sixty-seven: but i know that this time i have said too much, been too unkind
(Nothing especially thematic in titling after The Cure today, it’s just in my head. Reliable, bulletproof banger.)
Here in the House of Attempted Infrastructural Weirding we have spent September rather fumingly on the back foot. All it took was one person to tip over six months’ worth of plans just by being a little weaselly and dishonest about their own capacity, and one institution to be useless enough to mess up my quick-fire salvage plan — and then large chunks of North American society had a full-fledged panic breakdown and ran around pissing and screaming for three weeks, so my rather carefully paced, strategic autumn timetable that built in art, research, and rest? Went out with the trash. Busted your ass all year to stabilize your life, ma’am? Nice try.
I’m currently living in my own homebrew counterprogramming again (sigh), which — hey, when you’ve been raised in generational cultural trauma and hit voting age in 2001 is a core life skill? Duck that mob-mentality tsunami, slap together some social-infrastructural kit to keep you steady, do not let this fuckery blow you out of your own life. The shit I do is valuable. Even if, sometimes, only to me. But man, one resents the necessity after — *checks* — twenty-four years. I have spent my entire adult life under rolling trauma brownouts and I’m not fully convinced that it wasn’t longer, just that it hits different when you’re a child. It’s enough patience, yeah?
Eventually I will reroute this all into a structure that’s a little harder to break, but we aren’t there yet. Right now it’s just the tried-and-true fallback mechanisms, and getting together the energy to rewire the whole damn thing again.
So I imagine this edition is going to reflect that discombobulation: a Frankensteinian fixup of what actually might still be relevant, or happening, versus how this all looked three and a half weeks ago. While I try at least somewhat to not just bluntly be pissed off for an audience, because you all don’t really deserve that and I imagine you all have things on your plate which aren’t improved by it.
a little less conversation a little more action please
(Elvis Presley, community organizer.)
Interestingly enough, through the shittiness and chaos, I’ve managed to keep some of these balls rather constructively airborne. Some of my own stuff is advancing in interesting directions — example, a series of calls this month with neighbourhood community coalitions, some of which have already gone wildly well. It is a good organizer chat when both organizers are like “no, seriously, thank you for making time for my stuff, this is fucking great, we’ve got movie sign.”
I’ve had a chance to contribute a little to some other people’s work, aka exist in a good reciprocating network of projects aka promote the ecology. If you don’t do this thing, or do it often: Yes, talking to people for their academic studies on stuff that impacts you is a really quick, subtle lever for getting shit done. It is as good or better than doing municipal consultations, which also happened in a full spree the week before last. I spoke to two this month — one from outside the working space, one on an urban ag intersection that just started out with me emailing them about their participant call, going so researcher to researcher, this looks cool, whatcha dooooing? We’re going to keep in light touch about what we both turn up. It is cool, what they’re doing: an angle I’d never have thought of and one that’s got lots of room for fertile change. Much to like there.
There’s been some good learning space happening, too: notably, a grassroots education series on land use practices and legal frameworks for community organizers. (You can probably tell why I’m there by now. Food security and production is a land use; it’s relevant.) After trying to frankly dodge people venting despair all afternoon across other channels, it was two lovely hours in the evening with grassroots organizers, Community Land Trust advocates, urban planners, and senior peace activists talking about how zoning works and how you lean into and against and through an imperfect process as communities. And there we all are with sleeves rolled, swapping resources and comparing notes. Actively feeling out where our projects might join so we can do something.
Early on in the month, I did spend some time reseating myself in “the life-changing magic of being direct”, which showed up in my inbox last month. It isn’t fundamentally news, but has some very interesting angles on the topic:
— This is because people who are indirect don’t have much experience with their inner world making contact with the outer world. They sit and theorize instead of saying it out loud and seeing what happens.
— Sitting there and theorizing instead of just saying what you feel is the best way to stay stuck.
Oh, said I. Yeah, wow, both huge and true, and it really is bearing out right now. That certain slant of light opens up whole new ways to think about acts of communication, miscommunication, communication-with-self, and well — doing shit. I am confirmed in my prejudices by this one, but in a way that I think will legitimately come in useful and also it’s a good prejudice, I have no complaints about it. At least if you throw the shit at the wall, you get to find out if you’re going to need a different tactic fast, not slow. You can waste your whole fucking life fantasizing your own private disasters.
things watched
The major accompaniment for the annual late-August/September canning binge (a recipe every day or so until no longer in danger of food waste, and it’s tailed off some, but we’re still going) was Time Team, because it’s fun and chill, Baldrick presents it, and there’s lots. Twenty seasons’ worth of small-scale British archaeology was guaranteed to get me through all necessary duties.
Aside from some fun 1990s fashion flashbacks (whew, the 90s were absolutely still the 80s aesthetically speaking for a good long while) it reminded me how much I love that streak of media that’s mostly about informed puttering. It feels like a particularly British (and Japanese) sort of structure to me: Whole massive slice-of-life shows that are mostly built around stuff middle-aged people can reasonably do out back in their garden sheds, paced like a Sunday, presuming hobbies and garden sheds and little bits of amateur crafting work and idle curiosity and building a body of knowledge over time are of course a thing. When you need specific expertise, you call in the people who putter at something slightly adjacent to your hobby neighbourhood and form a mega-hobby. It professionalizes more about five series in; the early puttery ones are more fun.
Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study newsletter (a household favourite) writes a lot about hobbies and their sociology in the current North American landscape. But go back twenty years and across an ocean, and it stands out starkly how frayed that fabric is here and now.
Sure, there is a degree to which me putting up small oceans of produce is partially a survival activity: I will have salsa, harissa, and garlicky pickles all next year, peach and blackberry jam in winter, a few months of tomato sauce. And the blackberry jam I made from $1/box blackberries over Labour Day weekend is legitimately massively cheaper than buying it (less sugar more flavour, too; seriously, canning, it’s what’s for dinner). It’s also not even close to the most efficient way to do that thing, and — it’s 100% a hobby, because I’m always doing it for the love of the game.
It’s nice, when your hands are working, to have your head somewhere that’s explicitly uninvested in competition or persuasion; more: wait, where was the original Roman route across the Thames, let’s go find out mostly for the hell of knowing stuff, context is fun.
So Time Team has a nice ASMR to it when you binge ten years’ worth in approximately three weeks to a month. You start thinking idle thoughts about how they’ll find the traces of us in 2,000 years, and cultural continuity, regionalism and etymology: an increasingly silting level of curiosity and digging highly educated trenches. I dream of GeoPhys mapping.
speaking of the canning
It’s always full-on at the end of August or early September — harvest plus when the heat finally breaks — but after thinking this would be a lighter year due to balcony garden heat death of the universe, I’ve ended up with a surprisingly solid mid-autumn showing.
I can tell I’m, despite the economy, clearing some austerity out of my head, because okay, but will I eat it and enjoy that? was making recipe decisions this year. It’s a pointed lesson to spend two days peeling the skin off bell peppers with your thumbnails to marinate them in 2024, just to remember you don’t actually like peppers and ditch them discreetly at potluck parties. This is not efficient.
I’m on track for another round of tomatoes (they’re blooming again; I won’t argue) and there’s still still apples and pears to go (October crops, not Cockney); probably a batch of cranberry ketchup just after Thanksgiving, aka cheap cranberry week. I am going to need more jars. It’s a certain kind of satisfying to walk home with a flat of 500 ml mason jars in your tote bag. Feels like victory.
things read and to potentially read (a request)
Mostly focused on review books this month (some reviews are incoming in the next quarter) and a piece I’m going to write up properly for an omake! edition, since the first one went down so well and was bluntly, so much fun. Thanks for indulging that, everyone. I would love to talk shit about movies together some more.
There was also some hard thematic trouble in most of this month’s reading, to the point where I’m not going to take on any trauma literature for the foreseeable future. See: 100-word vocabularies, for motivation and possibility and what goes on in other people’s lives, even if not verbally. I don’t consider this the traumatized writers’ fault or something; I mean, when your brain is literally sealing off parts of itself to protect you, you aren’t asked to accept the EULA first — you just take the hit and don’t, maybe, realize for years how much of you went missing. But the books that headspace produces — it is so small and full, there is no room for me. And I usually break a clavicle trying to squeeze in there to receptively inhabit them for the purposes of good criticism-writing, so I think perhaps I shall not.
I will put a semi-private call out here, though: I’ve been asked to review something for a queer fiction publication, Canadian-authored and Canadian-published ideally, and we’re in discussions as to what. If you! or a friend! has a recent title that you think would be to my taste for this situation, please reach out? I’m making my own inquiries too, but y’know, in case the perfect book is sitting here under my newslettery nose.
And please: take the criteria seriously, don’t just self-promote at random, let’s be cool about this. Community, not networking. Your suggestions appreciated.
‘cause boys! don’t cry.
I don’t think I’ve entirely escaped the halo of exasperation here, and I’m not sure I’ve kept my word on keeping it interesting, but hey. Best effort under the circumstances.
Have a good October, guys. Here’s hoping for a bit more connective tissue when we get there.