Season's Change — mnchrm vol. lxix
mnchrm — lxviii — 200915
Season’s Change
Hello, friends! After what felt like an eternity, it seems Summer’s truly given way to Autumn here in Chicago. My favorite season, when the leaves turn, the weather is perfect, and things seems to slow down. Unfortunately, many of the activities I like doing in Autumn—sitting in the park after brunch, going to museums, finishing up a day downtown with a night movie—aren’t available in our pandemic world. So for me, this Autumn is probably just going to precipitate a slower pace here; more full days spent cooking, a late-night bath, longer walks. Ah well. It’s still a welcome change.
I’m Ian Battaglia, a writer, photographer, and philomath based out of Chicago; and this is my newsletter. Your subscription preferences are always easily updated at the bottom of this newsletter or on its homepage here—and if you really enjoyed it and wanted to send it with a recommendation to a friend, I’d be grateful for it.
A Trick In Scheduling—
My latest review went up last week, on Tuesday. I’ve been writing one review a month for The Chicago Review for longer than I’ve been formally a part of the operation as an editor, but by a trick in scheduling, I’ve got two pieces in two weeks this month, with the next one coming out on Tuesday. Go figure! In the previous one, I reviewed Huw Lemmey and Hildegard von Bingen’s Unknown Language a spellbinding new work.
One of the things people say all-too-often about books is that they’re “genre-defying” or “mold-breaking” or something, which is a sort of bizarre claim at its foundation, as there’s hardly a formal set of rules or even guidelines for most writing. However—I’m not sure if Unknown Language would be considered “experimental”, but it manages to merge poetry, prose, and essayic writing in a way that felt really fresh to me. The next book I reviewed, Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings was bounds-pushing, but in a very different way. Check the Review’s homepage on Tuesday for more.
More Bounds-Pushing—
Here’s a super-cool video of super-cool actor / director / screenwriter John Cassavetes talking about making art in and outside the bounds of the system, for him being the Hollywood studio system. Doesn’t this just make you want to go do something?
Progress—
Lately, one of if not my primary focus has been on studying Japanese. I started taking video lessons once weekly, and even over only a few weeks, I feel like my grasp of the language, and particularly my application of it, has improved noticeably.
I’m still in a sort of goldilocks phase, where week by week I can tell I’m improving, and in what areas. Part of this is because acquiring a language is such a large task, with the different vectors of speaking, reading, writing, etc all encompassed under this larger umbrella—so making gains in one-perhaps-underdeveloped vector can lead to an overall improvement. The other part is that despite studying for over a year, I’m still pretty early on in my journey. I do okay when writing something like a post or journal, or chatting online, and am getting better at composing and expressing myself when speaking to my teacher as well, which I’m particularly happy about.
Over time, it’s been really fun seeing the small ways it has changed my brain. From starting to pick out lines in anime I recognize, to being able to notice when certain lines differ from what their subtitle has been translated as. I listen to some Japanese-language podcasts, and it’s truly cool to progressively understand more and more of the conversation, from phrases here and there, to the gist of what’s being conveyed, to the conversation in its entirety. Lucky for me, sometimes it feels like there’s more resources for learning Japanese than there are for learning any other language. Maybe English has it beat, but I wouldn’t know!
This is also a drawback though, as it can be hard to know what to focus on. Part of this comes down to your goals, though for someone like me who just wants to achieve overall fluency, this is less of a concern than about focusing your priorities. It’s also lead to some weird-unevenness in my Japanese; though it’s fun to pull out some more advanced grammar structure like for making comparisons, or a more specific vocabulary word like “komorebi”—dappled sunlight through trees—with my teacher.
Only recently, I’ve started to reach for more Japanese set-phrases during my everyday interactions. It’s simple things, like expressing thanks or gratitude; but feels like a stride nonetheless. Additionally, I tend to have sort of a running train of thought in my head, almost like a dialogue; and lately, an idea or sentence will pop into my head, and I’ll sort of naturally try and figure out how to best express this in the little Japanese I know.
This part of how my brain works is perhaps what I find most compelling about fiction, but I’ll leave that for another newsletter.
The Show Goes On—
This beautiful Ginko tree only just popped up on my Twitter feed, but I would be remiss—remiss!—not to share it with all of you.
Season’s Change—
I’ve got a piece going up on my Patreon this week, about the different processes I go through in editing a photo, sometimes in parallel, and how they flow together to make a “finished” image. It’s all about the photo you see up top here, so if you like that one and want to see a peak behind the curtain, make sure you sign up for my Patreon here.
Closing—
To end this week, my friend Azu put out a new song, ‘Everything I Wanted’, which you can listen to on Spotify. It’s such a beautiful track, one that is immediately evocative of late nights and reminiscing. I kind of imagine a beautiful, introspective credits sequence over it; it conveys the sort of emotion I’d want to leave an audience with. Can’t recommending it enough!
Thanks again for tuning in this week, wherever you may be. As always:
Stay strong, fight on.
From Chicago with love.
Your faithful commander,
— I