sixty-two: put on your spurs and swagger around / in the desperate kingdom of love
Sometimes a song has hit you before, in a graduated way, and then you are curled up on the couch under your soft grey blanket, outwaiting an April frost next to your skinny seedlings, recumbent and restless, head wandering, and it grabs the edge of a line, and — there. Right to the centre.
This has not been an especially pleasant or orderly month in the desperate kingdom of. We’re outside the lunar shadow of fuck it, I have nothing to say to anybody, which is something, but fresh off a very disconcerting federal election here — five weeks of three major parties campaigning on tire-fire trauma logic, where I am deeply uneasy that what just happened was the wrong thing and we are about to pay for it in rather poisonous fashion. The entire city is snippy, tired, and decidedly reactive, which makes for staying more to myself than usual to keep out of the blast radii, which makes for a somewhat inward-leaning newsletter as I try, myself, to maintain a shield against the ambient bad mood because everything I can do to improve this shit, personally or on a community scale, requires a stable head and forward motivation.
So, y’know. I have only some things to say to anybody? 🥁 Let’s see if we get a full issue out of it without dying of scowl.
“and you’re going to jitterbug with ulcers?” / “yes I am, so watch out for pus.”
Because I am avoiding all kinds of wild trauma interactions (on reflection, that’s only part of the story here, but I’m solely responsible for enough important decisions right now that current events need to take a number), the first half of the month featured a wild, thoroughgoing deep dive into the backlist of Bob Mortimer. This was in my head for a few days, being a rather welcome guest, and, well, off we went. Which turned into a massive dive into the backlist of Reeves and Mortimer together, which has been both delightful and clearly a way of gnawing at something I have glimpsed through tight edges.
I kind of love it? They’re hilarious and quick and spontaneous-rather-than-random and visibly having fun the whole time, and it mostly works because it’s mostly on the production values — and rules — of a backyard show put on by six-year-olds, except the six-year-olds are peerlessly good singers/songwriters/banterers/character actors with awesome comic timing, and the juxtaposition is delectable. But also there is something brewing underneath this material. I don’t always know what scent I’m on when I do this, but there definitely is one.
Turns out, the thing that emerges when you’re marinating your brain in a double act’s old promo interviews, looking for whatever it is that compels you, though, is:
• This is simultaneously two friends dicking around with the most childish glee and a pair of wildly smart people writing in forty-thousand-word vocabularies, and when interviewers try to compress it down to hundred-word legibility, they don’t engage; they smilingly launch total evasive manoeuvres and stay within their own rules of play. Hard respect to that. 🫡
• Bob Mortimer has always been sick, like a background hum, and he never actually at any point seems to hide it. He just doesn’t frontload it either, and when it comes up as relevant, people don’t frequently know what to do with the honesty. There’s one very early interview where he is massively direct about his rheumatoid arthritis, and another a few years later, where he’s asked why he’s got his shoes off, he’s quite plain that he’s got foot ulcers and they hurt too much today to wear shoes.
He’s so upfront with it, he’s just not — explanatory, emotional, or, well, on script. It’s an affect I recognize from talking about some of my own health stuff with people who are a little flinchy and projective, except when I say it, the interaction usually goes like them saying That’s terrible, an emergency! and me saying No, it’s just physics. It is here; I am here. Let’s not make a god of it.
(This happened, at this year’s first on-farm class: we’ve only had one so far, due to a mixture of lease complications and severe weather, so we’ll report that next month when it’s got its feet a bit. I came in with the injured back stiff and head-swimmingly painful, and mentioned as we started that I needed to take tasks that would go easiest on it, because it was visibly making me breathe hard. And man, the torrent of — I mean, it’s not even advice, is it? It’s not legible or sensible as actual advice. It’s almost a form of panic, a desperate attempt to put something and anything, like Heaven with all its power, between themselves and the fact of a body in pain even though it’s not their pain, or their body. And, like — I’m afraid that’s just not how the thing works, mate? I go out and have fun half-functional and with an eye on the bodily needs or — I have no fun? At a certain point you choose the fun? I mean, fortunately for all of us, I was so preoccupied with listening to the body itself that I couldn’t properly get offended.)
But it occurs to me this might be part of why I’m leaned in so close: Pain without inhibition. Something pervasive, liberating, and atomic.
The second clip is worth watching from the timestamp, both because you get to see this physically very closed, fidgety person just click into life on a dance floor, and if you are someone who watches body language and likes people, it’s basically heroin. But also because of that little bit of honesty, and what comes after it — around nine minutes in. The host asks a little incredulously if he’s going to jitterbug with ulcerated feet. And. 🙂 And his pleasure in doing it is splashed across the screen, y’know?
This is not some kind of mealymouthed morality tale because people are not lessons they are people, and parasociality is a set of cannibalistic stories looking for a host body so we decry it, and without real conversations we see each other only through a keyhole. Making no claims to veracity here. And it’s not even close to the whole of what I’m in there for: They’re funny as fuck and in a time of proverbial socio-emotional dryness, I’m getting contact highs off the sheer amount of fun everyone in those shows is having. (It’s quiz night. Are you coming in, or what?)
But I haven’t been able to take my eyes off it. Some guys from three decades ago know something I need to know too. I will play it again and again (marco) until I find out why (polo).
(If you’re interested: It’s not a starting point by any means for their stuff, but FYI: Catterick is brilliant.)
selling your reason will not bring you through
Between all this, another semester of Food Security coursework is done and dusted: from the kind of headspace where in the moment I’m fairly convinced what I’m turning in is shit, because my head’s overpopulated with all the unresearched angles, directions that I don’t have time for, and ways the work I actually want to do here diverges from the assignment rubric. I cut five different, thoroughly interesting research papers out of this course’s major research paper so as to not entirely blow my word limit. (What do you mean I can’t write a novella for this?) It’s when I go back that I realize that behind the haze of synthesis and irritation I have said a few legitimately worthwhile things.
What has been the historical experience of this city? How has it impacted the current state of food security? are entirely the right questions to ask — but are questions one should ask of that city, not one's imagination. There is a point at which imagining ideals bears a fatal flaw: They require you to have guessed right. In doing so, they can lose contact with the accreting, organic, extant conditions and surprises that are active forces in a city's food system and generate friction with the actual actors in cities — or simply crumble once something doesn't go their way. Pitfalls like the local trap underline what happens when idealizations are prioritized over a community's actual context. An urban food security strategy requires placehood and active listening to work with, not against the people and land it's meant to serve, as per Sitopia's concept of being an ecological being in the land; ecological beings have two-way relationships with place, culture, and circumstances, and sometimes place dictates the terms.
My major additions are in the spirit of crafting a more flexible and humble framework: the listening vision, the one that doesn't actually require me to be right but survives my limits and mistakes. Ultimately, a vision of a food-secure city may hinge more on what we do next, in the moment our paradigm expires.
It’s a long way of saying or we could stop ruminating about it in our bedrooms and show up where we are because talk my friends she is cheap. But there is, I think, something portable — especially if/when mired in polycrisis overload — in aiming to design interventions that survive our own imaginative limits.
So next semester we’re well into food economics and policy, but in the spirit of trying to do things not just along my usual rails, I’ve also applied to, and had one of the offcut ideas accepted into a social enterprise incubator this past week. It’s just a small one out of the university, running next month, and increasingly I think that’s how I plan to go in: Can I build something smart enough to survive me in the places I falter?
I mean, on certain levels, I know I can; I have five unfinished novel drafts and a double handful of poems that are still semi-backburnered because I make things that are smarter than I am all the damn time, and then I’m constantly chasing my own taillights, trying to catch up to them. But a system, though? That’s a challenge. I think an interesting one.
the brief and wondrous life of this year’s editorial
My stint in weekly slushkilling turned out to be a brief one: it came clear very fast that there were some decidedly crossed expectations going, and before people got truly, truly pissed at each other over them, I made the call to just step back out again.
Which is a shame, because it was enough of a taste to remember how thoroughly I love this work. Would that I’d lived in an era where this made people a living wage, because I’m — bluntly — vastly good at it, and after two decades, it’s still fun. In that brief month I spotted two good ones, and the delight of that does not fade with experience; it only sharpens.
The rejection letter perspective shift did actively solidify into something that — it’s not the most actionable thing in the world right now by a mile, but next time I get an editorial venue, I’m making that a venue for change. It was a very odd feeling, midmonth, to weigh up a few rejection letters I’d just written, the reply to my first acceptance of the term, and a poetry rejection that came in for my own stuff while I was slushing. The rejections I’d sent had actionable craft points for each piece under consideration and a sincere wish for good luck with them going forward. The rejection I got was a mass-emailed form that spent most of its time trying to manage the spectre of rejection sensitivity for independent adults, without having found out first if that was necessary and from a position of no relationship — and didn’t say anything about the work itself, and didn’t know anybody’s name, and didn’t try to leave anything better than they found it, and didn’t do much useful in the end for anyone.
I am not inherently a resenter of rejection letters, and that’s not a polite way to pretend away Big Rejection Feelings. I have so many filed away that just the physical ones fill a massive boot box in my closet, and that’s just from the years before people transferred to email, never mind Submittable. They’re basically just part of the landscape of living; almost a mile marker on the road that proves you got out there with the piece and did the walking. But it was odd to stack that up next to the conversation happening in the acceptance-with-rewrites, where we were talking about generosity, working together to the integrity of the piece, and the directed practice of ambiguity on the sentence level. One of these things was just unarguably better than the other. Like, does the person writing or reading the rejection letter walk away with anything in their hand? That matters, I think, when you’re building a literature, or the capacity of a community.
I doubt I’m going to convince anyone who’s overwhelmed or foundationally insecure on this point, but, y’know. It turns out, at the end of the day, I wasn’t doing it to convince them. Next time I land myself behind a slushpile, though, I’m going to be doing my thing with deliberation.
you know that i’ll be back / return of the plants
This was and has been planting season (official last frost date Sunday), and I’m already shifting into habits that I’m gratified to see come back as habits. The peas and radishes went into planters first weekend of April; I blanched some asparagus for dinner the next night, and saved the water reflexively. I don’t pay for directly metered water in this space — it’s aggregated through the building — but at a certain point last spring all the cooking water started to be fed to the plants, just for the elegance of it. The reflex kicked in like an old friend.
Everything outside is coming up slow: It’s been very cool this month, and grey and moody. But the beets, leeks, and napa cabbage were successfully translated body and soul unto the balcony, and seem to be surviving thus far despite temps. I have, for the first time, daikon radishes coming up: I got the seeds too late last fall to try them out so they’re this spring’s surprise novelty crop.
Also despite the fact that I haven’t picked up a grow light yet, the hot crops inside are looking quite cheerful.
In my scrounging search for inputs, I went into the composter and dug around to see what’s what with my trowel. And — I have no idea why I thought it wouldn’t (or wasn’t confident it would?) but I’m bizarrely gratified to find live! nude! compost! in there.
I mean, there was no reason there wouldn’t be. Objectively speaking, I’ve been dumping all my scraps plus toiletpaper rolls and shredded shipping paper in there since December, and following the directions, so yes, this is what happens. This still feels like magic in the sense of sufficiently advanced technology, or windowsill baker’s yeast. I haven’t taken any out yet, because it’s not really cured and I have some worm castings to work with as startup fertilizer, but: compost! Something from nothing! Ladies and gentlemen, The Aristocrats!
things watched
Since I’ve been on the sketch comedy extravaganza, a lighter category this month, but there was an interesting note in The Pollinators (2019) — a holistic look at the bee habitat situation in the US as it stood at the time, which started a little pedantic, but ended with some decent texture and nuance. The main spine of the film is following beekeepers who basically truck their hives across the US on the backs of semis to pollinate regional monocrops by season: as in it’s almonds time in California for four weeks, but nothing else blooms on that farm after that because it’s been planted with only almonds, and local bees would starve, so they just import them, put them on the truck after, and go to the next regional crop.
I couldn’t but notice the ways that once we get an idea in our heads — a systemic idea, that is — they propagate all over the place and into places they really don’t belong. I mean, if you look at it cold: People wanted to industrialize/centralize a process, and that doesn’t create the conditions for life, so they just made the bees migrant labour. That’s the model being followed. Migrant farmworkers with wings. There is something to not even attempting to change outright the set of shapes people think in (propaganda, also good luck with that), what formats and systems we think are possible? But even just adding in better options at any level of a social system and trusting the shape of that idea to leak its way outward. If you can invent insect indenture, you can start conceptualizing human rights with ladybugs.
things read
I also finally got to Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, which I’ve had out from the library so many times I cannot tell you. The depth of the mental block on this book, I swear.
I finally read it on the streetcar out to the west end to pick up consignment books from their temporary home and finally get my blue-podded pea seeds, and then in the Cuban restaurant I used to hang out in when that was my neighbourhood, over a plate of pulled pork, slaw, and beans.
On one level, I detest the very smell of the word allegory and there’s a lot of it in this novella. But she’s such a strong craftsperson that it opens up fast, into legitimate intimacies and something like the texture of a life. It’s still quite slight, I think? The allegory really doesn’t help, and the expiry date of the epiphantic comes on fast these days. But there’s a world in here worth spending a moment with if you’re not bothered by that sort of thing.
The best read this month, though, was Rose Macaulay’s What Not, a 1918 short speculative fiction novel about a grand social experiment in the aftermath of WWI (a war which hadn’t yet ended when she wrote it) to make people more intelligent, by brain training and outright eugenics, out of fear that stupidity causes war and stupidity would cause more. She’s pulling not from the later Orwellian playbook but direct from life, from people’s interactions with food rationing and a kind of government-ordered standardization that was very fresh at the time, and it shows: the people aren’t symbols or types, they’re real. They have messy lives, contradictions, inconsistencies — and it’s notable, I think, that Macaulay’s idea of intelligence includes full-on emotional intelligence and social skills. Whether that’s about the author or the era, I don’t know which. But: you notice.
The delight of this book, dystopian as it is, is that it’s funny. Clever and funny both; warm and clever and funny. It’s got deliciously dry comic timing, a well-balanced sense of the absurd that doesn’t get laid on too thick, and what you end up with is an authoritarian dystopia not drenched in fear, but a mild sense of romantic music-hall farce — layered atop one character uncomfortably noticing how much we live the matter of our lives like a music-hall farce, and how little that changes, even in the aftermath of a century-ending war. Look at how ultimately silly this all is; how typical of our human failures and messy hopes. Highly recommended.
things to read
My copy of Reckoning 9’s print edition showed up in the mail, salmon poem intact. I think official print release is July, but preorders are up.
Likewise, the No! issue of Qwerty showed up in my mailbox this afternoon, and it’s live and for sale on their site. Two poems in here, ‘the silent treatment’ and ‘he says write about death a normal amount’, both brief and putting a lot of yes in their nope. I have skimmed through the rest of the issue, and a good portion of it is quite fabulous: worth reading if you’re a journal person.
okay, that’s not so bad.
That does indeed count as a full issue, well done us.
Next month: Ideally less of a filthy mood in action; some actual farm time reportage; some new book reviews I think; social enterprising; a little room for the unexpected now that the weather’s settling into spring. Hope you all keep well.