twenty-one: on immunity
immunity report
Sorry: this letter is two weeks late. But the big news around here was that the household got our second vaccine shots the Friday before it was supposed to go out, and by newsletter day I was still feeling iffy enough to kick it down the road.
Considering I was prepared for medical disasters, it was surprisingly restful: takeout, one really bad night of pain, the first day spent just hurting everywhere, and the second watching Das Boot (3 hr 25 min, good for lying in one place) and eating ice cream, which is definitely a combination.
The feeling of being in the full immunity window is--complicated and exquisite. I don't feel flinchy anymore about taking my mask off outside to drink coffee in the sun. I went into a supermarket in person yesterday for the first time in 16 months. The cashier was annoyed at me for not doing the lineup system right, and I apologized: Sorry. It's been a while.
The other set of immunities this month come from the decision to put my Twitter on ice, probably permanently. There was a thing I said years ago to someone privately, when on the cusp of leaving a job: I don't like the person I am in this space. While I like to think it hasn't shown as hard in my overt behaviour because hey, what's a text medium good for but self-control, I haven't liked the person I am in the universe of fast reaction and binary good-bad takes for a very, very long while: more reactive, less able to be curious, less focused, more hurt, so very much more overwhelmed. So much more despairing about people's instincts and capacities. When you build entire years-long conversations on narrow channels of data starvation, you start finding yourself assuming in all kinds of little places that people are only what they've presented, and that's poison. (Side note: You can tell, as a fiction reviewer, which authors have been on the internet too long. They're writing propaganda now, and don't even know it.)
Disentangling it from the rest of my worlds has been a lot of work; social media's like emotional kudzu. But the deed is pretty much done at this point, and a little over a month in, my head's feeling a lot clearer for it. I can feel my own thoughts--soft, indistinct things sleek like whales and not inclined to be defined--slipping back into the habitat. I go outside and have perfectly pleasant little interactions (you can tell the streets of Toronto are happy to be filling up again; the quality of the small talk is exquisite), and that is my world for the day. I'm thinking about the ways we used to inhabit space--thousand-person pillow fights, a weekly game of downtown tag, plant identification walks, house shows, stuff--and what changed, and how to give that sense of play more air and light in a way that doesn't negate everything that's come between us. I want to rebuild movements of physical space.
But I'm sitting closely and watching myself for the person I'd more often like to be: more immune to certain kinds of snap judgments, insecurities, scarcities of nuance and compassion, glibnesses, bullshittings, unforced errors. Not like I'm never going to get sick from them; like, they're my errors. But immune enough that when I do, that shit won't be fatal. We'll all have a chance to recover.
tiny agriculture
Despite some very rainy days, cool weather, and one instance of hail (and then we dove out onto the balcony at admittedly minor personal risk to rescue the tomatoes), the garden is asserting itself finally this month. We have purple peas! We have nasturtiums! We have tiny little beans and big fat arugula!
Behold, the miniature agriculture:
The next goal: looking into balcony compost systems. We have been getting beautiful blue rounded duck eggs from the farmers' market, and they're the kind of beautiful that makes you want to see them through to soil.
things read
I started this month by finishing Clifford Jackman's The Braver Thing, which is about pirates in a very Moby Dick technical way, and really about systems of government and their failure and what the point of all this noise might be. This is also too high-concept a way to describe this book. There are pirates. Things go poorly for various reasons (things going badly at sea: a summer theme), mostly when people get caught up in the machinery and not the honesty. It's oddly engrossing for something so grounded in allegory and technicality; he's a very good writer, I think, just by virtue of the fact that he took this idea and made it work.
Dean Spade's Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next) was less of a success here. It's a slim little instruction manual for what, why, and how; padded significantly with a particular ideological viewpoint that I think can bluntly be walked past. There are some significant gaps in its understanding of human dynamics (ie, hierarchical structures aren't caused by "charismatic leaders"; you can find yourself in a hierarchy when too many of the people in the room are in the enthusiastic habit of people-pleasing, as per another rather disturbing read I had this month, Lane Moore's essay collection/memoir How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't). There is only so much I'm interested in hearing about "the elites" in a class about running better meetings, and I have been firmly in a place, for a while now, that prioritizes what we do next over who we blame.
Yes, I am annoyed at this one. It replicates a rather cardinal sin, in my view: making someone read their Bible before they can have their breakfast. I didn't need a primer on who Spade doesn't like, just the strategies, thanks.
On the third hand, stronger research reading came out of Christian Picciolini's Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism, which does the slightly odd and noticeable thing of describing the recruitment mechanics and rhetorical traps of American white supremacy to a tee--but also while replicating them against it? I didn't not notice the way the story that anchors this one (built as a collection of illustrative case studies of people entering and detaching from radicalization) was about a middle-aged South American immigrant catfishing a nice young white Republican girl. This is not a purity test; it's a recognition of social narrative structures and how hard they are to shake.
Finally, I'm still gleefully plunging through Sayers in my downtime, a little in awe of the sentence-level work being done in Murder Must Advertise -- as well as how much marketing hasn't actually changed since 1933. I swallowed Gaudy Night in one weekend-long gulp, and I understand now why the general love for that book is so great, fierce, and enduring. I am fond of Wimsey as a character, but I feel Harriet in my bones and skin: her moods, her hesitations, her joys, and the way her intelligence does and doesn't save her from it all. I love how absolutely pissed off she gets whenever someone asks her about publishing--or, really, anything she truly cares about. I love how it telegraphs with that little line about a book not about a crime but about people, and her struggles with putting psychological realism in, exactly what it's meant to be after. It was such a book.
things to read
(This is a very full category this month. They do travel in herds.)
"The Instructions" is officially loosed upon the world at Neon Literary Magazine.
"The Mysteries", a story about empire and caregiving and making good semiotic choices, is in the new issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, fulfilling a little-but-fierce career-long ambition to write a story that fit there.
Reckoning 5 is also officially loosed upon the world in print!
That review of Jen Sookfong Lee's The Shadow List is live at CAROUSEL Magazine for the delectation.
I had the distinct privilege of doing a Q&A with novelist Aliya Whiteley for Publishers Weekly last month. It's timed to coincide with her collection From the Neck Up, which is one of the most magnificent things I have read in the past year: complex and nuanced and dryly funny and compassionate and strangely, softly sane about ecological disaster and the failure of bodies. If you are the Reckoning type of reader, you will appreciate this.
I was a huge fan of her novella The Beauty (gorgeous, grotesque, some of the weirdest-ass shit I have ever seen and I'm here for it), and some of the strengths carry over. But beyond that: this book is an achievement, and after looking at that interview, please don't sleep on it. Pretend I'm still bookselling, and that I'm throwing this one (in a spirit of lovingkindness and compassion) at your head.
Sorry: this letter is two weeks late. But the big news around here was that the household got our second vaccine shots the Friday before it was supposed to go out, and by newsletter day I was still feeling iffy enough to kick it down the road.
Considering I was prepared for medical disasters, it was surprisingly restful: takeout, one really bad night of pain, the first day spent just hurting everywhere, and the second watching Das Boot (3 hr 25 min, good for lying in one place) and eating ice cream, which is definitely a combination.
The feeling of being in the full immunity window is--complicated and exquisite. I don't feel flinchy anymore about taking my mask off outside to drink coffee in the sun. I went into a supermarket in person yesterday for the first time in 16 months. The cashier was annoyed at me for not doing the lineup system right, and I apologized: Sorry. It's been a while.
The other set of immunities this month come from the decision to put my Twitter on ice, probably permanently. There was a thing I said years ago to someone privately, when on the cusp of leaving a job: I don't like the person I am in this space. While I like to think it hasn't shown as hard in my overt behaviour because hey, what's a text medium good for but self-control, I haven't liked the person I am in the universe of fast reaction and binary good-bad takes for a very, very long while: more reactive, less able to be curious, less focused, more hurt, so very much more overwhelmed. So much more despairing about people's instincts and capacities. When you build entire years-long conversations on narrow channels of data starvation, you start finding yourself assuming in all kinds of little places that people are only what they've presented, and that's poison. (Side note: You can tell, as a fiction reviewer, which authors have been on the internet too long. They're writing propaganda now, and don't even know it.)
Disentangling it from the rest of my worlds has been a lot of work; social media's like emotional kudzu. But the deed is pretty much done at this point, and a little over a month in, my head's feeling a lot clearer for it. I can feel my own thoughts--soft, indistinct things sleek like whales and not inclined to be defined--slipping back into the habitat. I go outside and have perfectly pleasant little interactions (you can tell the streets of Toronto are happy to be filling up again; the quality of the small talk is exquisite), and that is my world for the day. I'm thinking about the ways we used to inhabit space--thousand-person pillow fights, a weekly game of downtown tag, plant identification walks, house shows, stuff--and what changed, and how to give that sense of play more air and light in a way that doesn't negate everything that's come between us. I want to rebuild movements of physical space.
But I'm sitting closely and watching myself for the person I'd more often like to be: more immune to certain kinds of snap judgments, insecurities, scarcities of nuance and compassion, glibnesses, bullshittings, unforced errors. Not like I'm never going to get sick from them; like, they're my errors. But immune enough that when I do, that shit won't be fatal. We'll all have a chance to recover.
tiny agriculture
Despite some very rainy days, cool weather, and one instance of hail (and then we dove out onto the balcony at admittedly minor personal risk to rescue the tomatoes), the garden is asserting itself finally this month. We have purple peas! We have nasturtiums! We have tiny little beans and big fat arugula!
Behold, the miniature agriculture:
The next goal: looking into balcony compost systems. We have been getting beautiful blue rounded duck eggs from the farmers' market, and they're the kind of beautiful that makes you want to see them through to soil.
things read
I started this month by finishing Clifford Jackman's The Braver Thing, which is about pirates in a very Moby Dick technical way, and really about systems of government and their failure and what the point of all this noise might be. This is also too high-concept a way to describe this book. There are pirates. Things go poorly for various reasons (things going badly at sea: a summer theme), mostly when people get caught up in the machinery and not the honesty. It's oddly engrossing for something so grounded in allegory and technicality; he's a very good writer, I think, just by virtue of the fact that he took this idea and made it work.
Dean Spade's Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next) was less of a success here. It's a slim little instruction manual for what, why, and how; padded significantly with a particular ideological viewpoint that I think can bluntly be walked past. There are some significant gaps in its understanding of human dynamics (ie, hierarchical structures aren't caused by "charismatic leaders"; you can find yourself in a hierarchy when too many of the people in the room are in the enthusiastic habit of people-pleasing, as per another rather disturbing read I had this month, Lane Moore's essay collection/memoir How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't). There is only so much I'm interested in hearing about "the elites" in a class about running better meetings, and I have been firmly in a place, for a while now, that prioritizes what we do next over who we blame.
Yes, I am annoyed at this one. It replicates a rather cardinal sin, in my view: making someone read their Bible before they can have their breakfast. I didn't need a primer on who Spade doesn't like, just the strategies, thanks.
On the third hand, stronger research reading came out of Christian Picciolini's Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism, which does the slightly odd and noticeable thing of describing the recruitment mechanics and rhetorical traps of American white supremacy to a tee--but also while replicating them against it? I didn't not notice the way the story that anchors this one (built as a collection of illustrative case studies of people entering and detaching from radicalization) was about a middle-aged South American immigrant catfishing a nice young white Republican girl. This is not a purity test; it's a recognition of social narrative structures and how hard they are to shake.
Finally, I'm still gleefully plunging through Sayers in my downtime, a little in awe of the sentence-level work being done in Murder Must Advertise -- as well as how much marketing hasn't actually changed since 1933. I swallowed Gaudy Night in one weekend-long gulp, and I understand now why the general love for that book is so great, fierce, and enduring. I am fond of Wimsey as a character, but I feel Harriet in my bones and skin: her moods, her hesitations, her joys, and the way her intelligence does and doesn't save her from it all. I love how absolutely pissed off she gets whenever someone asks her about publishing--or, really, anything she truly cares about. I love how it telegraphs with that little line about a book not about a crime but about people, and her struggles with putting psychological realism in, exactly what it's meant to be after. It was such a book.
things to read
(This is a very full category this month. They do travel in herds.)
"The Instructions" is officially loosed upon the world at Neon Literary Magazine.
"The Mysteries", a story about empire and caregiving and making good semiotic choices, is in the new issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, fulfilling a little-but-fierce career-long ambition to write a story that fit there.
Reckoning 5 is also officially loosed upon the world in print!
That review of Jen Sookfong Lee's The Shadow List is live at CAROUSEL Magazine for the delectation.
I had the distinct privilege of doing a Q&A with novelist Aliya Whiteley for Publishers Weekly last month. It's timed to coincide with her collection From the Neck Up, which is one of the most magnificent things I have read in the past year: complex and nuanced and dryly funny and compassionate and strangely, softly sane about ecological disaster and the failure of bodies. If you are the Reckoning type of reader, you will appreciate this.
I was a huge fan of her novella The Beauty (gorgeous, grotesque, some of the weirdest-ass shit I have ever seen and I'm here for it), and some of the strengths carry over. But beyond that: this book is an achievement, and after looking at that interview, please don't sleep on it. Pretend I'm still bookselling, and that I'm throwing this one (in a spirit of lovingkindness and compassion) at your head.
*
Books-heavy, but it's a month where I've been exquisitely up in my head -- hopefully with some communicable results into the fall as those immunities gather.
Have a good midsummer, and stay safe.
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