sixty: salute your solution
January, I think, was about seven qualitative weeks long. February didn’t get shorter; this month packed in approximately eight more weeks of action, even if one of them was an Official Sick Week and ought to have counted for point-five.
So, um, suffice to say this is a long instalment: research and organizing and mystery novels and the way films age into social rigidities and some reviews and some poems and way too many systems in chaos that I’m slowly unraveling.
This is not even close to all of the action — interacting with institutions is very much, right now, like a real-life game of Minesweeper, and the mines are people in crisis who insist on hoarding decisions in a desperate bid for control instead of letting someone outside crisis have ‘em and get the job done. There are only so many fights I can take on and still accomplish anything I actually enjoy, so it’s required nimble choreography — but there’s no saying what a heap of good conversation, gluten-free injera (teff only!), and a solid night’s sleep does for accounts. Or a study session with the local crew from your SFPC course, in a darkened gallery/makerspace, passing around urban farming resources and code. Or food court lunch on a Tuesday afternoon with seed catalogues, swapping book titles and links to an anarchist collective making fabric dye out of invasives (yes, I called them up basically instantly, fuckin’ a, it’s solarpunk yarn). Or, or, or.
In terms of the humanist life pacing mission: We did get a little better at doing what we want and doing it with style this month (everybody say yeaahhhh). My phone has lived halfway on mute for weeks; last night’s schedule was briefly suspended because I decided it to live against the binary and yes, do evening overtime, but do it with cake. Apparently I did this well enough that halfway through the February long weekend the ever-present pressure dropped, and I got the first stress-comedown, end-of-crunch, raging snotty head cold I’ve had in five years.
It’s probably hat tip to the COVID precautions that it took this long, but it’s still more than a little dislocating: I used to get this exact head cold every winter, December or Reading Week, whenever I finally dumped a load of stress, and it’s been, well, half a decade. Half a decade outside a habit of body. Even if it’s just a head cold, that’s a form of physical exile.
So I just punted everything, and got the distinct pleasure of watching over 60 cm of snow (:D) blow off the taller buildings across my planters, against a blue sky, with a thoroughly stuffy nose and “Hard Sun” muttering through my head and the pot of ginger lemon tea that clears my sinuses out on the counter, feeling rather repatriated to my body and my life and the concept of snow days in a way I hadn’t realized I missed.
That sense of repatriation is spreading outside, too. It’s almost as if the more precarious everything around us is getting, the more the vibes along and through this city have warmed and softened and brightened. I couldn’t say what’s made the shift. So many people have this extra piece of kindness for each other again — something that’s been missing or flickering like a lightbulb for a few years now. It keeps happening everywhere. All the old TTC men, at the corner with the local charity canvassers, holding up the back table at an Ethiopian place on the Danforth for four! solid! hours! (gluten-free all-teff injera, thank you world for these practical graces) once we realized what time it was, exclaiming to the server that oh, we are so sorry, please kick us out, you could’ve kicked us out whenever you needed to, and the grin from her that said she was not going to kick us out, but that we said she could’ve, y’know.
Heading outside this month is finding it full to the brim with conspiracies of consideration. This was what Normal™ was to me. I missed it desperately.
think locally act locally
Food systems have been at the front this month, both in coursework and politically: as the US and Canada did food tariffs brinksmanship (Christ, spare me from drama) I was sitting up past 11pm, catyelling at urban planning papers my dudes, it’s not about what it’s about, control of systems and resources is unfortunately an active value in a food system, we’re animals, we have trust issues, learn to rejoice in the imperfect world1. One of the things I actually do enjoy about food systems is they are not creatures of theory. It’s all concrete logistics and human mess up in there. The vibes do in fact matter. Emotional readings are quite braided into the logistical ones, and increasingly, I’m finding them relevant. It’s the kind of work where — I think you might have to like people, really and truly. Verify, sure, but trust.
That hum played into a few conversations this month: A somewhat unexpected followup chat on public placemaking with someone consulting for the Downtown BIA, where those refrains came back up: treat people like people, build social trust, if a community wants to have fun don’t let formalisms squash that.
Another: Trying to explain without derailing a classroom that bad thinking isn’t just when you neglect to ask questions, but where you find an answer that validates your contempt for other people and accept it as the answer, down tools, full stop. The grudges you don’t challenge, the trust you don’t venture, constrain your thinking. You stay small.
Another: In a project meeting, pointing out that a process problem doesn’t need an wholesale overhaul, just teaching a second person to do it and then trusting them. That a simple solve comes from not assuming that there is no second person to start with. We are now building around the second and the third person.
Another, during the briefing for a Home Waste Audit I did this month (not much to report on this, idly upping my plastic reuse game) which was bright with cartoon slides and soothing reassurances to not worry about being seen to be producing waste and not speaking, but sharing. There’s a serious quantity of group therapy-speak contaminating climate spaces, and I’m using that word advisedly: it gets all kinds of places where it’s not actually doing any work but it’s definitely hauling in certain kinds of structural relations. A home waste audit intro seminar isn’t a high-shame, feelings-intensive space. It’s a weird, infantilizing vibe, and I’m not sure if climate communicators grasp the dynamics they’re sometimes constructing. An adult with a Grade 7 reading level is still an adult and maybe ought to be done that bit of respect. Or, y’know, trust. Trust that people who showed up actually want to be there?
Amongst the flourishing generosity around me, I’m seeing a lot of this flinching, reflexive paranoia this month: the kind of tide that tends to rise when people around me are in a bad place and carry it from pillar to post, assuming there is no second person or the second person is a saboteur. Where it’s so much more often the case that lots more interesting stuff happens when we stop deciding people are malevolent or ignorant, and start deciding they’re tired, obstructed, and handling excessive time and resource demands but basically interested and good. Making choices as best we can; the condition of being adults. It’s all much, much more interesting when we start with the supposition of adults.
Which is all, all, all to say: I think you have to like people. To do this. To legitimately think human follies and largely neutral-to-benign mess and the braid of history and our mundanities are worthy and beautiful, and form the matter of living, instead of an obstruction on our way to it. You gotta like people juuuuust a little.
1I find it very telling, every time I look up just how I habitually misquote Swanwick on this line, that I always feel he didn’t go hard enough with the verb. It’s not actually enough to praise.
recherche (deeply recherché)
Early this month, I also put together my study proposal for this semester’s action: groundwork for the urban orchard policy situation here in Toronto. Conditions are still precarious for doing actual community research (ie there isn’t grading capacity and the ethics review would apparently take fifty thousand years), so we’re going to generate another quite necessary lit review.
While I understand that “Nothing But Flowers” is maximum irony and a not uncomplicated text (!), it’s still super fun to listen to while you’re putting the finishing touches on a research study proposal to start quantifying gleaning as a food sovereignty distribution stream and suggesting that perhaps a few more fruit trees about the place wouldn’t go amiss. Welcome to David Byrne’s TED Talk; this is in fact the future I want.
Going slow and steady with this project hasn’t been a bad idea, turns out: the whack of references I had waiting in the wings. 🥳 However, increasingly, I’m getting the sense that now might be the time to go fast: that feeling where something sits, murmuring, ruminating, and then abruptly sits up and goes okay, now.
Last week, I finally pulled the pin on the first calls about this project — one forestry department in the town where I grew up, some community organizers involved, and one mini-project in Thorncliffe Park — and oh, we’re having fun now. I may have been moving more conservatively than I strictly need to here, presuming I’d have to make an airtight case. In short, I’ve been thinking in the last mayoralty; fitting for the culture-of-no we’ve lived in for twelve or fifteen years while stupid battles got fought and refought and the place fell apart around us (good lord, when I say it out loud). So yeah, I have overprepared. It’s probably forgivable to have formed the habit, but I may not have to do that anymore. I don’t need to be a planner, just befriend some.
The other great meeting this month was the urban growers’ network annual, with a whole hour and a half of hot brainstorming on the policy situation at the City right now and what could/should be advocacy targets. There is so much appetite for good work, and so much appetite for — yeah, we all need to be talking more. And I was weirdly thrilled when I started a sentence with: “So, when I decided to jump into this with both feet, about a year ago—” and realized that — wait, I’ve only been full-on on this work for a year. And I’m working up cross-network policy tactics and zero-cost sampling methods off the top of my head, in ways that aren’t just self-aggrandizing, but actually good ideas. Like, hey, I asked myself at the end of last year where on earth my 2024 went and you know what? Apparently it went here. Soaking up all the frameworks and context and interlocking project history so that when my mouth opens, it’s not bullshit coming out. 😀
I thought I had much farther to go before that tipping point. I mean, I’m still a little itchy about even calling myself an organizer, like what, 15 years in? So, yeah. I’m — actually delighted.
from seed
Last year at Farm School, the start of this whole little whirl right here (only! a! year!), we had a few local-producer guest speakers in who told us quite emphatically you can’t make a living wage doing this stuff in Toronto (someone disputed that energetically at said meeting above, but anyway). You had to sell to restaurants in reliable, high-yield specialty crops (microgreens) that could command a high price point. Some of this was cost of living, some of it was devaluation of produce.
It’s probably telling that some of what I did in response was “In which case I will alter the deal ^h^h^h^h food system in which that is true” and skipped off to policy school, but I appreciated the open-handedness of this approach. Widening the scope of the activity isn’t always an excuse or dilution. Sometimes you widen the solutions with it.
Being an urban farmer as I am (!), during Head Cold Weekend I sat down with my big pot of ginger tea, the seed chart, and my inventory, and mid-snowstorm, midnight, started this year’s garden plan.
My eyes are bigger than my mouth and I immediately wanted at least two more 20-inch planters (which I then impulsively bought and dragged one-handed, cackling, all the way home through the downtown of this major city). But as well as figuring out what I want to home at Downsview, this is going to be a balance between ambition and sober appraisal. One must imagine Sisyphus on morning watering duty in August, when it’s 34 C and the novelty’s worn off. On one level, I have to design for those weeks when it’s going to be a chore. On another, all my fun in life is abundance and challenge, so I have to just plan for the idea of a joyful excessive avalanche / graceful expulsion — and plant things I can process and can for the winter. One must imagine Sisyphus with a full winter’s supply of homemade tomato sauce, too.
I’m starting leeks, lettuce, and eggplant this week, as snow melts outside. The garden plan is still only about a quarter complete? But I’ve sketched it out big, and we’ll see how the Homestead plot fits into this calculus. Stay tuned.
things watched
One brief, one long: the first series of Ludwig is very, very good if you want something quite gentle and smart and emotionally intelligent and rife with the standard David Mitchell situation. It was a one-evening binge worth having.
In longer form: Chasing Chasing Amy is an interesting piece of film-history documentary — a filmmaker doing analysis and interviews alongside something personal about how that film shaped them. It’s something like a bit of making-of, a bit of narrative, but all framed within the shape of its echo, and spending some time on examining how that movie’s read today as a piece of queer-focused art — or not queer-focused, as the case may be.
I’m personally very fond of Chasing Amy. It’s one of those movies I loved for what felt, at the time, like a real levelheaded self-awareness: late nineties nerd culture taking the absolute piss out of itself from the inside (the convention stuff is hilarious), an understanding of group social limitations and how we manage relationships with people who can’t come to terms with each other, a — not just willingness, but eagerness for everyone involved to get to be their whole and complex selves. A desire to truly, truly see each other. I still think it’s one of those works where every character is really inhabiting a self. It’s both funny and lived in. So it was interesting seeing how the perspectives — from critics, viewers, cast members — around its portrayal of a relationship that’s basically sexually fluid rather than heterosexual or queer shaped up.
This documentary covers some of how it’s aged and some of how various critics and artists read that complexity, and tapped interestingly into an argument I’ve been having for a long time, and maybe a little louder recently, about what people think the point of story is.
I found myself both with and alongside the movie in the best way, really: thinking about why each person treats this piece of story either like an affirmation, a commentary, a reflection of personal conversations they and Smith had, a command, or a sales brochure. Or alternately, why people think they have to fawn at an inanimate object (book can’t see you), and what that relationship with art says about relationships with life, about need.
I had a very sharp argument at the last writing workshop I attended (a while ago) about making room for the undidactic space in a story. It’s just talking. We’re rife with experiences, half-processed, differently contextualized, parsed, misparsed, some that just are and remain Mysteries in the sense of μυστήρια, not crime novels. We’re just sharing ‘em around. There’s no should in it. This is, obviously, one perspective. Clearly I am right. 🤓
But if anyone goes to find this movie, all this isn’t just a rumination. There’s a twist in this documentary, one I don’t want to point out, but it’s the most firmly, gently furiously assertive reclaiming of an experience I’ve seen on film. It’s worth thinking alongside, and watching for.
things read
I polished off the next two Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club mysteries this month, and they do get more confident on the prose level. By the third, man’s decidedly found his feet. Still quite light, still deeply funny, and now confident enough to offer a few very good pieces of stable ground.
I’m officially putting these ones on the recommended list; they just took a minute to hit stride.
The other big one this month was Mark Lanegan’s memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep. I’ve had this a while; Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, Saturnalia, and Bubblegum are some of my favourite albums in the world: the kind of music I write novels for in reply, like I’ve dropped a stone into the well of them and I’m tipped by the edge, transcribing the echoes. He's one of the few people I would show up to see every time they came through town no matter what the project was, and I’m still on a certain level gutted that won’t happen again; he died in 2022, COVID-related, I think. He had a way of standing rock-still on stage, holding the microphone on its stand like he was balanced on something stable but precarious and it was the counterweight. I wanted to write things about that body language. It was the stillness that obsessed me.
It’s a very blunt, upfront book about a life made mostly a mess of, at least up to the point the story’s put aside; 1997 or so. I'm very glad I'm not a person with a certain attitude to parasociality, which is — a thing that even typing it, I want to unpack, examine, but maybe not in a newsletter already running this long. (Like I said: Eight weeks of action.)
But I’m glad of it, because he's quite plainly honest through the whole thing that he is not a good person. In some extensive detail, the kind that I got the sense that he felt was shocking because he’s ashamed of it, because he remembers all the things left off the page, but becomes less shocking than deadened through repetition, in the way the cycle of a multi-substance addict is: endless laps around the same problem. And implications, structurally, that there were parts of that he was very far from figuring out.
I’m sorry for the lack of introspection into creative process, or certain kinds of analysis; it very much does form-follows-function by focusing so much on drugs and drinking: who scored where, the mechanics of it, the almost Excel-spreadsheetlike mathematics of a habit. I started figuring out, halfway in, that he’s not talking about the rest of it, that it seems like a weirdly blank and empty life, because — he might not remember the rest of it. It might not have mattered or figured. The rest of the world might not have been there. No knowing if that’s the case, though, or just a choice of focus on his part.
I'm -- weirdly glad I'll be able to let that be. What a mess of a man; this is one of the most beautiful things that still runs around my head, and one day I will finish the novella I wrote to hold it so it catches the light. This one’s a hard read if people aren’t built to hold the contradiction, y’know?
It left me thinking some significant thoughts about masculinities and that self-repeating trap of dudes and withholding and hunger and shame; thoughts that are, I think, book thoughts and not Internet ones. They belong decently in some other manuscripts. Suffice to say something — less clicked than was confirmed, a little.
It’s not essential reading. It’s a little depressing, or a lot. I am still so sad I’m never going to stand stage left at a gig again, another still point in a loud guitar show, mostly watching the angle of that man’s too-steady hand.
[a voluminous silence where writing goes]
It says something that it still doesn’t want to be talked about. Multiple strands of this have gone somewhere so personal, so close to the nerve that there is no path for unviolently exposing it to light. Merrie and I used to talk about this: Some work has to be done in absolute darkness. It is hard for me to even imply I’m writing right now. (See: μυστήρια.)
I can say this: Research for this project has always been a little impossible. A language barrier, two or three regimes with very little interest in a complicated version, a hundred years between us; there’s just no hope of an authoritative version. When I started work on it in earnest, the library was closed for four months under a ransomware attack. I couldn’t source history books. Since last summer, when online search results started to truly go sour, it’s gathered another dimension: a bit like coaxing stories out of a loved one who’s had a stroke.
When I’m digging for grounding details on this project, there’s something oddly peaceable about watching search results go mad. Google is sundowning; I can’t rely on it anymore. I’m writing in the universe of altered narratives, statues without faces, and blurred memory. Time slips. There’s room between its lapses.
It’s forced me to fall back on the world inside myself, and — to my delight, I’ve found it big enough to catch me. Full of half-fallen grandfather trees and printing presses and old expurgated books and tidepool carp and plum jam and hands and ghosts and mass gravesites and light and sex and silence. I’ve been forced to trust myself. It’s oddly startling, to relearn what that looks like again after years of writing outward, into others’ terrain, into spaces that insist experiences have fixity, and find it—
—and find it.
I think I will thank the world for this, later.
things to read
This one’s been a long time in production, but my review of Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto went live at Reckoning this past month. It is possibly the most irritable review I’ve written under byline; I pitched the book thinking hey, it’d be nice to see what a non-Eurocentric, Marxist approach to climate work does differently and adds to our wonderful toolbox of praxis. Reader, it was not nice, and my resultant sputtering bait-and-switched feeling led to some different, but I think still interesting questions about how the communities and movements we construct drive and interact once they’re actually on the road; about comporting ourselves in emergency; really about good faith. I can’t say there’s value in the book. I think there’s value in the review. I got mad enough to think really hard about why I was Big Mad.
On the other end of the spectrum, my review of Kim Trainor’s climate poetry collection a blueprint for survival will go live Thursday at PRISM International. And this is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in an age. Cohesive, honest, structurally light on its feet and rigorous and brilliant, polyvalent, just — everything.
On the poetry front, two poems in this issue of Qwerty are up for preorder: “the silent treatment” and “he says write about death a normal amount” (the second is more pandemic poetry; I swear I’ve almost run out and will probably bin the rest soon). If I squint, they’re also both organizer poetry. Every rage a concomitant piece of joy, etcetera.
and if there's one little answer to this complication
So yeah, quite a plateful. I’m coming to a place of acceptance about how many weeks we might be treated to in March. Slowly.
Definitely on the docket: Some more poetry, the slow march of fruit trees into wherever I can get ‘em like Birnam Wood in motion, annual seed swap debauchery, a ration of shit I didn’t plan, a ration of shit I did. Opa. See you in four Gregorian/eight cognitive weeks.