twenty-three: then a ploughman said, Speak to us of Work.
Good afternoon from the last great skybound outpost of something-or-other, where we have been beset by it: freelance work, housework, creative work, logistical work, sliding basically into our faces like one of those gravel-pouring machines hell-bent on filling a pit. September is always the heaviest month for this: everyone else comes back to the office and decides, hey, we should do some things and then oh no, my inbox.
The stiff and palpable silence that always comes from here in September is the noise of me trying to dig out.
werk werk werk
For Labour Day (no, seriously), I watched 9to5: The Story of a Movement on Netflix, because watching the labour movement do solidarity things always adds value to our day. It's a tidy little summary of movement-building and political context and timing and diffusion, and one of the first I've personally seen to take a long view to that whole question instead of a victory/failure perspective.
The other interesting thing was the invisibility-to-me -- we don't assume what I haven't discovered wasn't there -- of this entire history. Of course, I know about the Dolly Parton song and the movie. But they sit there in my consciousness like an artifact, and what's been stripped away is the context: all this work that thousands of people did to build a movement with immediate, ground-level impacts.
It had me thinking that maybe that's some of what people are after when they try to build the artifact first -- the book, the movie, the anthem, the worldbuilding, the Elvish language, the lore -- without actually building the real context, the movement. As if you can art that thing, movement and impacts, into being. You can't. You can work it into being, and organize it, but that mindset felt familiar in the way that people campaigning for awards to retroactively make their story good feels: as if by creating the degree, you could conjure the process of learning.
This seemed weirdly and circularly like a fitting place to land it: thinking about how the value is in the work.
That said, the other thing I did that week was order a half-bushel of peaches. One of the big local farmer's markets -- the one that was our local when we lived in the west end -- figured out a delivery system sometime last year, and getting large heaps of local fruit just dropped at your door is wild and intoxicating and ridiculous and once you know it can happen, it must happen.
So I got them on the Thursday, and then spent the whole weekend -- literally, Friday afternoon to Sunday night -- pitting, cooking, infusing, canning, and cleaning, with a four-game series against the Orioles and a handful of Netflix documentaries on in the background.
Results!
The stiff and palpable silence that always comes from here in September is the noise of me trying to dig out.
werk werk werk
For Labour Day (no, seriously), I watched 9to5: The Story of a Movement on Netflix, because watching the labour movement do solidarity things always adds value to our day. It's a tidy little summary of movement-building and political context and timing and diffusion, and one of the first I've personally seen to take a long view to that whole question instead of a victory/failure perspective.
The other interesting thing was the invisibility-to-me -- we don't assume what I haven't discovered wasn't there -- of this entire history. Of course, I know about the Dolly Parton song and the movie. But they sit there in my consciousness like an artifact, and what's been stripped away is the context: all this work that thousands of people did to build a movement with immediate, ground-level impacts.
It had me thinking that maybe that's some of what people are after when they try to build the artifact first -- the book, the movie, the anthem, the worldbuilding, the Elvish language, the lore -- without actually building the real context, the movement. As if you can art that thing, movement and impacts, into being. You can't. You can work it into being, and organize it, but that mindset felt familiar in the way that people campaigning for awards to retroactively make their story good feels: as if by creating the degree, you could conjure the process of learning.
This seemed weirdly and circularly like a fitting place to land it: thinking about how the value is in the work.
That said, the other thing I did that week was order a half-bushel of peaches. One of the big local farmer's markets -- the one that was our local when we lived in the west end -- figured out a delivery system sometime last year, and getting large heaps of local fruit just dropped at your door is wild and intoxicating and ridiculous and once you know it can happen, it must happen.
So I got them on the Thursday, and then spent the whole weekend -- literally, Friday afternoon to Sunday night -- pitting, cooking, infusing, canning, and cleaning, with a four-game series against the Orioles and a handful of Netflix documentaries on in the background.
Results!
- Salted brown sugar peach jam
- Peach-sriracha jam
- Oven-roasted peach-lemon butter
- Plum-star anise jam (these came in our fruit box on the Saturday; wrong place, wrong time, tiny plums)
- Smoky Russian peach tea jam
- Peach barbeque sauce
Some of the hoard!
Because -- canning is work. Not even past-work, the kind of work that millions of people get paid not even close to enough per hour to do; work that's been rendered less visible in the product? (Tangent: I bet that's why we, the stereotypical millennials, most stereotypically love ourselves a hand-labeled mason jar. Behold the visibility and humanization of the work. We are laying bare that offering of labour.) But it's fun work. I am not alienated from the brush of peach fuzz against my hand. I chop, I sweat, I season, I have a result. When I hand it to someone, they know all the things that went into it.
things read
It's been heavy with review books this month, but from the fun books: Micaiah Johnson's The Space Between Worlds was recommended from a few quarters, and I'm recommending it on for the literary genre readers. It's smart, thoughtful stuff with codeswitching and parallel worlds and the ways we hold ourselves rigid that wasn't heavyhanded; that was never quite where I expected it to go and always far more satisfying.
Most of my downtime reading this month was sunk into Dan Jones's 600-page history of the Plantagenets, because it's been hanging around this house far too long. It's popular history, and an overview, but did open a sidewise window into just how much people are always being people (again, always, usually). The intense litigousness and focus on image management that goes into every shift of kingship in the 12th and 13th centuries was not unfamiliar -- and completely at odds with Fantasy Middle Ages -- which made me start thinking about where Fantasy Middle Ages comes from, and why.
things to read
New poem "Rows of Houses" will be live this week in the sixth issue of The Deadlands. It is about inside and outside and ghosts.
Via editor Ellen Datlow, her Best Horror of the Year anthologies from Night Shade Books are on sale as a time-limited bundle, until about October 27. That includes yours truly's short story "Stay" in Best Horror of the Year 4, which has kitchen parties, wendigos, and ethics in wintertime.
On the day job front, if you're into some of how people are trying to construct the good or at least neutral robot future instead of the evil one, I profiled custom house design company Architectural Designs. It took weeks of interviews and 10k words in notes, so I'm rather proud of it.
things read
It's been heavy with review books this month, but from the fun books: Micaiah Johnson's The Space Between Worlds was recommended from a few quarters, and I'm recommending it on for the literary genre readers. It's smart, thoughtful stuff with codeswitching and parallel worlds and the ways we hold ourselves rigid that wasn't heavyhanded; that was never quite where I expected it to go and always far more satisfying.
Most of my downtime reading this month was sunk into Dan Jones's 600-page history of the Plantagenets, because it's been hanging around this house far too long. It's popular history, and an overview, but did open a sidewise window into just how much people are always being people (again, always, usually). The intense litigousness and focus on image management that goes into every shift of kingship in the 12th and 13th centuries was not unfamiliar -- and completely at odds with Fantasy Middle Ages -- which made me start thinking about where Fantasy Middle Ages comes from, and why.
things to read
New poem "Rows of Houses" will be live this week in the sixth issue of The Deadlands. It is about inside and outside and ghosts.
Via editor Ellen Datlow, her Best Horror of the Year anthologies from Night Shade Books are on sale as a time-limited bundle, until about October 27. That includes yours truly's short story "Stay" in Best Horror of the Year 4, which has kitchen parties, wendigos, and ethics in wintertime.
On the day job front, if you're into some of how people are trying to construct the good or at least neutral robot future instead of the evil one, I profiled custom house design company Architectural Designs. It took weeks of interviews and 10k words in notes, so I'm rather proud of it.
*
There are more events upcoming through the fall -- including a few university class visits -- so perhaps proof of life pictures? Perhaps.
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