thirty: inaction is a weapon of mass destruction

This edition's title brought to you by friend to all community organizers Faithless, who had his head sorted and this whole beat covered in 2004. Everything you need to know for modern social action is in there, including the bit where you're gonna spend too much time passionately talking to a brick wall. (In seriousness, I love this song, and the video. Artbot declares that it is art.)

It's been a long and extremely subdued summer. There are about half a dozen things -- international and hyperlocal -- that I could reasonably say "Well, [X] hit me hard," and the problem is? They all did. Even when they're not developments that personally impact my body, they impact people I care about; they impact my (much-needed) ability to be around thoughtful, competent adults. There is an ungodly shock wave to suffering. It almost takes out more than the blast.

In the cracks between, I've been picking at what I guess we'd call emotional professional development: a lot of the state of the world won't be changing anytime soon, so what do I do with it? So to that end: a few workshops. One on burnout for artists, in the spirit of being real about the situation on the ground, and one virtual drop-in group at one of the local artists' centres. In the second, we were asked to introduce ourselves with our discipline, and someone said they'd been sick, and right now, their discipline is their body. It's one of those things I'm tucking into my pocket to keep, because--yeah, that's a way to think about the last year.

So yes: right now, one of my disciplines is my body. Sleep, stress, ergonomics. I splashed out on a full setup for the desk this summer -- mouse, keyboard, finally an ergonomic chair -- and can't think why I didn't do it sooner. It's an intense help.

(Incidentally, I started wondering when discipline started to mean punishment, and not the structural framework of acquiring a kind of knowledge -- knowledge's exoskeleton -- and apparently it's around 1300. A bad year! Maybe we shouldn't keep worldviews from plague-and-subjugation centuries run by guys who named their catapults War Wolf. It's like the depression lies of semantic evolution, and I think there's great value in curation.)

But the other discipline might be, right now, the world around me.

I don't need good people / to pray and wait / for the Lord to / make it all straight

I said something offhand on Facebook earlier this summer about thinking of a livable city as an art project; approaching it as such. And that's been working itself through. This summer in organizing has being busy; is being busy. We have a municipal election coming up in October with massive, mundane stakes, which are the hardest kind, in some sense? Make a dent in who runs this city or things go on this way, and going on this way is evicted people starving on my block in weeklong 35 C heat warnings. It's private security in public parks; it's everything increasingly broken. It's a set of priorities I can't refute and sleep at night, y'know?

I have occasionally gotten into fights over this stuff. Especially when people say "making art is my activism!" and it's the same art they would've made anyways, wartime, poortime, richtime, peacetime. Yes, there is and should be nuance in this question; the intersections between introspective/creative work and socially-oriented/community work aren't even a spectrum, they're a four-dimensional field. Frequently the best thing we can do, long-term, for the people around us is actively heal ourselves. All this is true.

But I usually can't help but personally landing in the same place: Doing what we enjoy or what scratches a psychological itch can be good for us, but that doesn't make it activism? It can be another good and important thing, but -- to me, for activism to be in the equation, other people need to be there too: real people, their real needs today. There has to be someone in receipt on the other end, not just the idea of People Who Needed What We Need. That person may exist! They may not. We're not sure. But there are real people in our real communities who need real things now, and they can articulate that to us; we don't need to construct and model them and check if they're Like Us, just help. As artists, as people: we have to live at least a little bit in the world, even if the world hurts.

This actually got summed up pretty elegantly in a Baffler article by Lyta Gold on how the Facebook metaverse's particular brand of desexualized weird, of all things.

 

So. What she said.

Which all means? More thinking's been going into urban orchard partnerships and how to slip what I've spent three years learning about transformative justice and social repair into everyday spaces. More time than usual has been going into things like talking up good Council candidates and doing data entry scullion work in the metaphorical kitchens of organizations like Progress Toronto, which'll probably continue through election day in October. It's basic, dry work -- names in spreadsheet -- but it frees up staff time to chase forward planning/volunteer activation, and there's a distinct pleasure to parsing through petition names and addresses written by hand. You get to see all the people in your city, rich neighbourhoods and poor, who want the world you want. You see their handwriting, unmistakably real. You remember you're not alone in this.

things read

In between, a bit of light reading? I've been spending most of my time on a few Nancy Mitford novels -- Love in a Cold Climate, The Blessing, Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie -- which are currently filling the Light, But Smart need. She's terrifically funny, and at the same time makes me want to chuck everything respectable, everyday, and modern about my life into a very large bin and run off to Paris to do inadvisable stuff. On one hand: not so possible, since the Paris she's talking about doesn't exist anymore; it's a time, not a place. On the other: I think that tension's why they're so successful. It's the sweet spot things like Undercover Boss hit, where no matter what perspective (and prejudices) you're walking in with, there's something indulgent, something to look askance at, something to yearn for.

Christmas Pudding isn't much in and of itself -- it's an early novel, and it shows -- but Pigeon Pie is an early-onset WWII book, and while it's funny, it's suffused with this terrible sadness barely held in check. Almost like a smell of autumn; here is the life a rather frivolous (but not entirely stupid, come to think of it) upper-class woman is used to, and here is everyone's unspoken knowledge that it's never coming back. I don't exactly like how much that resonated.

things to read

For once: short fiction! "Sunday in the Park with Hank" is in the last issue of The Deadlands. It is a very short story about a girl and a WWI veteran and a ghost in Central Park on a sunny early-1920s afternoon, and it was written after reading far too much John Crowley and getting that music into my head. A few of this newsletter's readership helped with feedback on early drafts, so: thank you.

Or if you'd rather be read to: the reading I did with Strong Women Strange Worlds back in May has been uploaded to their YouTube channel and is available now. For people who've been here a while: it's just an excerpt from Ashes and not my best hair day, but if that's new to you? It's there.

In terms of future reading: a poem, "fertile week", will appear in Reckoning's special reproductive justice issue. It's about, among other things, gardens, pre-Code horror movies, and intense cognitive dissonance. I think release date is October.

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Here's hoping everyone is safe and well and whole, and happy autumn.