twenty-eight: that yearned desperately to affirm the world rather than negate it
This from Hayao Miyazaki, who is not formally, I found out today, a Living National Treasure, except for how he is. In the quote he's talking about sneaking out of a high school class to see Japan's first feature-length colour animated film, and it reaches for him, and -- he reaches back. (and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes, you know the drill.)
The world has been -- I've no polite way to say it -- impeccably stupid lately. I mean, not even an interesting kind of stupid; it's all the same petty mistakes with new branding and better distro. I'm not sure anyone should be made to watch genocides in real-time through your screen next to the cat pics.
As we drift through what should be a lockdown and isn't (100,000 cases in the province daily as of this writing) I'm taking a little solace in wandering the wide walls in my head. There's Wittgenstein and garden planning and sitting up all night talking about queer theory and ingenuity in prisons and social-institutional memory. I'm thinking about poetry translation and how good my French needs to get to do some. I'm thinking about installation art. I want to be land-sized. In my head, I bend the walls; nothing is rigid, even time.
things finished
First on the list this month: my University of Toronto poetry class. It ended with a portfolio of ten pieces, some of which aren't quite what I wanted, some of which were intensely challenging to build and revise. So, formal poetry, about that. Complicated! It's the balance of saying the thing you want to say while being -- supported and not hamstrung by the form.
Some of those pieces will be very good if I sit with them for a week solid and think about every word from all possible angles. I'm not sure good poetry's a thing I can produce at the rate of one piece a week, but y'know, one can lay good foundations and then build on 'em.
I also gave that guest talk to a first-year class at Framingham State University, which -- yes, I was right -- was not an open event. Undergrads are great. Simultaneous to that, it feels like a huge challenge right now to tell them things about the future -- notably that there are things we know to work, things we know to not, that this is how to get a future, etc. -- in a way that wasn't major fraud. Like, at this point one must live in the humility of what we all don't know. But we talked a lot of process and had a mutual good time.
things begun
The night temperature's reliably above freezing right now, so even though it's a month before canonical last frost, we got to work on the garden over Easter Weekend. We're trying to use the least complicated tools at hand for this year, and -- it turns out that a cardboard box is a perfectly fine garden container? I'd been worried about moisture on the bottoms, but it's all good? The liquor store sends you these excellent little bottle dividers that are the perfect solution for carrots and beets? I feel like I just hacked the planet?
Here is the tiniest young arugula. We'll bring it in if there's frost tonight.
I've also started sprouting mung beans at home, because store bean sprouts are expensive and watery, they go bad instantly in the bag, and the Seedy Saturday webinar about home sprouting was simple enough. Readers? This works. I rinse the little beans twice a day and set them in a cool dark place, and behold, in five days they are alive and have a flavour. This household is now fully outfitted for banchan.
things still making passage
The green alpaca sweater is trundling along. Sweaters take time! You have to knit a whole body and then two whole-ass sleeves it turns out. We'll photograph that when I get at least to the neckline?
things read
This month I finally cracked into Hermann Hesse -- Steppenwolf -- as part of the 1920s fiction reading programme, now stretching to Berlin. It's hitting the renewed theme of everyone has always known everything; there's a line early on about how Harry, like all people, wants to be loved for his whole self, and when people see one half or the other, the kind they don't like, they recoil. Things are being thrashed toward on Twitter nightly that have been set down for over a century; probably more. They were planting trees for us to eat from; they saw what we saw. It makes sense for us to, y'know, check if the tree is there.
Anyways, Hesse is a bit of a crank and I think he knows and embraces that shit, and is at peace with his crankiness, and yet and still has important things to say about living with your multivariate self in messed-up times when you know the wind's largely against you.
(Every time I think thoughts about this -- and the project it's shaping into -- my brain rings like a wineglass.)
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India was a fairly quick read (hat tip Maya for the recommendation): both quite keenly pointed about how colonialism screws every single person it touches, and an interesting peek into an idea of India that's basically gone; the thing that was dying in Merchant/Ivory's Shakespeare Wallah. It's interesting: there are dynamics to baked-in, systemic class-stratified racism that I think Americans think they invented. Document says: they didn't. Different setting, same reflexes.
I also finally read Don DeLillo's White Noise (what can I say; the guys who kept pushing it on everyone in undergrad were not a good recommendation for the book itself). God, that is a masterful book: in the choice of language, in the straight-faced line between intense intimacy and distanced surrealism, in slow-building the atmosphere he wants until it can be turned, and the question he wants can emerge: what even the fuck do we do with the pervasive terror of death? It felt relevant, let's say? And for some reason, I hadn't expected this book to be so loving. It's shot through with this almost awestruck love of other people. It never has to say it; it just does it. (Note to self: goal.)
Also interesting that things that are being said now about social media -- that it's a particular destroyer of our society -- were being said then and in volume about television. The problem's probably deeper. Also, we've been living it for a lot longer than one would think.
Finally: Susanna Clarke's Piranesi startlingly lived up to the (two-year-old) hype. What a lovely, still, deep, perfect book. I'm really appreciating things lately that are soft, emotionally speaking. Where the texture of the words doesn't leave marks on your face. It's such a soft book, and a subtle one.
things to read (and upcoming readings)
New poem "Breaking Horses" is in this issue of Canadian literary journal Grain. This is the Georgia O'Keeffe poem, the one about pictures and people changing each other. I haven't read any of the other contributors, so this'll be a chance for some new writers over here. I got some very pretty copies the other week. Here, look, they're pretty.
I'm also going to be reading at Strong Women Strange Worlds on May 6th at noon EST. It's six authors, eight minutes each, and I'm going to be reading from An Inheritance of Ashes, so if you're here, it's probably older news to you. But I know a few of the other authors reading and they're fun, so if you're looking for a Friday lunchtime chillout, it could be a fun time.
The world has been -- I've no polite way to say it -- impeccably stupid lately. I mean, not even an interesting kind of stupid; it's all the same petty mistakes with new branding and better distro. I'm not sure anyone should be made to watch genocides in real-time through your screen next to the cat pics.
As we drift through what should be a lockdown and isn't (100,000 cases in the province daily as of this writing) I'm taking a little solace in wandering the wide walls in my head. There's Wittgenstein and garden planning and sitting up all night talking about queer theory and ingenuity in prisons and social-institutional memory. I'm thinking about poetry translation and how good my French needs to get to do some. I'm thinking about installation art. I want to be land-sized. In my head, I bend the walls; nothing is rigid, even time.
things finished
First on the list this month: my University of Toronto poetry class. It ended with a portfolio of ten pieces, some of which aren't quite what I wanted, some of which were intensely challenging to build and revise. So, formal poetry, about that. Complicated! It's the balance of saying the thing you want to say while being -- supported and not hamstrung by the form.
Some of those pieces will be very good if I sit with them for a week solid and think about every word from all possible angles. I'm not sure good poetry's a thing I can produce at the rate of one piece a week, but y'know, one can lay good foundations and then build on 'em.
I also gave that guest talk to a first-year class at Framingham State University, which -- yes, I was right -- was not an open event. Undergrads are great. Simultaneous to that, it feels like a huge challenge right now to tell them things about the future -- notably that there are things we know to work, things we know to not, that this is how to get a future, etc. -- in a way that wasn't major fraud. Like, at this point one must live in the humility of what we all don't know. But we talked a lot of process and had a mutual good time.
things begun
The night temperature's reliably above freezing right now, so even though it's a month before canonical last frost, we got to work on the garden over Easter Weekend. We're trying to use the least complicated tools at hand for this year, and -- it turns out that a cardboard box is a perfectly fine garden container? I'd been worried about moisture on the bottoms, but it's all good? The liquor store sends you these excellent little bottle dividers that are the perfect solution for carrots and beets? I feel like I just hacked the planet?
Here is the tiniest young arugula. We'll bring it in if there's frost tonight.
I've also started sprouting mung beans at home, because store bean sprouts are expensive and watery, they go bad instantly in the bag, and the Seedy Saturday webinar about home sprouting was simple enough. Readers? This works. I rinse the little beans twice a day and set them in a cool dark place, and behold, in five days they are alive and have a flavour. This household is now fully outfitted for banchan.
things still making passage
The green alpaca sweater is trundling along. Sweaters take time! You have to knit a whole body and then two whole-ass sleeves it turns out. We'll photograph that when I get at least to the neckline?
things read
This month I finally cracked into Hermann Hesse -- Steppenwolf -- as part of the 1920s fiction reading programme, now stretching to Berlin. It's hitting the renewed theme of everyone has always known everything; there's a line early on about how Harry, like all people, wants to be loved for his whole self, and when people see one half or the other, the kind they don't like, they recoil. Things are being thrashed toward on Twitter nightly that have been set down for over a century; probably more. They were planting trees for us to eat from; they saw what we saw. It makes sense for us to, y'know, check if the tree is there.
Anyways, Hesse is a bit of a crank and I think he knows and embraces that shit, and is at peace with his crankiness, and yet and still has important things to say about living with your multivariate self in messed-up times when you know the wind's largely against you.
(Every time I think thoughts about this -- and the project it's shaping into -- my brain rings like a wineglass.)
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India was a fairly quick read (hat tip Maya for the recommendation): both quite keenly pointed about how colonialism screws every single person it touches, and an interesting peek into an idea of India that's basically gone; the thing that was dying in Merchant/Ivory's Shakespeare Wallah. It's interesting: there are dynamics to baked-in, systemic class-stratified racism that I think Americans think they invented. Document says: they didn't. Different setting, same reflexes.
I also finally read Don DeLillo's White Noise (what can I say; the guys who kept pushing it on everyone in undergrad were not a good recommendation for the book itself). God, that is a masterful book: in the choice of language, in the straight-faced line between intense intimacy and distanced surrealism, in slow-building the atmosphere he wants until it can be turned, and the question he wants can emerge: what even the fuck do we do with the pervasive terror of death? It felt relevant, let's say? And for some reason, I hadn't expected this book to be so loving. It's shot through with this almost awestruck love of other people. It never has to say it; it just does it. (Note to self: goal.)
Also interesting that things that are being said now about social media -- that it's a particular destroyer of our society -- were being said then and in volume about television. The problem's probably deeper. Also, we've been living it for a lot longer than one would think.
Finally: Susanna Clarke's Piranesi startlingly lived up to the (two-year-old) hype. What a lovely, still, deep, perfect book. I'm really appreciating things lately that are soft, emotionally speaking. Where the texture of the words doesn't leave marks on your face. It's such a soft book, and a subtle one.
things to read (and upcoming readings)
New poem "Breaking Horses" is in this issue of Canadian literary journal Grain. This is the Georgia O'Keeffe poem, the one about pictures and people changing each other. I haven't read any of the other contributors, so this'll be a chance for some new writers over here. I got some very pretty copies the other week. Here, look, they're pretty.
I'm also going to be reading at Strong Women Strange Worlds on May 6th at noon EST. It's six authors, eight minutes each, and I'm going to be reading from An Inheritance of Ashes, so if you're here, it's probably older news to you. But I know a few of the other authors reading and they're fun, so if you're looking for a Friday lunchtime chillout, it could be a fun time.
***
More news upcoming in the next few months: a few things are sliding together rapidly (fingers crossed?). And until then: see you in a month.
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