiration, pulling an early-2000s Detroit — and there is a relationship to the past, to decay, and to place implied in that which Green doesn’t overly focus on, but does take seriously. The thesis does pull together, implied rather than express and quite loosely, but it’s not there for the thesis — it’s a tour, and a good one.
things to read
As promised last month, the fish poem hit its online release at Reckoning this month. I’m still quite pleased with it. Swim fishie swim.
she’s gonna dream of the world she wants to live in
And apparently in the afternoons, if the humidex stays this high.
But what else are you going to do under the circumstances? Sight the world you want, keep your pace aimed toward it, bring friends. Try to enjoy yourself a little on the way there. If necessary, slip through time.
