sixty-six: ostranenie
This month’s title from an essay on the concept of estrangement in science fiction that I’ve been meaning to read for approximately a million years, and early July, finally did. From its author, Simon Spiegel:
Shklovsky in his 1917 essay Art as Technique defines ostranenie as the breaking up of established habits of reception. In daily life, we often perceive things only superficially—i.e., we do not really see them the way they are. To truly see things again we must overcome our “blind” perception, and this is only possible when they are made strange again. This process of making things to appear strange is, according to Shklovsky, the essential task of any kind of art.
This is the kind of thing I’d predictably like, so predictably, I like it: how persistent a line it’s drawing with the Situationists, I-Thou relations, linguistic markedness, Brecht and artifice as the act of showing the strings behind all the porous (or just frankly, not even there) things we assume are opaque and solid and can’t do shit about. I mean, with the theory language stripped away it is just before you assume that’s impossible make an investigation — or the more concise adventure game says click everything. Click five times.
I’m glad I saved it. Because it set up a real interesting train of thought when combined with a little too much exposure to how much people are executive-function thrashing and flailing this month (local and global). Because I’m not sure it’s the right question, never mind getting to the answer. But it might be the kind that in and of itself says something, under the layers of static and mixed signal?
Sure, there’s usually not too much wrong with don’t autofill your way through life (although pragmatically, a whole lot more moving parts in that request than you expect). But it gets a little more interesting if you think about whether when people say that over the course of the 20th century — and man, see above list, they say it a lot — they’re describing an external diagnosis or an internal experience. It’s a pretty steady flow of people, over and over, tumbling out of the side of a society, urgently saying okay, but you’re not seeing it, and — I mean, step back, there a few things that could be going on there before we land on deciding everyone around you is an automaton who needs breaking up of established habits of reception, devote our lives to trolling, and call it a day.
But people seem convinced of this — to the point where you wonder if they’re describing an objective insight about others, or projecting an active, personal struggle with the neurological trip switch between full, present sensory experience and stored habit and are trying to resolve it for themselves — convinced tripping the novelty circuitry lets them hack a way back to intentionality by just avoiding the habits in their own heads. And, y’know, add a little projection onto everybody else. Executive function problems + trying to pull resources by being a little bit of an epistemic bully: Lifehacks! Or, y’know, folk cogsci. A cogsci folkway — isn’t that hella neat?
Between this and having done some rather intense yoga classes lately, and the ostranenie feeling of watching my brain not work so well in extreme hot weather (see it, know it, not be able to do much about that): man, we don’t live easy in our own sentience, do we? We’re restless, bad-at-truth, awkward tenants in these brains we wake up in, and you’ve got to wonder how much of everything is just — consciousness, bodies desperately at odds with its own self, projected onto whatever we can grab to make a screen just to get a little structure around here.
So I do find myself wondering if some of what leads someone to these kinds of theories about attention, behaviour, other people’s inner lives is also a base state of being intimidated by your own capacity for shortcuts in general — insert digression here about artists are artists because we’re Not Okay, because no one who’s Okay takes this long a route to meeting their needs, seriously, novels take years — but also being willing and able to try a little something about that and also afraid you can’t. Because where concepts like ostranenie, the Spectacle, etc. trip over their own feet and fall into the ditch is somehow not really grasping that just breaking up the old infrastructure doesn’t magically make people know what to do next. It’s always a bit Step 2: ???, and then profit! You have to, y’know, intentionally build something that works better. It doesn’t fall at you from the sky. It’s a kind of thinking that’s framed oppositionally, subtractively — if only this wasn’t then I could.
So it makes an interesting kind of sense, reading about 1917’s finest theoretical snarking about those assholes down the road, between throngs of modern-day people complaining about norms and what they presume are the automatic reflexes of everyone around them, while not seemingly attempting a change in their own processes or behaviours. To thinking about a lot of our communicative/political activities as failed attempts to hack one’s own habit circuitry by people who for whatever reason can’t first-principle their own routes that day, which then themselves become instituted as social habits?
I have no idea if this is making sense to any of you, or if it’s still half lodged in my head, but: Gets interesting fast. This one, I may get an essay out of.
Having snarked long about theory, on the practical side here: I might be, for the moment, won over to the idea that even if I can’t be happy right now in a lot of situations, it is still a legitimate approach to be intentional and interesting while scared and/or grumpy or sad or stuck. There’s a lot to be said for not being a bore, dahling: First and foremost: to yourself.
Anyways, it’s a good paper, with some tactical value for the speculative writer. Theory enjoyers can find it here.
hope is a mathematical certainty
(I played through Heaven’s Vault again end of July. Most-beautiful thing. I would sail those rivers forever. <3)
Work on the various projects for improving my small corner of the world has been slow: Like I said, hot, no brains, and a lot of people are away from their desks and then it became plain that I also should be. But: nourishment for the work this month included Citytalk Canada (both the panels and podcasts, for the urban planning angle), which if you have the 1) interest in and 2) vocabulary for infrastructure and social development, is quite sincerely delicious. It’s a rich vein of people Actually Doing the Work from multiple viewpoints and sectors, and though brief, fairly wide-ranging on subtopics of interest. I’ve spent some serious time pulling handfuls of citations and reports to read later (all hail the read this later! list in its Umberto Eco-like scale).
One highlighted for the team: The ten minutes that Zita Cobb does on place, fragility, and the logics of different systems here is well worth it for the arts professionals. Start at about 13:40, and hang in there until at least 19:00 for:
"We were saved by art, because art is a different logic system. The people who came from the NFB and Memorial University — I was around between eight and ten when this was happening — they had no answers, but they had lots of good questions. And the questions really all had to do with focusing us on what we cared about.”
Fogo’s a brilliant case study as it is, and the consumer-facing side of it gets profiled on this cheerful BBC lifestyle show I coincidentally watched last month, but this is a great look at small communities, small subcultures, and their gears.
It’s also been, bluntly, a month where I’ve struggled with that feeling of what am I even doing? when the next step hasn’t been quite clear. There is a side of this project where I think I might be winning, and I don’t always know what to do with winning; in publishing, setting your levels to presumed rejection letter is a healthy survival strategy up until it isn’t. Sometimes you can estrange yourself from a perception right up your own — well.
Luckily, the thing that writing novels to over-elaborately meet your needs is good for? You get a little knowledge on how to work with that feeling. It’s bigger than me and it’s important and I can’t mess up ohgodwhatdoIdo? is — I mean, I hate it, but we’ve been here before. A lot. It does not necessarily describe a wall or a missed turn, just a set of signals about the shape of the thing having changed on me, and adjusting one’s working grip.
Listening to a zillion talks about infrastructure was good for grounding back into first principles and remembering: what I am even doing is building an infrastructure. It is a house for particular processes meant to last a great many years, and it will need situating and maintenance and adjustment through its long life, it will go through organic cycles of progress and need, and I will inevitably make mistakes. Processes breathe, and building them for breathing, enough room inherent to handle a range of operating conditions, is — well, it’s work. I am not happy while doing this right now, but I don’t think I’m doing it wrong. There’s not a massive difference between this and a novel manuscript at 60k, reaching about, going and what machine am I?
It’s coming in hints and intuitions. Between that and an offhand comment about food systems two courses ago that keeps coming back; between the persistent except, that’s not— I keep feeling about some of the extant frameworks for thinking about food systems in general and how people behave (never a certainty). In flashes, I understand that I am building a very long thought here. And that this one matters, so I ought to keep it nourished and not smother it with too many assumptions about where it might end. This is just like writing a novel: feed it, trust it, patience is golden.
Though it’s not the first time it’s come up, I’m increasingly thankful for Maude Barlow and Andri Snær Magnason, back in 2021 or so, for helping me widen my sense of time on these matters (my moral fantasy I could do just fine by myself). See, two years after the newsletter issue where I first linked that one, you too can watch all these strands and examinations and tangents start to braid into — something. 🙂
So: still doing it through the days when it’s hard, not gracefully, not in a camera-ready state. Just doing it. And trusting that I’ll sort it out. I usually do.
will you search through the loamy earth for me?
(Theme to a beautiful short TV series; hat tip Sonya, who first sent me a few Johnny Flynn tracks and opened up an excellent rabbit hole.)
The garden, however, has not been sorted out. After weeks in a row of extreme heat and the wildfire smoke rolling in, it categorically full-on wilted. The air quality here has been such that for more than a few days, I couldn’t go outside, so there was a point where I just gave up on maintenance and it was I think when I was facing down both at once. A good session with the balcony garden is about an hour of work, and even at five in the morning it was near 30 C out, or there was enough smoke in the air to take my fairly mild asthma from an under-control, deeply-occasional problem to the reason why staying indoors with the windows shut either felt or was mandatory. I haven’t sorted for myself yet where that line lies. Wildfire seasons are so new here. I don’t have a functioning relationship with this yet.
I’m angry about it, and weather can’t hear you. Which makes me angrier, because I get angry at futility too. On the other hand: you can’t hurt it so shout away, right? So I am just starting to come out of a full sad fury on this one, and have to think about moisture retention. For when I’m done with the feelings bit.
Depending on what the heat does, I may well still take a run at a fall crop. Spinach is pretty quick. The kale has partially made it. I could get a run of cooler-weather stuff in, potentially, if I just rip everything out and try again. Trying whilst angry without obviating the anger might be the art of the present age. Two things true.
things played
Some of that time inside did force me to actually catch up on rest, and I can’t tell you how pleased I am to get to use this heading again. It signifies actual neurological time off.
I went through, in a week, both instalments of Citizen Sleeper. The first is a small delicious miracle of community-oriented storytelling — you are a consciousness in a decaying android body, newly escaped from what’s basically indenture, trying to make your way on, or off, a semi-socialist space station floating in a neglected part of the galaxy. It has a lot to say about the gig economy, mutual aid, quiet solarpunkism, and the ethics of what you do when people in trouble are all that’s there to help people also in trouble. It’s also walking very soft about these things: integrated and intentional, rather than didactic. It’s a fully realized world, and did the thing good interactive fiction can: got my loyalties in order fierce and quick, without my noticing it’d happened. It’s a great little science fiction experience that doesn’t beat you over the head with what it’s legitimately thinking about.
The second instalment switches up the structure and gameplay a little: Same world, similar conceit — a sleeper/embodied consciousness on the run with a lot of community dynamics to untangle — but gets you on a spaceship, in a farther region, doing the Becky Chambers gig-workers-of-space scenario. It’s also actively playing with the idea of bad health and sheer burnout (memo to self) in a way I found stressful for reasons that are very self-condemnatory. Nothing like a game mechanic that will actively notice and penalize you for burning the candle at both ends when your worst personal reflex is — well. Yeah. That’s me told.
Once I got a handle on it, though? And worked with it a little better? It’s got the same really thoughtful, implicative writing; the same world big enough to spill off the page; and some of the biggest Cowboy Bebop energy I’ve seen in a while. It’s not a direct rip, which is good, because that always just makes me think about how much better Bebop is, but you can find it in a few hat tips, some of the approaches to the music, and a general atmosphere. More active, less restful, but there’s a lot of world in this one. They’re both excellent and I will probably play them again and again, looking for more endings, watching them spin.
The best discovery, though — mid-month over a weekend of late nights — was Roadwarden, which is the most startlingly beautiful thing I’ve had in my hands in a long while (here is its wonderful soundtrack).
I got this from gamedev and SFF writer Adrian Hon’s Have You Played? — which shows the value of understanding a critic’s tastes, because he didn’t like it at all, but his reasons for that told me I would love it. You play as a roadwarden — a travelling guide, guard, messenger, and problem-solver keeping the roads of a region safe — sent to a wild, beast-ridden peninsula to scout it out for the commercial ambitions of a very much colonial city-state, after the last guy disappeared. It’s a collection of communities carved out of a forest rife with undead, wild monkeys, giant spiders, and stranger things — half the towns not talking to each other, and everyone sitting on some decided secrets. And you have about forty days, managing space and maps and needs and your own need for meals and sleep and looking clean enough to be credible, to sort out as much of this complex, relational, murky, moody, emotionally intelligent world as you can. While carrying in the back of your head the whole time that — you are going to let in modernization and destruction just by being here.
I will say upfront that the option to defect and keep your merchant bosses out, preserving the villages’ total independence, doesn’t appear to be on the table. Which is sad because I wanted to just neglect that colonial report very, very quickly and not feel like my interactions here had something exploitative at their back. You would think there’s a way to just get everyone working together well enough that they don’t need empire, right? (This is absolutely a thing many stories would try to do in a closed narrative system and I’m not sure if I’d love them or hate them for it, because it’s both worthy and far too simple.) I think it’s very interesting that you can’t. There’s a comment being made in that about easy answers and hard ones, and about where we have influence against larger forces — not that we do or we don’t, just that it’s a matter of where and how. And knowing I had to pick my battles made me pick my battles. I actively sabotaged the sales pitch moment for two specific villages, when I felt like it would actively harm them to have our relationship turn transactional, or have outside capital touch their cultures. I couldn’t change the game mechanics, but even in a pre-programmed system, I could bite my tongue and let something look like incompletion or failure, never mentioning it was a quite deliberate choice, and just walk away whistling. That’s a wild thing to build into a game’s mechanics: what you choose outside and around those same mechanics; the space between text/screen and reader/viewer that I think of as Charlie Kaufman’s because him doing it in Adaptation was the first time it blew my mind. Refusal as it’s actually practised, maybe, with its actual vectors of impact? Not loud and bombastic. Quiet as hell.
And that’s the interesting friction, the spark that has this still with me (aside from the music, and the fairly intuitive puzzles, and the sombreness of the sepia-toned art, and the genuine feeling of those relationships — I mean, I had a favourite settlement to sleep at very quickly just because I liked the people there, and started thinking of it as home, and relaxed a little more when I hit those gates before dark). I’m not normally a reader who opens art looking to find myself in there. I tend to feel like — that can very quickly get to a place far too incurious? But the persistent exception is that I cherish a game where I can be fully, unboundedly myself in my choices and be rewarded for that. Just like Heaven’s Vault and Pentiment (recent most-beautiful things and still up there), Roadwarden let me do that. There’s a route for just being thoughtful, diligent, sincere with people, listening with attention, talking before you hit, and just clicking on everything — and you can find people legitimately, by and large, wanting to reconcile and be reconciled, or at least have the conversation. And it turns out that in the past few years that matters to me a lot: the rules of social trust actually working. It feels like rest.
This is only about $12 CAD/$10 USD, and highly recommended. I liked visiting the Citizen Sleeper world, but this? Beast-ridden woods or not, I would crawl in there to live.
things read
I started off the month with Bob Mortimer’s The Hotel Avocado — a sequel, and prose-wise on firmer ground than the first book, which was light and funny but compositionally a little shaky and self-conscious. Not having to set everything up and do a thriller plot has done it favours: with the people and places well in flow, it’s neatly structured, lived-in, no wasted space. It’s a great little funny smart action-packed gulp of an afternoon read: short and sweet.
Deborah Blum’s The Poison Squad (food adulteration woot woot!) is a quickly-paced, sharp, occasionally funny history of Dr. Harvey Wiley’s USDA chemical testing laboratory at the turn of the 20th century and their persistent war on the massive problem of American food adulteration. We’re not talking watering things down, we’re talking embalming beef in formaldehyde to disguise advanced rot and a suite of highly toxic preservatives. I kind of want a second book to figure out the austerity conditions under which anyone thought this was a good idea. This is not an ambient set of practices that comes from nowhere. There is mass hunger at the back of this; it’s marked all over with the idea of famine.
Blum’s a science writer by training and it shows here, I think? She’s skilled at setting things out with foundational clarity, and condensing complex political dynamics in ways that — I haven’t read the primary sources, but the concision doesn’t eat the sense that there is nuance happening here.
While she doesn’t structure for shock, some of the food quality descriptions are legitimately stomach-turning. It clicked with a few case studies from the thoroughly unremarkable food economics course in a way that gave them after-action value: a look at how much work it takes to get regulatory regimes in place.
And, while I don’t think Blum was aiming at it, there’s a small insight into what context set up the floating coping strategy that is clean eating and the anti-vax movement. You think: Oh. Here’s the horrifying food preservative-driven infant mortality situation that strategy came from. Here are the intense dirty-tricks practices manufacturers used to keep doing it. Here’s the way women’s organizations drove advocacy around this, so it got passed down locally and within families as women’s knowledge — ohhhhh. Four or five generations isn’t really too far to reach back for a coping strategy if you think about habits and generational memory — and I’m pretty certain that in some parts of rural North America, it’s much more recent.
All in all, a good read re: what it’s about, and a lot of shadows of the things it’s not directly about which I think will prove worthwhile. I am entertained and informed.
Lyndsy Spence’s Mrs. Guinness: The Rise & Fall of a Thirties Socialite came off the ancient precincts of my TBR pile weekend before last, when I just literally couldn’t face anything more that was useful, researchy, or had to do with work. I haven’t read a ton about the Mitfords (mostly Nancy and Jessica; it’s only an occasional interest), but enough that this counted as a reasonably familiar place to spend a day.
As biography, it’s a bit impressionistic and frothy: a rather distanced and neutral-to-the-point-of-stiff recounting of what was objectively happening in Diana Mitford’s social and family life during her youthful marriage to Bryan Guinness and then up through her internment with new husband Oswald Mosley. But it’s exceedingly light on anything like analysis, broader context, or psychological insight. You can imply a bit of causation into the frame with what Spence does present — there’s a reading available here about what happens when a smart kid is undermined, untended, undereducated, valued mostly for her looks, and just thoroughly personally stifled, and the mechanisms she develops to act out on all that go past the situation they grew for, and then off a proverbial cliff — but it’s not put on the page, per se. Spence is really, really studious in avoiding any kind of thesis, even as scandal hits, treason commences, and the whole thing goes incredibly off the rails.
But the implication does set one wondering whether the ongoing modern fascination with the Mitfords is really because they’re such an extreme case study: Blow a hole — with precarity, misogyny, and parental neglect — through a bunch of smart children’s souls and watch all the directions they ricochet as they grasp every tool they have to hand to fill it. It’s like the language deprivation experiment — what politics will they mature into speaking? — being performed with sufficient social cachet and financial resources to take your conclusions all the way. They’re the femme equivalent of Lord of the Flies with a budget. This perhaps reads different after having studied up on how young people, usually boys, are radicalized into ideological movements today — mostly uneducation, unlove, violence, loneliness, and the promise of emotional stability that is juuuust out of reach, if you just do this one thing.
Anyways, it’s a slight and rather by-the-numbers biography that stays very far away from questions of internal life or motive. The prevailing impression left was that — especially with the extended Mosley/Curzon family — good Christ these people did awful things to each other before they ever got near their intended target populations. I cannot believe none of the people involved didn’t wise up and bail on the entire situation. I have not catyelled at dead people through a printed page this hard since Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts (theme predictably also: no, do not fuck the head of the Gestapo what are you thinking, there’s bad boys and then a whole other level here, ohhhmigod.).
The answer is reductive and in some ways obvious: Hurt people hurt people! Austerity begets austerity. But wow, it is hard to take. So this one’s probably a title strictly for completists, or anyone who needs it actively disproven that the past was an idyllic land of social harmony and this is the newly-invented fallen world. People have, for good or ill, always had the same jaw-dropping range.
things to read
The review of Maggie Helwig’s Encampment should be live in the new issue of Spacing, though I still need a final confirm on that. I will keep you posted.
clicky clicky clicky
All rather internal this month, but that’s what happens when the air goes bad and a girl spends a few weeks stuck inside.
It has cooled down. If I keep promises to myself, I’m canning a megabatch of salsa tonight. There are food systems research papers, grassroots coalition-building, poetry book reviews, pickling binges, and a few possibilities on the horizon. It’s not even close to confident or tidy around here right now. But I will endeavour to keep it interesting.
Have a good long weekend, all. See you in September.