ten: the horse latitudes
So that phrase doesn't mean what I thought it did. I'd heard the story about the dead horses, water shortages and scarcity and throwing animals aboard to survive the voyage. I hadn't heard the better-accredited etymology about reaching the point in the voyage where sailors had worked through your pay packet debt, and were making money again--where your effort was useful again. Or the one where there was insufficient wind for sail, but you could latch your ship onto the current, and still go forward, and glide.
So: Ditching the austerity story, and keeping the liberation-and-progress ones. It's a parable, innit?
The current and the oars
The past few weeks saw flatlining cases in Toronto--and so the slight opening of our distance restrictions. Which meant it wasn't actually totally insane to go and sit with a friend in the park, masks on, distanced appropriately, and hang out for a few hours in the sun, filling our eyes with the sight of other people's dogs (things I missed: other people's dogs). It was good to have a conversation involving faces--and more to the point, body language. Body language is a richly missed gift.
Mostly in the absence of it, though, I'm finding a pleasure in multi-channel communication. (I'm drafting this paragraph while I listen to one Discord server's impromptu weekly "radio show", with poetry to critique for the new Zoom writers' workshop group tomorrow onscreen, and the sun spilling down the buildings and balconies outside.) Presence is presence. It's been a long time since I've sat on the phone with my friends for two hours at a time, but the habit of that didn't need too long in awakening, and it's been restful in the afternoons.
The biggest preoccupation here this month has been a spate of home improvement--and general systemic improvements. Before everything went pandemic-shaped this spring, one of my guiding principles for 2020 was if it's not working, fix it now instead of letting it generate friction. Small breakages accumulate into big ones; workarounds are work. This is philosophical and about how your attitude to small things refracts into the large; I also wanted to be less annoyed by how the kitchen faucet has leaked for years. Yes, you can just put a dishcloth there, but I can also live in a brighter world where you don't need to. At least in here, I can construct the world where things work.
As the last convention I had planned for 2020 definitively cancelled (not a surprise and yet still a milestone), it's been time to roll the travel budget into rugs, paint, picture frames, proper wood nightstands, better and more affordable internet, and other structural daily life improvements. It looks like this might be a long haul; I plan to make it habitable: all comforts on the ship. The infrastructure for it is a lot of work, but it's going to make things easier from here on out.
But right now it feels like we've left the rainy season, if only temporarily; or if this ship is briefly in dock. Time to get the kitchen knives sharpened, to have that masked haircut (short and cute if natural-coloured), to buy living room paint and extra toothpaste, and ready this little capsule of ours against the wind before the schools reopen in September and open the window for the second wave, and we're off into the wide blue unknown again.
Things read
It's been another heavy month for review reading, but with the machineries of book-lending in full swing (translation: Phase 3 hit, library books are due sooner, augh) I made a solid attempt at clearing the backlog in the past few weeks.
Notable reads this month included Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. I'm fond of Larson's overall style (when he's not giving me nightmares, I am in fact looking at you The Devil in the White City): it's very accessible, and he juxtaposes and relates storylines that at first glance might not pattern, but illuminate each other by their placement.
In this one, the primary source seems to have been the papers of William E. Dodd, an academic historian who was, in 1933, the American ambassador to Germany (yeah, say it with me now, ruh-roh) and those of his family--notably, his adult daughter Martha, who...has a distressing habit of getting romantically involved with, oh, undercover NKVD agents, other diplomats, and the head of the Gestapo. I worried about Martha's judgment a lot. Hindsight is an advantage--I wonder if I'm being fair when I think no girl you in danger at the already-dead person--and yet: when people around you are actively afraid of your suitors, it's worth noticing.
I haven't read up a great deal on the prewar Reich, but there was a novel intimacy in how all this was portrayed. The impression: Nazis are petty. They backstab and backchannel worse than small art scenes or homeowners' associations; subtract the guns and it's contemptible. It was a very odd read when placed against the vein of discourse that threatens against humanizing fascism. Not that it's likely news to anyone at this stage, but this is the most human stuff; it's just the human stuff that should never get a hearing or a budget.
As a counterbalance, adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy is a messier, more associative, terrifically brighter science-fictional manual for organizing and better living. Brown is, in short, applying principles from Octavia Butler's work and her own experience to organizing, resilience, and specifically collective action for racialized people. It's quite explicit that it's a text about philosophies and practices in progress--take what you can use, leave what you can't, which gave me more space to work with it.
I was a little put off by how it reads science fiction, but overall, it offers a lot to resonate with: that systems are emergent and fractal, and how you conduct the small things sets the tone and framework for larger ones; the value of being flexible; that having better relationships echoes outward. I found myself reading with the organzing/community work head more and more, and notetaking a lot. I might pick this up to keep around permanently: it's the kind of book that would work well as reference, I think, something to circle back to and revisit.
Things to read
"The Mysteries", a story about caregiving, empire, the fallout of telling ourselves different social stories, and weighing what things cost will appear in a future issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. This is a magazine I've wanted to work with for approximately nineteen years, so I'm pretty thrilled to see it land there. Sometimes the magic works. :)
So: Ditching the austerity story, and keeping the liberation-and-progress ones. It's a parable, innit?
The current and the oars
The past few weeks saw flatlining cases in Toronto--and so the slight opening of our distance restrictions. Which meant it wasn't actually totally insane to go and sit with a friend in the park, masks on, distanced appropriately, and hang out for a few hours in the sun, filling our eyes with the sight of other people's dogs (things I missed: other people's dogs). It was good to have a conversation involving faces--and more to the point, body language. Body language is a richly missed gift.
Mostly in the absence of it, though, I'm finding a pleasure in multi-channel communication. (I'm drafting this paragraph while I listen to one Discord server's impromptu weekly "radio show", with poetry to critique for the new Zoom writers' workshop group tomorrow onscreen, and the sun spilling down the buildings and balconies outside.) Presence is presence. It's been a long time since I've sat on the phone with my friends for two hours at a time, but the habit of that didn't need too long in awakening, and it's been restful in the afternoons.
The biggest preoccupation here this month has been a spate of home improvement--and general systemic improvements. Before everything went pandemic-shaped this spring, one of my guiding principles for 2020 was if it's not working, fix it now instead of letting it generate friction. Small breakages accumulate into big ones; workarounds are work. This is philosophical and about how your attitude to small things refracts into the large; I also wanted to be less annoyed by how the kitchen faucet has leaked for years. Yes, you can just put a dishcloth there, but I can also live in a brighter world where you don't need to. At least in here, I can construct the world where things work.
As the last convention I had planned for 2020 definitively cancelled (not a surprise and yet still a milestone), it's been time to roll the travel budget into rugs, paint, picture frames, proper wood nightstands, better and more affordable internet, and other structural daily life improvements. It looks like this might be a long haul; I plan to make it habitable: all comforts on the ship. The infrastructure for it is a lot of work, but it's going to make things easier from here on out.
But right now it feels like we've left the rainy season, if only temporarily; or if this ship is briefly in dock. Time to get the kitchen knives sharpened, to have that masked haircut (short and cute if natural-coloured), to buy living room paint and extra toothpaste, and ready this little capsule of ours against the wind before the schools reopen in September and open the window for the second wave, and we're off into the wide blue unknown again.
Things read
It's been another heavy month for review reading, but with the machineries of book-lending in full swing (translation: Phase 3 hit, library books are due sooner, augh) I made a solid attempt at clearing the backlog in the past few weeks.
Notable reads this month included Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. I'm fond of Larson's overall style (when he's not giving me nightmares, I am in fact looking at you The Devil in the White City): it's very accessible, and he juxtaposes and relates storylines that at first glance might not pattern, but illuminate each other by their placement.
In this one, the primary source seems to have been the papers of William E. Dodd, an academic historian who was, in 1933, the American ambassador to Germany (yeah, say it with me now, ruh-roh) and those of his family--notably, his adult daughter Martha, who...has a distressing habit of getting romantically involved with, oh, undercover NKVD agents, other diplomats, and the head of the Gestapo. I worried about Martha's judgment a lot. Hindsight is an advantage--I wonder if I'm being fair when I think no girl you in danger at the already-dead person--and yet: when people around you are actively afraid of your suitors, it's worth noticing.
I haven't read up a great deal on the prewar Reich, but there was a novel intimacy in how all this was portrayed. The impression: Nazis are petty. They backstab and backchannel worse than small art scenes or homeowners' associations; subtract the guns and it's contemptible. It was a very odd read when placed against the vein of discourse that threatens against humanizing fascism. Not that it's likely news to anyone at this stage, but this is the most human stuff; it's just the human stuff that should never get a hearing or a budget.
As a counterbalance, adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy is a messier, more associative, terrifically brighter science-fictional manual for organizing and better living. Brown is, in short, applying principles from Octavia Butler's work and her own experience to organizing, resilience, and specifically collective action for racialized people. It's quite explicit that it's a text about philosophies and practices in progress--take what you can use, leave what you can't, which gave me more space to work with it.
I was a little put off by how it reads science fiction, but overall, it offers a lot to resonate with: that systems are emergent and fractal, and how you conduct the small things sets the tone and framework for larger ones; the value of being flexible; that having better relationships echoes outward. I found myself reading with the organzing/community work head more and more, and notetaking a lot. I might pick this up to keep around permanently: it's the kind of book that would work well as reference, I think, something to circle back to and revisit.
Things to read
"The Mysteries", a story about caregiving, empire, the fallout of telling ourselves different social stories, and weighing what things cost will appear in a future issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. This is a magazine I've wanted to work with for approximately nineteen years, so I'm pretty thrilled to see it land there. Sometimes the magic works. :)
*
Short letter this month, but all the making has been maintenance-variety and mostly with my hands, which sounds less than it is in words: I put up a shelf. I cleaned out the drawers. Here is a pea plant on our balcony, grasping the spirit of August (and my chair), and I'll see you in three weeks.
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