thirty-four: the arc of momentum bends toward justice

So, earlier this month I said I owed you a brief one? Now the holidays have hit, and I owe you a long one.

I preemptively apologize for sending this on the day when literally every company I've ever spoken to is clogging my inbox like it's flood prevention week. One more thing! But I'm out of weekdays this, um, year.

in review

The few days before Christmas Eve are basically close of business around here, and I've put up the traditional year-end post, with this year's work in publishing. It's a good heap! Not the biggest heap, not the smallest. The award was nice.

I don't really have the distance yet to review any of the rest of the year. It feels a little like one disaster to the next, with no loss of enthusiasm, but I think that's because most of it isn't finished yet. I'll know in two years, or five, or ten, how I felt about all this? Because man, people were throwing insurrections and starting wars and stripping civil rights and walking right up to general strikes this year -- we were absent some big problems 365 days ago -- and each one of those things would take a minute to sink in. All of them together is silly. Living through big-H History is an activity for chumps.

that knitting problem

The sweater isn't finished yet. I hit the point where it was sleeves time, looked at it, and did an equally valid thing, which was to go putter around on a pair of herringbone socks until I could get myself interested in finishing the sweater. I'm not always good at matching yarn to pattern -- I've been knitting for years but as a hobbyist, and there's so much I don't know about it and plan to discover in my own time, on a non-production schedule, with a hobbyist's ease -- but this time it worked out: something textured and kind of Crimson Peak, which we like in our knit goods. This yarn's been in my stash since probably 2009, so finally knitting it instead of shuttling it from place to place, neglected, was the arc of justice etc.

Beware Crimson feet

These other socks are no such thing, because I bought this yarn on a Black Friday sale under the thinly veiled excuse of "but I need a Knitpicks order, my size 5 interchangeables broke and I don't have the right size cable for this sweater, and it's [insert ridiculous sum] to free shipping." There are gentle lies we tell ourselves to pad the pointy bits of the universe and they are best treated with grace, like the existential insulation they are. It made nice socks, though. The pattern's a bit hacky, but I like them. They will go well with my cute rose corduroy overalls.


There's something about the arc of momentum in a pair of socks; somewhere in the heel flap it stops being a slog and clicks faster like a climbing rollercoaster, and it's easier to keep going than it is to stop. Working the gusset of the first of these (and watching The Tale of the Princess Kaguya with a mug of cider, warm in bed), I started thinking about how that could be cross-applicable: where, with a book, an action, with a life, it gets easier to keep going than to stop. How you slow down again in the foot, but there's enough boost in that heel bit that you know the toe's coming, and can stick it out to the end. How one can generate those peaks and valleys, and stretch the momentum through.

I don't remember where it's from, but someone used to say six weeks made a habit. I wonder if it's chartable, where momentum generates; where we store it to expend. Conscious practice is a strange way to live. You can't stop seeing it in everything.

that writing problem

I found this during one of those long late-night YouTube trawls; you know, the ones where you fall in a small hole and just keep digging it to see what's underneath that. Apparently there's a recurring show in London called Letters Live, where major actors and performers read a selection of people's correspondence, from the mundane to the profound. They have a lot of it uploaded, and some of it's screamingly funny, and some humbling, and I'll recommend you the Henry Miller/Anais Nin being read by Clarke Peters and Miriam Margolyes because whoo boy, that is not something you see every day.

Anyways, it's called "a letter on work-life balance" from theatre director André Gregory to Richard Avedon, written when he was already gone, but there's more happening there: it's about how we metabolize a question, how we approach...well, everything. I've been thinking about it once a day or more ever since: "Artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are...doesn't the work on self inform the work?"

The older I get (oh god, she's one of those people now, who says the older I get, fetch the ice floe) the more I understand that people say things that are true in different ways than they're read. Half of the act of listening is sussing out which bit of what's been said is the true bit, and the applicable bit, and the truth is generally about five layers down and requires some context as prerequisites. Also it changes as you change: have fun storming the castle!

But a lot of our most accessible ways to read right now -- social media, thinkpieces, etc., takes -- are reading surfaces instead. Maybe most of where we get misled is reading surfaces. I mean, yes, you should spend the core of your time on your art -- but that's never meant cutting out everything else to plant yourself at the keyboard, austerity, withdrawal, self-coercion. Too literal; too much surface reading. It meant -- it always meant -- something more, finer, and deeper about where in your life you embed the lens.

I've spent most of this month drafting hard on the prison book; a little every day, even if it's a little, something every day. Spare words on other projects aren't being counted, even though they're happening (tangent: I'm finding it very worthwhile to have lots of boxes to fit thoughts into right now; it gets them clear of the workbench without loss or debris.) I've found it takes me a few weeks to get back into the reflexive habit of being with it daily. It takes a few weeks more to get into the headspace where I run my fingers through it, feel interconnected motion, where I remember my own competence at this work.

But in preparatory motions -- okay, really because I had a dream about me and balance and a bicycle, and it felt important, and subtly liberating, and when I thought in which of my narrative boxes does this belong? it turned out to be the novella -- I opened the novella one morning this past month. And the question of it, the question of futures built within precarity, which I'd found insoluble when I closed it last time around (a year ago? two years?) seems manageable now. I look at it and see daylight. And I think what's happened is I've lived my way to the answer. It had to be thought about with different tools than intellect and imagination; it had to be thought with time and the body. And -- there we have it: right tools, right job, better answer. I've been picking at this since 2015, this but how? and now there is a: well, first.

I mean, I understand why yes, the project took me so long because on the way I had to remake my entire model of cognition can read as, erm, a bit self-exculpatory. But -- I kind of did, and I suppose I did say all those years ago that I wasn't doing this anymore if I couldn't do it in a way that actually worked for me, and promptly set off to figure out how to make it work for me. Don't ask big questions if you don't want to dig for big answers, I guess, she said with a tiny sweatdrop? This ain't for the faint of heart?

that writing problem, pt. ii, the wrath of fiction

There's no things watched section here, or it would be huge (end of year is when I binge movies) but I wanted to especially shout out "Sr.", a documentary-ish/art film/thing by Robert Downey Jr. about his father, Robert Downey Sr., art film maker, countercultural creator, shitposter extraordinaire. This isn't strictly my thing, on the whole? I put it on because it looked basically kind and I had applesauce to make before four pounds of apples died on me, so I needed something to watch while stirring. But it's got a delicious sense of humour, and dropped a realization into my head about art (yes, ahhhht) while stirring/chopping/spicing.

So, for years, my pinned Tweet has been this -- and it'll stay this until that site sinks like an abandoned cargo ship:


It's from Porco Rosso. We keep it because Miyazaki is always right, but also: that's a creative practice in two sentences. And Robert Downey Sr. is definitely living that best life. His films are weird. They're also hilarious. They have a definite personality, and an eye for the gag, and don't care if there are loose ends or rough bits sticking out. It all looks like a pack of people having the most fun possible under the circumstances and on a five-dollar budget.

The juxtaposition of watching this on (yet another) afternoon when people for some reason were nitpicking at the exact conformation and density of the rules on how to do a writing, as if that ever got anyone anywhere, really, really struck me.

If I'm having a creative resolution for next year, it might end up being: increase the fucking thing. Be weird. I like weird! Weirdness is my strength. But I'm turning over in my hands the idea that weirdness is one of those central things that make us, well, human That give and communicate our selves? And that a lot more gentle weirdness is not a bad additive to the current situations, plural.

things read

Some of you might have noticed this section missing the past few months. I've had a hell of a time reading this fall: no focus, no desire. The drought broke second week of December, and I just about ate the library books sitting overdue on my shelf. Two notables:

Rachel Monroe's Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession was ostensibly novel research (crimes crimes crimes) but also just an interesting beast overall: a true-crime book trying to tackle why women are obsessed with true crime. As someone who gets into "crime funks," as Monroe calls them -- those weeks when you just binge murder stories until you make yourself sick, and then you're somehow satiated -- it was interesting to read an analysis of that: what archetypes we're accessing and a few stabs (heh) at why. In the true crime tradition, it's more of a loose anthology of case studies than a study, but it makes some pretty trenchant observations about gender, social violence, and just what people are getting out of this exercise. Accessible but more introspective than most treatments on this topic are, it's a quick read, well worth it.

Corey Mintz's The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants As We Knew Them, and What Comes After is also terrifically accessible. Mintz is a former line cook, the ex-restaurant critic for The Globe and Mail, and one of those people I'm about a degree of separation from, having floated in the same Toronto arts/journalism/activism circles for years but never actually met. He's a clear writer, if occasionally a little circular, and a great observer of industry dynamics. None of his analysis especially surprised me (yes, delivery apps are bad; yes, cooks and ag workers need to be better-paid) but the peeling back of the systems that created those conditions, that perpetuate them, that could be tinkered with, is incisive and built on a great sense of how parts and people interlock. It's a great explication of logics, and the third chapter, on restaurant reviewing, applies completely to the books industry.

things to read

'white squirrel season again' will be in the intersectional feminist journal Canthius sometime next week, as the crow flies.

***

Well. Another one down?

Happy New Year; I'll see you on the other side of the river.