thirty-eight: une immense espérance a traversé la terre

This month's title from the background lyrics of Alt-J's "Hunger of the Pine" and also Alfred de Musset's poem "L'espoir en Dieu" (I love highly literate rock bands, don't you?). There's an English translation, but someone brutally overdid the rhyming and the slightly high-register 18th-century style phrasing; best to do it in French and translate from scratch. I don't agree with how de Musset's framing Christianity, but it is a handful of lines where someone tries to build a ladder out of words and climb it out of their own personal pit. In other words: handy. A vast hope across the earth is walking.

(See, my translation's much better.)

I got it 'cause I always take the long way home

As mentioned last newsletter, this month was marked by a bit of scheduled wandering. I spent a week in rural Quebec visiting friends (and their two cats, one of whom likes food and one of whom likes pets all the time), just talking a double ton of history and theory and art and general muss and crap and cooking non-elaborate but satisfying stuff and then eating it.

I didn't take tree pictures--and some of the trees didn't survive the week, since the day I left, an ice storm rolled through and took a few of them down--but we did see some good birds (crows, some raptory guy who was probably a hawk) and we got to peek into a family sugar shack and get the explanation of how it all worked. The base of the machinery looked fascinatingly like a cast iron Victorian stove, which makes a person think about just how ideas get adapted, built upon, worked and worked and worked and we end up with so much stuff that just rhymes.

It's been three years and it felt just really gorgeously good to hang out and mess about with my people. Just: good.

I also had more than a little adventure getting back to Ottawa to make the train as that serious ice storm rolled in, and then picking my way back home to Toronto. (Kudos to hosts for formulating a seriously good plan to get me back to Ottawa VIA, and the chops to execute it.) It's a very eerie feeling to be on a train through this kind of weather: dark, close, oddly secure as the trees coated in ice flash by and you hit occasional bouts of loud lightning, rain streaming off the windows. All the signal lights were dripping stalactites. The train was 90 minutes late; the one I would have taken hit a tree and never made it. The whole thing felt very cradling and immensely precarious, sort of like going to sea. You understand a little, what it's like when the waves hit the hull of your ship and all there is is you and wood and sea. The last few years have felt like that often: slow realizations of oh, this is what this experience meant. Not rhetorically, but in the gut.

Likewise, there's been a lot more (smaller, local) wandering now that the weather's warmed up enough to make it not a total pain in the ass. Our local Community Environment Day (they do them by civic ward, so it's always somewhere in the neighbourhood) was significantly farther east this year, so hauling three years' worth of e-waste, batteries, and so forth for proper disposal on a rainy Saturday morning was a bit more of a production. Enough that it was worth staying a while and talking to everyone at the booths, and--man, I have missed the casual good-faith conspiring you get up to about community gardens, local politics, knowing a guy who's doing a thing and maybe we should talk. This is perhaps an odd moment in time to find out that you're an extrovert? Or maybe it's the absolute logical moment.

things read

Finally got to, this month, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard's Rehearsals for Living, which has been on my stack a while. I did not expect to find myself so unaccountably annoyed. It's organized as pandemic letters -- as a collaboration between two heads -- but is more like mutual audience-facing essay work: the explanations, citations, backgrounding is aimed (probably by perceived necessity?) at a 101 readershp. And yet: Immediately, the thing's robbed of its intimacy, of the sense of being a conversation, because nobody talks like that in their personal correspondence unless they're addicted to Reddit or have decided the purpose of conversation is educating others. Which is not, structurally speaking, a conversation; it's a sermon.

There is a strong possibility where I'm at has a lot to do with this reaction. I may be fuller up on theory than I have ever wanted to be, and emptier on action. It's just such an odd tone to take in a book circling the need for community, how -- oddly stiffly its voices withdrew from the basics of human everydayness, how fenced-in they were behind citation and reference and a certain kind of codification of harms (I have been growing long thoughts about grievance, and what it does for us, and what it doesn't, and they're not coming from outside the house). It's missing the ground. I don't believe in things that don't have a spot of earth in them. I can't believe in the rhetoric of making communities without a little bit of willingness to be messy, vulnerable, unbarricaded.

I'm doing better -- on a different note -- with E. W. Hornung's Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman stories. He's Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law and is rather directly inverting Holmes and Watson as a pair of upper-class burglars, but they're good heists, they don't always work (which keeps things interesting), and they say a lot of little things about the era; just little details like sparks of light.

The really interesting thing is George Orwell's introductory essay, "Raffles and Miss Blandish", from 1944, which is added into this collection. Our buddy Eric Blair has opinions, and he is not feeling shy about them:


...yeah, um, tell us how you really feel. O.O But: I do think Orwell's on to something quite significant in the passive-versus-active idea of which danger is fun and which is not. It's about the limits of one's agency, and what one's actually fantasizing about here.

things to read (not mine)

So Catherine Rockwood mentioned this piece when we were at Notre Dame in February having another of those talkfests: a neo-Jacobean formalist demon-hound poem she'd sold but not yet published. It came out this month and just gave me twenty kinds of delight, so here you go. It's so soft and so smart and I was chewing it for hours to keep the flavour in my mouth. :)

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Brief, but: I hope everyone's doing well. And that I'll have more to say in May.