thirty-five: not by yourself, and not all at once.
I ended 2022 by duly performing one of the Christmas week rituals: Telling myself I wouldn't spend money on the Steam sale, doing it anyways, and being delighted by what I got. (First and foremost, Pentiment, which is the most marvelous thing I have played, read, whatever in a long time. It is aesthetically beautiful, systematically cohesive, and clever, and kind, and honest. The best I can describe it in short words is as if the core attendees of Scintillation made a video game. I sincerely cannot remember how long it's been since I've felt this much sheer, gleeful joy at a piece of art. I'm trying to pitch a review somewhere because I need a gajillion words to get into this.)
But! I also replayed Mata Hari over the Christmas holidays: a 2008 adventure game about being a spy in a quasi-historically accurate and rather gorgeously painted pre-WWI Europe. It's one of those indie things that sat off to the side even at the time, and I have an odd fondness for it, because the puzzles were good, and the approach to history thoughtful even when it was super counterfactual.
In the tutorial, when she's recruited as a spy for a few people's desperate attempt to stop WWI, she says: "Helen of Troy's beauty started wars, but I don't know that mine can stop one," and her soon-to-be handler says: "Not by yourself, and not all at once."
That hung around my head a little this month as we slogged through the January desk reboot, housing advocacy during not one but three winter storms, and municipal budget season -- all through the kind of unrelenting grey weather where you see the sun once in two weeks and every little thing becomes that much harder. This month was, on many fronts, a little impossible.
But: Not by yourself! And not all at once. And it is the end of January, and we are here.
not all at once
Novel research has been back on over the past four weeks. I spent a whole afternoon gathering spot research on how victims' families approach the death penalty (complex, nuanced, frequently not great); a week and a half listening to episodes of Ear Hustle, five a day, to gather every last crumb of stuff that people do in prison; and then a week listening to episodes of One Million Experiments to gather every last crumb of how people are doing abolitionist work now.
The last is hugely inspiring if you're looking for a lot of people in a row who know what they're doing, or at least are brave enough to get out there, roll up their sleeves, and find out (and I'm usually looking). It covers experiments as fundamental as a community fridge and as complex as building an entire remote health care network, and it's funny. I like when organizers and activists are funny in public! We should do that more! Why so serious?
All of it's folding into the novel, which has slowly grown past the 75,000-word mark. If, last month, I wrote the saddest sentence of my entire creative career, this month I wrote what might be one of the most important: about accountability, and complexity, and how they're not honestly all that difficult, we just make 'em that way. It's good when a project keeps justifying its own existence.
It is most definitely still slow rolling, but I've accepted that this is fiddly hard work and the wages of sin etc., and it's still moving. If good work slowly's how it's going to be, then: good work slowly. Opa.
not by yourself
For the first time in--yeah, wow, ten years now, I took myself to City Hall's Budget Committee to depute about this year's frankly sloppy and villainous municipal budget. Our mayor has taken a whole chunk of power for his personal self, and delivered a draft budget that takes too much money from everything and gives it to the police because who needs social services anyway? (Answer: Us. We do.)
As you might imagine, this is not going over well. More invitations for deputation training showed up in my inbox inside two days than I've seen in the past five years combined. And it looks like people delivered: 222 speakers over four locations through three days of meetings. When I walked into the committee room after years away, there was the line of people who were visibly my people, sitting with masks on, papers in hand, on point.
Living in this city the past few years can be a very demoralizing experience; a lot of what I love about it is being fed to the crows and they are making us watch the meal. So it's a wonderful feeling when Good Toronto shows up in quantity and claims space. There was some serious organizing behind that effort, but even without, every speaker was talking about how the world actually works: services over policing, prevention over punishment, making things actually work over grandstanding bullshit.
Are we winning? I honestly don't know. The system's been stacked a little too far in favour of weenie autocracy to tell at this point. But in case you're someone who wonders about the utility of showing up for these things: half the goal is identifying the smart people you could potentially work with back in the cheap seats, between speakers. Even if the primary goal of pressuring council doesn't get through, you take names for later, and quietly look people up when you get home.
To my surprise and intense satisfaction, my two best lines made national media. One step closer to the Garcia Lorca model of Being a Poet.
**
Along those lines, we got the chili cooking project reanimated this month in time to get people hot meals and keep a lot of frustrated people sane with community action. It was on pause because the far-too-few organizers had hit burnout, but a little spreadsheet, a little mailing list software, a little structural organization and delegating and teamwork, et voila. We delivered our first batch this past weekend. People ate. They knew their neighbours care enough to catch them.
I still want to get this onto bike power when it's a little warmer -- hey, might as well make it more climate-friendly -- but one step at a time. Not all at once.
things read
It's a short book, but the big thing this month was Erin Hatton's Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment, which makes a raft of good points and insights about coerced workers -- incarcerated people, grad students, college athletes, workfare recipients -- and how there's a distinct category in the American imagination of workers who aren't real workers and therefore must be forced, or punished, or surveilled, or exploited to get labour out of them. Yes, this was book research, and I should warn: it's immensely rough reading on certain levels.
It's got a significant hole in it: the weird tendency in American sociology books (this is not the first time I've noticed it; it was just very apparent here) to suddenly grow incurious past a certain historical point. Hatton grounds her study in a bit of 18th- and 19th-century social history around people considered "dependents" -- paupers and poorhouses, chattel slaves, white housewives -- and how their depiction generated this social script around people who aren't working, or working in the right ways, and so forth.
Except there is so much missing from this picture: poorhouses aren't by far an American invention, the casting of white women as weak and fragile and medically unsuited to work happened well before that and there's a great deal to do with the industrialization of the textile industry/market share grabs in there besides, and the casting of Black and indigenous people as indolent, violent, needing "civilizing" through labour -- that's not about industrialization, and it's not an American invention either. It's one of the original logics of colonialism coming through from 300 years prior; this propaganda echo.
The absence of a pre-American history in this -- this weird forgetting that the white American men enacting these strategies also had and worked from cultural contexts! and didn't just wake up one morning deciding to be perverse! -- is...strange, to put it mildly. I can't tell if it's just a lack of page space, or a deliberate desire to pin accountability on those men for making real choices (which is true, and yet we are still accountable when we're context-bearing animals), or that American-centric headspace which seems to think a whole society sprung fully formed from the head of whatever on January 1st, 1492. But it's a notable gap, a feeling like missing bones and teeth. Y'all didn't come from nowhere, and neither did these systems. I would have loved to trace those roots much better.
That said? Reading a chapter about how people in each of these systems know who has power to make or break their lives (push out their parole date, withhold their letter of rec, kick them off food stamps, divert them out of the NBA track) and thus, get extra compliant as a precaution? That the reason for these systems is to generate compliance and extract maximum labour for minimum outlay? As someone who works in the arts? Was bluntly chilling.
I know this culture. I saw it coming up, where people would enforce weird try-hard rules on each other; it's the culture of competitive wordcount and never saying anything bad about editors and not "being difficult". It's the culture convinced editors keep enthusiastic blacklists. I had full-on flashbacks reading this: the ways early-career writers dig elbows into each other to be more compliant, pile onto each other, make examples of each other, say in those syrupy-smug ways that doing X will void you out of this industry. When -- the weirdest thing is -- there was and is no evidence it matters, no structure of authority that can enforce it, and no rules. The biggest assholes in existence keep getting publishing contracts; people most of the industry hates. There is literally nothing you can do to be unpublishable.
Genre writers apparently build and enforce an industry culture of coercion and boundarylessness, comparable to workfare or exploitative grad school labs, for themselves, toward an empty throne. They're doing it to themselves, for nobody. And the horror of that didn't leave my body for a good few days.
things to read
Preorders are still up for Canthius #11, which includes my "white squirrel season again": a poem about being a Toronto dirtbag in your heart.
It's a little farther out, but I'm told the CAROUSEL reviewer residencies will be announced shortly, and that'll bring the roster of this year's reviewers and what we're going to bring you. In advance: My month is May. :)
***
February's going to be thick with stuff: some travel, a few major deadlines, baseball (!), and inevitably probably at least three protests considering the way it's going. I'll try to throw some knitting in for variety. :p
See you next month!
But! I also replayed Mata Hari over the Christmas holidays: a 2008 adventure game about being a spy in a quasi-historically accurate and rather gorgeously painted pre-WWI Europe. It's one of those indie things that sat off to the side even at the time, and I have an odd fondness for it, because the puzzles were good, and the approach to history thoughtful even when it was super counterfactual.
In the tutorial, when she's recruited as a spy for a few people's desperate attempt to stop WWI, she says: "Helen of Troy's beauty started wars, but I don't know that mine can stop one," and her soon-to-be handler says: "Not by yourself, and not all at once."
That hung around my head a little this month as we slogged through the January desk reboot, housing advocacy during not one but three winter storms, and municipal budget season -- all through the kind of unrelenting grey weather where you see the sun once in two weeks and every little thing becomes that much harder. This month was, on many fronts, a little impossible.
But: Not by yourself! And not all at once. And it is the end of January, and we are here.
not all at once
Novel research has been back on over the past four weeks. I spent a whole afternoon gathering spot research on how victims' families approach the death penalty (complex, nuanced, frequently not great); a week and a half listening to episodes of Ear Hustle, five a day, to gather every last crumb of stuff that people do in prison; and then a week listening to episodes of One Million Experiments to gather every last crumb of how people are doing abolitionist work now.
The last is hugely inspiring if you're looking for a lot of people in a row who know what they're doing, or at least are brave enough to get out there, roll up their sleeves, and find out (and I'm usually looking). It covers experiments as fundamental as a community fridge and as complex as building an entire remote health care network, and it's funny. I like when organizers and activists are funny in public! We should do that more! Why so serious?
All of it's folding into the novel, which has slowly grown past the 75,000-word mark. If, last month, I wrote the saddest sentence of my entire creative career, this month I wrote what might be one of the most important: about accountability, and complexity, and how they're not honestly all that difficult, we just make 'em that way. It's good when a project keeps justifying its own existence.
It is most definitely still slow rolling, but I've accepted that this is fiddly hard work and the wages of sin etc., and it's still moving. If good work slowly's how it's going to be, then: good work slowly. Opa.
not by yourself
For the first time in--yeah, wow, ten years now, I took myself to City Hall's Budget Committee to depute about this year's frankly sloppy and villainous municipal budget. Our mayor has taken a whole chunk of power for his personal self, and delivered a draft budget that takes too much money from everything and gives it to the police because who needs social services anyway? (Answer: Us. We do.)
As you might imagine, this is not going over well. More invitations for deputation training showed up in my inbox inside two days than I've seen in the past five years combined. And it looks like people delivered: 222 speakers over four locations through three days of meetings. When I walked into the committee room after years away, there was the line of people who were visibly my people, sitting with masks on, papers in hand, on point.
Living in this city the past few years can be a very demoralizing experience; a lot of what I love about it is being fed to the crows and they are making us watch the meal. So it's a wonderful feeling when Good Toronto shows up in quantity and claims space. There was some serious organizing behind that effort, but even without, every speaker was talking about how the world actually works: services over policing, prevention over punishment, making things actually work over grandstanding bullshit.
Are we winning? I honestly don't know. The system's been stacked a little too far in favour of weenie autocracy to tell at this point. But in case you're someone who wonders about the utility of showing up for these things: half the goal is identifying the smart people you could potentially work with back in the cheap seats, between speakers. Even if the primary goal of pressuring council doesn't get through, you take names for later, and quietly look people up when you get home.
To my surprise and intense satisfaction, my two best lines made national media. One step closer to the Garcia Lorca model of Being a Poet.
**
Along those lines, we got the chili cooking project reanimated this month in time to get people hot meals and keep a lot of frustrated people sane with community action. It was on pause because the far-too-few organizers had hit burnout, but a little spreadsheet, a little mailing list software, a little structural organization and delegating and teamwork, et voila. We delivered our first batch this past weekend. People ate. They knew their neighbours care enough to catch them.
I still want to get this onto bike power when it's a little warmer -- hey, might as well make it more climate-friendly -- but one step at a time. Not all at once.
things read
It's a short book, but the big thing this month was Erin Hatton's Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment, which makes a raft of good points and insights about coerced workers -- incarcerated people, grad students, college athletes, workfare recipients -- and how there's a distinct category in the American imagination of workers who aren't real workers and therefore must be forced, or punished, or surveilled, or exploited to get labour out of them. Yes, this was book research, and I should warn: it's immensely rough reading on certain levels.
It's got a significant hole in it: the weird tendency in American sociology books (this is not the first time I've noticed it; it was just very apparent here) to suddenly grow incurious past a certain historical point. Hatton grounds her study in a bit of 18th- and 19th-century social history around people considered "dependents" -- paupers and poorhouses, chattel slaves, white housewives -- and how their depiction generated this social script around people who aren't working, or working in the right ways, and so forth.
Except there is so much missing from this picture: poorhouses aren't by far an American invention, the casting of white women as weak and fragile and medically unsuited to work happened well before that and there's a great deal to do with the industrialization of the textile industry/market share grabs in there besides, and the casting of Black and indigenous people as indolent, violent, needing "civilizing" through labour -- that's not about industrialization, and it's not an American invention either. It's one of the original logics of colonialism coming through from 300 years prior; this propaganda echo.
The absence of a pre-American history in this -- this weird forgetting that the white American men enacting these strategies also had and worked from cultural contexts! and didn't just wake up one morning deciding to be perverse! -- is...strange, to put it mildly. I can't tell if it's just a lack of page space, or a deliberate desire to pin accountability on those men for making real choices (which is true, and yet we are still accountable when we're context-bearing animals), or that American-centric headspace which seems to think a whole society sprung fully formed from the head of whatever on January 1st, 1492. But it's a notable gap, a feeling like missing bones and teeth. Y'all didn't come from nowhere, and neither did these systems. I would have loved to trace those roots much better.
That said? Reading a chapter about how people in each of these systems know who has power to make or break their lives (push out their parole date, withhold their letter of rec, kick them off food stamps, divert them out of the NBA track) and thus, get extra compliant as a precaution? That the reason for these systems is to generate compliance and extract maximum labour for minimum outlay? As someone who works in the arts? Was bluntly chilling.
I know this culture. I saw it coming up, where people would enforce weird try-hard rules on each other; it's the culture of competitive wordcount and never saying anything bad about editors and not "being difficult". It's the culture convinced editors keep enthusiastic blacklists. I had full-on flashbacks reading this: the ways early-career writers dig elbows into each other to be more compliant, pile onto each other, make examples of each other, say in those syrupy-smug ways that doing X will void you out of this industry. When -- the weirdest thing is -- there was and is no evidence it matters, no structure of authority that can enforce it, and no rules. The biggest assholes in existence keep getting publishing contracts; people most of the industry hates. There is literally nothing you can do to be unpublishable.
Genre writers apparently build and enforce an industry culture of coercion and boundarylessness, comparable to workfare or exploitative grad school labs, for themselves, toward an empty throne. They're doing it to themselves, for nobody. And the horror of that didn't leave my body for a good few days.
things to read
Preorders are still up for Canthius #11, which includes my "white squirrel season again": a poem about being a Toronto dirtbag in your heart.
It's a little farther out, but I'm told the CAROUSEL reviewer residencies will be announced shortly, and that'll bring the roster of this year's reviewers and what we're going to bring you. In advance: My month is May. :)
***
February's going to be thick with stuff: some travel, a few major deadlines, baseball (!), and inevitably probably at least three protests considering the way it's going. I'll try to throw some knitting in for variety. :p
See you next month!
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