in the winter garden in the temperate rainforest in Northern California, lately:

there were no flowers for a couple months.

there were a lot of fungi, which are a sort of bloom, and few salvia, their flashes of vermillion sustaining the Anna’s hummingbirds who nest in the redwood outside my kitchen-sink window, which is also where the feeder hangs. every time i stand at the sink they come and hoverbuzz at me—especially if i, too, am wearing red—and i imagine they recognize me and call me Food Guy [i know they recognize people who threaten the nest, but whether or not they recognize people who feed them is less clear — i tried to look it up on g**gle but it’s so broken because of stupid ai that i ended up on a website called “fodmaps daily” and decided life without all the answers is pretty nice, actually]. for my part, i am not very good at distinguishing between hummingbird individuals. i call them all Banana, short for Anna Banana-Fana-Fo-Fana.

winter feels long this year, huh?

which is why i’m grateful for hellebores. one of the many reasons to love the hellebore—winter bloomer, legend, calumny—during this season of torpor is the flower’s obstinate aversion to publicity. hellebore blooms are almost impossible to take photos of. is the character of this flower truly modest, all demure and downward facing like its blooms? or is it actually one of those classic film divas who’s like, “no photos, please,” with her big sunglasses and dramatic hand swept over her eyes, but still she somehow manages to angle her best side toward the camera despite all these faux declinations, lining up that blushing backpetal juuuust right as you snap your shot, or maybe it doesn’t even matter, because every shot you take will be a good one?

who cares, this color is getting me through the dark months:

and now, just the past week or so, the sun’s arc begins shifting; small pockets of light make it over the redwoods at midday; new players enter the scene.

other gardens, other friends:
recently i went on a weeklong writing residency (self-imposed, diy) on the central coast and it was warm and sunny and oaky, and here are the names of the birds who talked to me:

soundtrack:
on the drive down the coast i took Highway 1, which was felicitously open all the way through Big Sur for the first time in years (now closed again, ah, Winter, you capricious muse!), and in the car i brought a handful of CDs from a certain era of my life (1997-2002) (for research purposes™). Low, Magnetic Fields, Strokes, Jets to Brazil, Sparklehorse, Spiritualized, Mogwai, Radiohead … i gotta say: driving through massive mudslide banks, sun glinting on flat blue Pacific, windows down, yelling-singing to “Karma Police”? it holds up.

who i’m wearing:
since having a lil’ skin cancer last year (it’s fine) i’m now a lil’ neck scarf guy, and i’m very committed to the bit.

i am also now in a committed relationship with these wildly expensive quilted pants, purchased three years ago and still in great shape. these things are bulletproof and cozy as hell. i wear them probably 3-4 times a week in winter and receive “i love your pants!”es from strangers each time.

now playing:
in the writing cabin i wasn’t really doing screens but there was one streaming service on the in-house tv, and it had many 90s movies, and so i kept with the retro theme and watched Pulp Fiction (1994) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), and… well, i have way too many thoughts about these films, both separately and as a diptych, to express in this short space, but i will say that it’s stunning how the presumed basic intellect of the viewing audience back then was… more. i miss it. please, Hollywood, bring this back. like, go ahead, just throw me in— speak dialogue, be characters, move time, we can handle it, i yearn to struggle to catch up to the narrative. please?

who i’m reading:
“The world of hauntings—of blurs and unexplained presences, of eerie absences, strange smells, inexplicable sensations—is one where we are confronted by what we don’t know, what’s still out there beyond our ken. It is not a place of familiar tropes and themes. It is a place without any clear meaning whatsoever.”
—Colin Dickey on some truly haunting AI shit

“Everybody is forming whole personalities around what it is they're trying to sell you, and I think I'm really allergic to that, and I dislike it, and I dislike being pushed to do that by publishers”
—Maggie Tokuda-Hall talks with Rahawa Haile about pigeons

“It was a strange feeling to look back at the scarcity of yesteryear and find abundance.” 
—Lydia Kiesling on dead book blogs

“Making money the most indispensable ingredient of your artistic venture, as far as I can tell, almost inevitably relegates that project to impossibility.” Charlotte Shane on DIY

“A blackberry is not a metaphor. It is a plant. But I might sometimes feel in deep kinship with its ways of being in the world: bristling with barbs, a wasteland monster, too big, choking out other, more belonging forms of life.”
—Sarah McCarry on blackberries, among other things

finally, in truly wild news: i have belatedly, somewhat bafflingly, at long last been Sally Rooney–pilled. i observed the Rooney hype/PR cycles of a few years back with bemusement but little interest; i’m not a millennial, and hence not the target audience for these books. of course, i’m not the target audience for many books i love, but as a Baby Gen X who often passes for younger, i’m predisposed to be annoyed by things that are often assumed to be My Kind Of Culture but aren’t. more to the point, for better and worse, as a former book/record-store clerk and lifelong total culture snob i tend to have a knee-jerk avoidance of all things Extremely Popular And Bestselling, so i was like, cute bucket hat, get that money, not gonna read ‘em!

but on my trip, for Research Purposes™, i listened to audiobooks of three of her novels. in a row. for the first 1.7 books i was like, meh, i don’t get it; indeed, upon reading the ending of book 1, Conversations with Friends, i was furious. (spoiler: she should have stayed gay.) but something shifted a few chapters into Beautiful World, Where Are You and i was like, oh noooo i think Sally Rooney might be a genius?

Rooney’s books ain’t perfect. they are basically, as my friend Zoe once said, romance novels for the literary tote bag set. the prose is not cliché-free, to borrow a phrase from noted novelist Jon Franzen. and i agree with many critiques of the work that have been well voiced elsewhere, especially concerning bi girls who don’t fuck and sad hot girls who don’t eat. i don’t know how romantic the novels actually are, but they are certainly horny, wow, like, walking around and listening to that audiobook is… there has been blushing, perhaps a hot flash or two? but you guys, i think she knows all this. and i think she is doing it on purpose. she is very much doing a thing. and that thing, while highly entertaining and indisputably money-making, is also clearly invested in poking at the dynamics of gender, sex, power, class, language, and cultural labor. i started reading Rooney because i’m interested in the epistolary form, of which she is a contemporary master, but my interest sharpened when i realized that the literary tradition her work owes the most to is actually theater. Rooney is far more Beckett than Joyce (or Natalia Ginzburg, one of her idols), and i’m not mad about it.

despite her youth, Rooney the writer does appeal to my demographic — she’s political, a Marxist, not easily swayed by trends in tech or culture. she’s anti-genocide and vocally so in a way that is not without consequences, even for someone of her power and wealth. as a fellow worker in the industry that unleashed upon this world the hateful assholes JK Rowling and JD Vance, all this matters to me. and in contrast to retro-con megaseller crap like Colleen Hoover’s ouvre, a million-selling author like Rooney is downright punk rock. in addition to my becoming fascinated by her intellectual and literary project, just knowing she’s in the mix, and that the kidz are out there reading her and Tok-ing about it or whatever… well, it warms my cold winter heart. big bouquet of hellebores for Sal.

hot tip: i do suspect audiobooks might be the key to Rooneydom entree, for those of us who’ve thus far resisted. Irishness is important to her body of work; the prose, perhaps, needs an Irish voice in order to land.

ok that’s my dimestore Rooney analysis, now back to Intermezzo and quilted pants.

tulips, and other new things, coming soon,

slán,
m.

PS - there’s a new ZYZZYVA out, i edited most of the prose in it, you should pick one up.