sentences
martinesque
by manjula martin
so, a lot has happened. is happening. will do so.
in lieu of a long preachy thing about ... all the things, here are some sentences. (thanks to Ingrid Burrington for the inspiration.)
“In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound.” —Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
My buddy Colin’s excellent (and brief!) lists/missives are an excellent way to start every week.
“‘So my question is, What keeps us going, then, fear or hope?’
‘Scientifically speaking it’s rotational inertia,’ he said.
‘So hope is a kind of inertia? Fear, too?’ I said.
‘Oh mommy, you’re getting so muddle-headed.’”
—Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
I decided not to publish any personal essays or op-eds to accompany my paperback launch. (For those uninitiated in the weird labor practices of the publishing world, this is something authors often due as “promotion” to “get their name out there” and “build their platform” around the time their book is released.) I have done and done, and I am tired of this mortal promo coil, and so instead I sat down and asked myself what I really wanted to write, and I realized I actually just want to listen to brilliant people right now. I also realized I’m a little bit tired of talking about fire right now (sorry) but I am not tired of talking about flowers, so i talked with author Yiyun Li about her garden, loss, and the failures of nature metaphors.
“I always said, one and done.”
My buddy Tessa just won the fucking Pulitzer Prize for her graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, and I am so stoked for her and so entertained by watching the publishing industry struggle to understand the fact that she doesn’t intend to write another book. I have probably already told you to read her book and if you didn’t heed my advice, well… I told you so. Read it, dudes. It’s the only one!
“There was something in the way a verse letter could elevate the details of the day-to-day and render it sharp-edged and memorable that he cherished. It appealed to the part of him that wanted his own brand of intense precision to suffuse everything he touched.” —Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite
My attention span isn’t what it used to be, but every night in bed I read several sentences in this delightful biography of my longtime canon crush, John Donne, and then I have the most bonkers dreams.
“The Bay is back.”
And I have a new job.
"That scene in the film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View where George Emerson climbs into an olive tree and shouts Beauty! into the Italian countryside.” —Why I Write: 17 Reasons
Alta magazine’s California Book Club chose my book as its June pick. Tonight (yes, tonight, in like … a couple hours?) I’ll be talking with literary polymath/workaholic John Freeman and impending memoirist Susan Orlean (!) about it. Free, online.
“Art, she’d come to find, served no purpose in a time like this.” —Susanna Kwan, Awake in the Floating City
Kwan’s first novel, which is excellent and sneakily stunning, came out the same day as my paperback. And tomorrow (Wednesday!) we’ll be in conversation in Oakland at the Womb House Books, talking about fire and water and making art during climate chaos. Will I be wearing my ELENA FERRANTE baseball cap? Come find out.
“THWART! UPEND! SABATOGE! SURVIVE!”
If you are able, please support this new publication I’m involved in and this new media collective I’m not involved in but wholeheartedly endorse.
“Independence, which I had up til then held in high regard, even revered it, was now to me a curse, the devil himself. It is dependence that a sane mind should seek. To depend on others and be in turn dependable.” Hisham Matar, My Friends
The morning after the Los Angeles fires began, I was sitting in a hotel room in another country, and I was thinking about whales. I had seen them that morning, in the same Pacific Ocean I had seen wildfire flames reach the night prior in photos of Los Angeles — the same ocean that flames reached in 2020, near the mountain where I was born, this same meeting of Fire and Water that has been occurring in these landscapes since before there was a thing called time.
At that exact moment, back at my house, it was raining. In the woods that border my yard, people in slickers and big boots were cutting up dead vegetation and stacking burn piles, and when I got back from my trip I carried a drip torch up the path and dipped it into those sticks and dead leaves, and I lit it on fire. The beneficial kind. With intention.
The horrors won’t stop but the way we respond to, prepare for, and fight them needs to.
That faraway winter morning as many thousands of people woke up wondering if they had a house, and thousands more began the painful bureaucracy of navigating what’s next, I was on a small speedboat at 6am watching the sun rise over the Pacific. We were following, safely, from a distance, a small pod of humpback whales, the arcs of their massive bodies undulating smoothly as they outpaced the boat easily. These are the same whales that cruise down the coast by my house, and I was in the place I see them cruising toward, so many winters.
In the boat, I was close enough to hear them breathe, these cousins of humanity. It’s amazing, that they are here. They are still here.
i hope you are still loving, still fighting, still here. the roses have arrived.
xo
-m.
PS - A question: would regular readers of this newsletter be interested in seeing more pictures of my flower garden? Because I could maybe send these letters more frequently, and they could be shorter, with more flower pics in them. There don’t even have to be sentences, tbh.
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