09. Midsummer to Midwinter
Happy solstice! I started writing this email around summer solstice, but I guess the newsletter went into estivation. Fourteen fortnights have passed. The newsletter now cracks one eye over a crisply waxing gibbous: winter solstice approaches.
No time to waste, then
— who knows when I will catch the bug to write again. Key beats of the last 6 months: I
went on a game show and had a good time
got a new job
had some existential breakthroughs
experienced some art
My Big Day
Back in February I was embargoed from telling y’all that I was a contestant on a game show, but now I can link you to S1 E2 of The 1% Club on Amazon Prime, where you can see me compete against 99 other contestants to answer increasingly tricky brain teasers. I won't spoil the ending because you really can't guess how it's going to turn out until the last 30 seconds of the show, but it was an incredibly fun day overall, and now I have a mild case of the game show contestant bug.
My New Job
I often say to job interviewers that my career pendulum has swing back and forth between dictionary/NLP stuff and just general Web development. I think that’s fairly accurate: humanities computing → web dev → dictionary data → “technical co-founder”-ish → web dev → grad school → computational linguist → funemployed. Now am Web Dev again, this time with a focus on backend processes moving money between banks. My team ensures that workers get their paychecks on time, and all the work, infrastructure, and relationships necessary to do that makes it quite an interesting domain to be learning on-the-job about.
I actually sat down to write this email because I was thinking about how I’m not taking much time off from this job during the winter holidays and I think it’s because I’m curious what the job is about through the cycle of the year. This is my first new job since pre-Covid, and my first real job that is remote from the start.
When I went into an office every day, I could develop a visceral sense of how the work flowed: what a “busy time” meant, what “slow” meant; when was everybody heads down and quiet. Being primarily remote, and seeing coworkers only at status meetings or project meetings, it’s harder get to know the people between meetings. I focus more on the work: funny if working from home is actually the closest thing to the Severance ideal of absolute human/worksona (“outie/innie”) separation.
So if I can’t experience what the office is like in the second and third week of December, I might as well stick around to see what the office Slack is like during peak white-collar vacation time. And anyway our customers’ employees are still working then: I still want to make sure they get paid.
Don’t worry, I still believe in rest and work-life balance. I will take vacation time. I prefer to travel when it’s less crowded anyway.
Book: Every Rising Sun, Jamila Ahmed
For a while now I have been checking out different selections/translations of the Arabian Nights stories, and I just finished one that really hit the spot: the audiobook of Jamila Ahmed's Every Rising Sun: A Retelling of the One Thousand and One Nights. In its bones it is more an original novel than a story collection, but the novel offers a ton of cultural and historical context that I was implicitly looking for, but which I wasn't actually going to find in a regular collection of the folktales (with or without the framing story of Scheherazade and Shahryar).
In Every Rising Sun this is no longer just a framing story but a fully-fleshed historical novel, set during the Third Crusade in the late 1100s CE. Jamila Ahmed (“studied Medieval Islamic history at Barnard”) slips her Shahryar into the real succession of leaders of the Kerman Seljuk Sultanate. This Scheherazade not only spins folk stories by night, but also uses her storyteller's sense to shape her storyline’s political landscape: bartering the endings of her djinn cliffhangers for better outcomes in her reality.
The romantic core of the book is obligated to start out as a tragic “I can change him” quest, and there are moments where Scheherazade seems so focused on Shahyar's will-he-or-won't-he potentials (kill me, love me) that it can feel like a Kindle Unlimited romance (“The Wife-Murderer's Wife”?). But by the final act, all of those tropes have been rooted out in a satisfying way.
The parts about the Crusades made me realize that I have never actually read listened to a full story about the Crusades from an Islamic perspective. Scheherazade accompanies Shahryar and his troops when they join the defense of Palestine from the Frankish invaders. Here it is impossible not to overlay more recent history of Anglo-Europeans fucking up Palestine, especially when I happened to read
this fresh LRB piece by Adam Shatz this week [sic: written June 20, 2024] —
In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’
Two more books
The Adventures of Mina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty. This one more of a fantasy novel than Every Rising Sun — come to think of it, Adventures is almost completely aromantic. Swashbuckling medieval-Islamically through every port on the Arabian Sea, with more excellent othering of monstrous Franks with their violent appropriation of culture, land, and in this case, magic.
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera. I had a lot I wanted to say about this book — spooky otherworldly lumpen underground resistance in a political landscape that is a whirl of competing religious cults — and then just now I read the first Goodreads review and I learned it’s also a retelling of the story of Gautama Buddha and the son he abandoned (named Rahula = “Fetter”, the name given to the main character of The Saint of Bright Doors). Now I feel like I just need to read it again with this critical new knowledge.
Highly recommend the audiobooks of all three. Each reader seems perfect for the work they’re reading.
Let enough be enough
I would rather send this now than put it off any longer. I guess I’ll have to get to the existential breakthroughs in the next one. They’ll keep. One of their catalysts was a production of Waiting For Godot and lately I’m recognizing that I am especially impressionable to art that is exhibited in darkened rooms.
Thank you to those of you who have written to me to say hi and gently nudge.
Love,
Orion.