Category Archives: Dailies

dailies (july)

Read:

Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and The Beautiful
Julian K. Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel
Elizabeth Bear’s Machine
bits of Foreign Affairs Vol. 101 Nº3
started re-reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum

Watched:

Knife+Heart
(almost all of) Sorry to Bother You
a bunch of Stargate: SG-1 (Season 8)
first 2 episodes of Paper Girls
Cowboy Bebop

i really really really enjoyed Elizabeth Bear’s Machine. at work there has been a lot of (very serious) joking around about who among us enjoys “fun” in their reading material and who does not. i have had to conclude that while i don’t think i have much patience of “fun” in my horror reading (the more esoteric, philosophical, and convoluted the better), in the realm of science fiction a little bit of light-heartedness goes a long way. which isn’t to say that Machine didn’t make me cry, because it did. (not an altogether uncommon result of an enjoyable science fiction experience for me, actually.) but i liked the characters and more than that, there was a degree of real and genuine excitement i felt for the world that Bear has created in the White Space stories. (i first encountered the future within which Machine takes place in the short story “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward” by Bear and Sarah Monette which was included in the Dreams From the Witch House anthology edited by Lynne Jamneck—read my review here.)

Nghi Vo has been on my radar for a little while, but i hadn’t gotten my act together to read any of her work just yet. thankfully, i’m getting much better at using the interlibrary loan system from the public libraries and have been able to expand my horizons a bit. The Chosen and The Beautiful is not as light-hearted as one might imagine a magically infused re-telling of The Great Gatsby to be. i was also working through it while everyone on twitter was losing their minds over whether it was necessary or not to have read the original (in some form) of a work if one is to write some kind of meta-fiction of it. Vo’s book is a perfect example of exactly why an intimate familiarity with the original work is a fine requirement to impose upon metafictional projects. i haven’t read The Great Gatsby since high school (2010, junior year, TA’s english class, focus on american literature), and Vo’s book made me want to go back and read it over again and turn it upside down and shake out all the little extra details that i know i either missed or have since forgotten.

The Chosen and The Beautiful is able, specifically, to interact exquisitely with the bizarre shallowness which pervades fitzgerald’s novel. the original novel is composed of set pieces and characters being played by people we never really get a good look at, and Vo digs into that exact element, not merely giving depth to the characters by creating histories for them, whole cloth, but by finding ways to bring a peculiar, mystical life to the shallowness itself. the book as a whole is both a love letter and a careful dissection, affection and fond of the original, but also chiding, demanding a little more. what more could you ask for?

Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon… took a little while for me to get into. i persisted through the collection out of curiosity (rather than pure stubbornness) and i do feel like i was rewarded for it. (in particular “I Am a Beautiful Bug!” towards the end of the collection is funny, heartbreaking, delightful.) i found myself thinking of what Gretchen Felker-Martin said when i spoke with her for a piece that went up on the LASC website (see here), to take in “queer art made by real queer people.” if, as a queer person, the aesthetic products of other individuals’ personal experiences of queerness make you uncomfortable, it is imperative to sit with that feeling, to work through it, to try to better understand oneself and one another through and despite and within that feeling of discomfort. i’m not sure what i learned about myself just yet from reading Jarboe’s work, but i do know that i think it’s worth reading and thinking about and talking about, so you should do that.

every time i start re-reading Foucault’s Pendulum i think “surely i must have imagined how good this was” and each time it’s perfect and beautiful and majestic and it makes me feel like every thought and feeling and disdain and passion is possible. that’s it. i love it so much.

i’ll be honest with you guys, it’s 9am. i have been up since 7am. i was woken up at 4am this morning because of intense pain in my knee and, as it turned out, in my shoulder (likely the result of lying too long in one position while asleep, in an effort to avoid moving my knee), which necessitated getting out of bed and taking advil and figuring out how to fall back asleep in a hopefully-better position. i’m too tired to have good complex articulate thoughts about the movies and tv that i’ve been watching. so that’ll just have to wait for another day.

good luck out there. (see you, space cowboy…)

Mid-Summer Snippets

FRIDAY, 20 JULY 2018

“I KNOW IT HAPPENS TO EVERYBODY, BUT IT’D NEVER HAPPENED TO ME,” HE SAID. “I KNOW PEOPLE’S MOTHERS HAVE DIED, BUT THIS WAS MINE.”
OSCAR ISAAC, NEW YORK TIMES. 6 JULY 2017.

Isn’t that the process of growing up? Realizing that everything that has ever happened to you has happened before to someone else. What we need to remember, as adults, is that all children, as they grow up, are discovering life all for the first time. Their pain is bright and new and unlike anything they have ever felt before. We must remember that for all the repetition in the sum total of human experience, each individual encounters each of these forgone conclusions as a revelation, something awesome – in both its terror and its glory.

WEDNESDAY, 18 JULY 2018

I ate dinner at home.

Before I left, a little while before, Blueberry had either found or killed (or, at the very least, maimed) a rather large beetle. Not quite a stag beetle – I don’t think we have those in this part of the country – but a 1.5 inch long, glossy black beetle.

She was curious about it and kept trying to eat it, but I got the impression that, legs up, it was too spiky or shocking for her to be able to fit it in her mouth.

She proceeded to scrabble at it, pushing the beetle’s invisible black body along the mess of flat stones which constitutes a walkway, along the edge of the deck, from the gate to the porch door, in that part of the garden.

She would pounce, sniff, taste, rear back, push— pounce, sniff, taste, rear back, push— again and again. Her white paws and startled reaction, the direction of her fixed gaze, the only things to give any indication of where her immobilized prey had ended up.

She must have scraped the body – head-thorax-abdomen – of that poor creature across ten inches or a foot, in a clatter of rough claws on slate, and the imagined rasp of carapace on stone.

Eventually, some significant damage must have been done. She leaned down, her blunt, curious snout pressing against stone and dirt, before lifting up her head.

Pitbull lips flapping, I could hear a sharp crunch-crunch-crunch. Satisfied, she trotted away in to the dark of the yard.

Retroactively published 22 Jan 2019

2018.04.19 : In defense of Cynicism

Two weeks ago (maybe more, maybe less) a friend and I sat down and started discussing philosophy.

I struggle to get along with optimists. Not to denigrate or dismiss them, because I think it’s beautiful to be able to believe in the best possible outcome. It is simply not something I am always able to entertain or understand. For me, optimism takes work.

The opposite of optimism is pessimism; the belief that everything will go wrong, all attempts will end in failure, and happy endings are impossible. This is the diametric opposition of the optimist, who believes that things will be okay, things will work out, and happy endings are always possible.

I am not a pessimist.

I consider myself a cynic. What does that mean exactly? It can’t be the same as pessimism, despite the fact that the words are often used interchangeably. Why does cynicism feel apt, where pessimism is grating?

The cynic, in my mind, is one who is ever hopeful, someone who dreams of happy endings, who wants things to work out. But. (And there is always a “but” with the cynic, it’s true.) Despite all that wanting, despite the dreaming, they’ve been frustrated too many times to believe that things will work out. The cynic reads the paper in the morning and weeps, because every morning they hope that the news will not be a litany of tragedies (though they know, every morning, when their feet touch the floor, that they should expect something terrible).

The cynic has taken a bad bet. Because the cynic will bet on the underdog, the new-comer, the good man knowing that they will lose. This is where the cynic and the pessimist differ; the pessimist has no desire to be surprised. The cynic is ever hopeful that this time, things will be different (despite knowing the odds).

So who is the opposite of the cynic? It is not the optimist, for they are static, just the same as the pessimist; they both look down the long uncertain road ahead, and see the light at the end, one sees sunlight, the other the on-coming train. The cynic is waiting, hoping for sunlight, and expecting the train. Who sits with them in that uncertainty?

My friend said, “Faith.” And she was correct.

Faith is that which sustains people in times of uncertainty. Faith is not optimism; it doesn’t promise that everything will work out for the best. Faith is an abiding belief in the future, that when the road is long and dark, something warm and safe awaits at the end of the road. Faith never promises a journey absent of strife, danger, and suffering. Faith promises that one can always take another step; look how far you’ve come.

The cynic and the faithful sit together in the dark, they know the odds. They know that the road is long and dark, and they both hope for the best. The difference is that the faithful knows the strength of hope. They know that hope is capable of sustaining someone, so long as you are a true believer.

The cynic, by contrast, is not quite strong enough. The cynic knows what hope tastes like, but doesn’t know how to make it grow, does not know how to harvest it, how to bake it into what they eat.

On days when I have to attempt great works, I sometimes wish I could have the strength of the faithful. There is a certainty to faith, to optimism, to pessimism that can seem enviable.

On every other day, I welcome the spark of doubt that lives within my cynicism. It is a balancing act, a middle path. The cynic can dream of heaven and keep their feet on the ground. One must be able to see clearly to know what is broken and one must have tasted hope to know what is possible.

Without cynicism, I would not be able to do the things I dream of doing. Cynicism is both that which arms to me examine how we have failed as a people, as a species, and where we have done wrong, it is the expectation of being beaten down, of being lied to, of finding victims and perpetrators. But it is also cynicism that makes me believe that we can do better, that we can improve, that we can apologize and heal.

I’m not sure I recommend it. The cynic is always expecting disappointment and, unlike the pessimist, they are not ready to accept it. But it’s a fighting spirit; still hoping for the best, despite their expectations.

2018.04.10:

Over the weekend, I visited the RISD Art Books Fair with a friend.

The first question is what is an “art book fair” – are they books about art? Is the library selling off old bits of its collection? Are they books that constitute art? None of the above?

The answer, as always, is complicated. Over all the event leaned into the notion of “books as art” with a healthy dose of “art fair” holding the whole thing together. Representatives from a variety of organizations of creatives were in attendance. Most of the stalls were RISD affiliated, showcasing the work of RISD students, past and present.

My friend and I spent a solid chunk of time pouring over the table half-covered with little, 2 cm in diameter buttons, each with a colorful background and a handwritten statement on the front. “No thank you” read one, “pseudonym” read another, “kind of a drag” read one that I bought, “solid blood” read one my friend bought. There was no method or reasoning to the text that we could discern, but nor did we care to look for one. It was time well spent swimming through the vague thoughts forms of the subconscious.

I picked up two little chapbooks by a graphic design student from the Kansas City Art Institute.

Selecting art books, like buying other kinds of art, is an exercise in self-discovery. It is never clear why you prefer one thing over another, why you want this work of art and not that one. Nevertheless, the feeling is always concrete, always strong. There is no rationalizing it, no secret formula to understanding it; art one brings home becomes a housemate, a companion. So it is also with art books. They call out to us, and we pick them up, and when we bring them home, we find ourselves sitting there, leafing through, curious, always trying to look with new eyes.

Knowing a piece of art can only happen with time. The thing which originally drew us to it is almost immediately papered over, hidden by every subsequent detail we find which pleases us. We put ourselves in dialogue with the piece by accident; simply by spending time with it, little details are revealed, “Oh, look at that little shape there” and “Oh, that shade of blue reminds me of the first house I remember us living in” and “Oh, how melancholy”. We are revealed as much as the art is revealed as much as the artist reveals. Indirect communication and accidental resonances take over.

Retroactively published 22 Jan 2019