Author: Azlan

583: “Art is like good bread!” (Bread and Puppet)

                “Art is for kitchens!
                Art is like good bread!”
                -Bread and Puppet, “Why Cheap Art Manifesto”

                This morning my younger sibling called in the few minutes before one of their classes and one of my meetings. It was a lovely little conversation, itself like a quick bite of bread, and during it they read to me the entirety of Bread and Puppet’s manifesto. Part of it goes, “[Art] needs to be EVERYWHERE.” I’ve been watching art everywhere throughout the rest of my day. Here are a few of today’s wonderful pieces:
                A friend’s portrait of an adventurous snail, doodled on the back of their name tent during a meeting.
                The impromptu song of muppet noises my partner and I sang. 
                Another friend’s little dance when I saw them walking and waved. 
                Another friend’s doodled flowers and vines.
                The leaves a kid nudged with their toe, maybe listening to the crisple-crickle, maybe arranging them, and when I passed that place and looked down the leaves were a little start of brown curling edges.
                What’s some of the art you’ve seen everywhere today?

by Azlan

582: “Fallen In Love With A Color” (Maggie Nelson)

                “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets, page 1

                On a walk tonight, and we had to stop to watch a tree’s lacy leaves breathing in the light of a street lamp. Seen from where we were, the leaves looked almost white. Or snowy. Or moonlit reflection on water. Just as permeable, drinking in the world. 
                Maybe it was the street lamp and the angle we were looking from, and who knows, maybe my tired eyes. I’ve walked that street a lot lately, and I don’t remember any tree with leaves the color we saw tonight. But then again, how often do I take the time to fall in love with a color? Too rarely, I think. Maybe that’s the point of asking. But since seeing the tree I keep falling in love with colors: the blue-black-dim of the shadows behind the white leaves, the blue of Nelson’s Bluets, waiting for me back on the desk, and the paler teacup blue of a note from a friend that peaks out from beneath a stack of work papers on my desk to say “Hi, Azlan!” in my friend’s dark blue pen. The red of a pencil at my elbow. The pink of my partner’s water bottle. Maybe Nelson’s right. When seeing becomes permeable, becomes drinking in the world, it’s a kind of falling in love.

by Azlan

581: “What She Didn’t Tell Them” (Mary Helen Specht)

                “What she told them: She told them about the clock radio she got from her birthday one year […]
                What she didn’t tell them: “How her father had reams of paper in his office, and how she used to steal some of it […]”
                -Mary Helen Specht, Mudlark, page 117

                One of the things Mary Helen Specht does so powerfully in Mudlark is create, respect, and press into that distanced space that can exist between two people. In this case, it’s a mother Jenny and her daughter Neko. When the book unfolds from Neko’s perspective, we feel the longing of a child who somehow can’t quite reach across thought and temperament to her mom. When the book unfolds from Jenny’s perspective, we feel a parent’s world forever changed by a changing daughter and by the everythings Jenny and Neko somehow can’t say to each other. Or can’t hear. 
                I’m only halfway through the book, so I don’t know how things will go for these two. But I feel the reach. The distance. The love that goes on all the same. When someone isn’t able to recognize their own story as just one side of the interaction—maybe that’s when they end up locking themselves away. When a story has space for what we say and what we can’t say—space for that longing to reach each other across the distance, even when it doesn’t feel possible—when that longing takes shape—
                Well, I haven’t finished the book yet. But even unresolved, the tension feels like hope.

by Azlan

580: “Blow Away” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

“once

we were not afraid
to blow away”

-Alexis Pauline Gumbs, from “Walking to Arawak Road”

                My partner and I are walking twice a day, first thing in the morning and near last thing at night, and I’m learning all the different things these walks can be. I think I’ll keep learning for as long as we walk them. Sometimes they’re banter, playful, tidbits of thoughts and jokes and possibilities. Sometimes they’re more logistical, the planning taking over: all that sequence of when we’re getting groceries and who needs to be where when and how many zucchini we still have. (Tonight: three). Sometimes they’re quiet. Tired from the long day, or still waking up from our sleep, we walk along to the sound of the wind and the changing shadows of the clouds. The first few times that happened I wondered if I was doing something wrong in not “carrying” the conversation. I wondered if it would get boring. I’m realizing how fully it doesn’t. The silence is a sky we blow out into. There’s rain here, and clouds. We blow into thoughtlessness. Into rhythms.. Then someone puts a hand on someone’s arm, and we pause. Look. A raccoon beneath that three, looking at us, scenting the wind to ask whether it’s time to keep blowing along or time to slip back inside a warm den.

by Azlan

579: “Acquiring New Meanings” (Vandana Kalra & Shilpa Gupta)

                Vandana Kalra: “Do artworks keep evolving, acquiring new meanings, even after leaving the artist’s studio?”
                Shilpa Gupta: “They do […] [One example] would be an outdoor light installation which is currently being shown on Lake Zurich. In the 2004 work, lines from a ruled book rise and get transformed into three interwoven languages—English, Urdu and Hindi—all saying, ‘I live under your sky, too.’ Fifteen years ago…”
                -From Vandana Kalra’s interview with artist Shilpa Gupta on September 6, 2020

                Sometimes writing the trick of writing pretends that these words exist somehow “out there,” steady and stable, meaning the same thing year after year and place beyond place. I love staring at that illusion until I blink and see through it. Every piece of writing I really connect—like every piece of art that inspires or humbles me—is always acquiring new meaning.
                I first read this interview with Shilpa Gupta 2021, a few months after it happened. Since then I’ve returned to it: the webpage and the words are the same, but the meaning is different, just like Gupta’s light installation meant different things while changing times and places in 2004 to 2020. Perhaps that’s on my mind because a series like Uproar is a kind of transformation through time. I can go back and read the posts from 2015 or 2017 or 2020, and the pixels on my screen pretend they’re the same, but for me they never are. Sometimes what I wrote back then is a realization that has grown into the soil of my life, so now it’s a practice, and it’s surprising to see the seed being planted. Sometimes a quote I wrote about sounds completely different to my ear then it did then: not a seed but a shovel, or not a shovel but a mirror, or not a mirror but a crack in a mirror, or not a crack but a wildflower I admire as I pass by. 
                It’s not just our gardens that change. Our tools shift in our hands, too. When I started teaching a mentor told me, “I’ve been assigning The Catcher in the Rye long enough to go from seeing myself in the teenager to seeing myself in the older teacher.” When I pay attention to the readings I assign students, they all change, year after year: not just in how I see myself in them, but in how they connect to the world around them and in what they make possible.

by Azlan

578: “Sensory Hairs” (Ed Yong)

                “Sensory hairs are versatile structures. They can be actively pressed against surfaces to produce tactile sensations, as whisking rats and oripulating manatees do. But they can also be passively bent and deflected by flowing air or water. By responding to that pressure, an animal can detect the flows created by distant objects, touching things from afar without needing to make direct contact.” -Ed Yong, An Immense World, page 172

                Sometimes I play a game with myself: I look up at the sky and imagine a vaulted veiling, sometimes above the treetops, above the bird’s flight paths, above the clouds. I’m trying to take a sip of just how much open space I’m seeing. Something similar has happened when I stood high on a mountain ridge, looking across a valley to another peak: all that expanse, as far as a long day’s hike, as close (it seems) as cold lakewater cupped in my two hands. It can be hard for me to see how much this how much is, how deep, how wondrous. And so I practice.
                And I practice with what I can’t see. Yong goes on to describe an experiment in which two manatees could clearly feel the slight vibrations—movements of less than a millionth of a meter—of a submerged sphere a meter away from their flanks. What would that be like, to be so in touch with the flow of the water you swim in? I don’t know. I imagine it. Just as delightedly, I remember that I don’t know. I imagine how little I see: how narrow a face of the world my eyes give me (wondrous as they are). I look at my skin, my arm hairs, sensitive in so many ways. I feel how much I have to learn from a manatee about being touched.

by Azlan

577: “[A Tool] Made By Someone Else” (Min-zhan Lu)

                “[Because of how I was taught, it seemed that the tool of language] was made by someone else and was then acquired and used by me. How the others made it before I acquired it determined and guaranteed what it produced when I used it.”
                -Min-zhan Lu, From Words To Silence, p. 445 

                Today I started teaching a seminar for university instructors to come from across campus and discuss what we’re doing when we teach writing, and how we can do it better. It’s a wonderful, experimental, interdisciplinary conversation, with people joining from around the world and from many different fields. Sometimes—at first—it can be hard to get on the same page. We all come from different disciplines, and so we have different ways of talking about writing and writing instruction. Today we suddenly landed on that shared page by remembering Min-zhan Lu and asking: well, what are you doing when you write? In your learning, what is the tool of writing for?
                For assessment, said several instructors. Reflecting on their own educational journey, another added: writing is how I put together my thoughts. Another: writing is where I build the puzzle that I hope to share with you, inviting you to rebuild it and  work with it in your mind. Another: writing is where I release some of a day’s stress. Another: writing is one place I go to understand who I am and where I’m headed. All these answers, and the tensions between them, led to the first great conversation of our seminar. When writing is being used to judge how well you did, it can be hard to take up writing as a tool for weaving together all the threads of a complex thought. But we like that tapestry. And I like the reminder: when we’re working together across perspectives and trainings, we can step back to ask, what do our tools do? What do we want from them? Who told us to use them that way, and what other things might I want to do with this shovel, this pen, this question?

                And because I love writing as a puzzle you get to remake for yourself, here’s a riddle from the poet Symphosius (late 7th or early 8th century) as translated by Richard Wilbur. The question is (as the question so often is) what am I?

                “Long daughter of the forest, swift of pace,
                In whom old neighbors join as beam and brace,
                I speed on many paths, yet leave no trace.”

by Azlan

576: “Footnotes” (Nghi Vo)

                “‘Cleric, make sure you note the story as I have told you, and not as my young foolish sisters have done.’
                Chih nodded, because that was what footnotes were for.”
                -Nghi Vo, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, p. 102

                Well, my friends, my dissertation is just about complete. There’s a bit more to do. There can always be a bit more to do. But I’ve just been looking over the entirety as I complete some revisions: an introduction, five chapters, three interludes (these are my favorite), an appendix with the script for a writing workshop I love leading, and hundreds of footnotes. I love footnotes. I poked around with different ways of adding them here, but all of the formats felt fussy, so instead how about a list that isn’t quite a list:
                Footnotes are wonderful for when
                a) someone said something so beautifully well that I have to include it, all of it, even if I don’t know how to fit their paragraph into mine. And so: footnote.
                7) there’s something else I’d really like to talk about—a book I read, and a friend who gave it to me. All that’s a wonderful rabbit hole I’d like to invite you down, but the chapter or the story’s headed somewhere else. Footnote.
                iv) folks have very different views on whatever we’re discussing, and right now I want to follow one view enough to understand how it moves and where it’s looking. But it’s also important to remember the story’s told another way, to go in another direction. Footnote.
                ?) really I just want to share a joke, a delight, a moment of seeing, like the rabbit who poked its head up from the tallish grass to look at me, and then went back to eating. Which makes me hope you have a snack nearby.
                Writing forms make it easier to say some things (and harder to say others). I love forms that open up linearity: that unfold flat space to show there are always different paths and thoughts moving through here, even if I’m arranging some ideas into a sentence with sequential words. Forms like footnotes. And lists that aren’t quite lists: no beginnings, no ends, and a web that makes sense all together.

by Azlan

575: “Where Unfriendly Eyes Might See It” (Nghi Vo)

                 “There was the name I called him, of course, but the habits of a lifetime die hard, and I do not wish that written down in any place where unfriendly eyes might see it.” -Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, page 69

                 Nghi Vo’s wonderful novella shares this line in the dramatic, dangerous world of high politics and spies and secret messages, but it also captures something I feel in almost all my writing. At least, all of the writing that I imagine being read by more than one person.
                 In a conversation or a letter to a friend, we know the garden in which we’re sharing these words. We know each other: maybe we don’t know if the other one has read and loves The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but we’re somewhat familiar with one another’s interests and worries, with the complex weaves of intentions and relationships that live behind me saying Nghi Vo captures something I feel in almost all my writing. In writing that is read more broadly, the shared space of our conversation’s garden only exists if we make it inside the act of reading and writing. And people might come into the garden of this shared paragraph in other ways. They might come in with their heavy boots on, thoughtless of where they’re stepping, or more. They might come in unfriendly, looking to take what isn’t being shared.
                 I think that’s why I often find myself writing to specific people. To old teachers, some of whom I know will never see this. To distant friends, people I’m still close to or with whom I’ve long since lost touch. To authors still alive or from long ago who talk to me in their writing, and so I am talking back, imagining the space where we could meet and share. That situates the writing inside a seeing that is friendly, or at least respectful, or at least relational. We are thinking about how we see each other. Who we are to each other. And the way writing is used, sometimes that reflective, careful thinking can be left behind: the words torn up, and there are so many roots that I want to share but that I do not wish written down in a place where unfriendly eyes might tear them.

by Azlan

574: “TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE” (Ross Gay)

                “I have since begun cataloging delights that I will save for a future date, which, while stacking delights in itself is a useful activity and practice (sounds like a Denny’s pancake breakfast special: Delight Stack), it defeats this book’s purpose of TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, which I actually wrote on my hand in the bathroom of Darn Good Soup in Bloomington today…” Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, page 107-8

                This from near the beginning of Ross Gay’s 35th delight in The Book of Delights, as he’s reflecting on his project of writing a delight every day (more or less) for a year. As he’s noticing patterns, five months in, in how he looks for delights, how he writes about them. These words meeting me.
                This also being the page I opened to just now after my love and I came back from a late summer walk, the evening cool and then warm as we washed through it, muscles waking up after a day inside, fireflies flying their fires, neighbors walking their dogs, the zipline carrying a kid across the playground (and the kid carrying the zipline into his games). Which is to say: I also notice patterns. I’ve been writing Uproar for 570-some weeks. Which is to say: I sometimes start “saving up” Uproar posts, making sure I’ll have them. Have enough. Which is to say: that saving turns away from what I love most about Uproar. Remembering, that is lovely. (Just yesterday my love recalled something funny we’d said, and said it again, and without meaning to I said “good remembery!” Remembery like a spell, like magic, I think). But instead of saving up because I’m worried about having enough, these posts for me are about abundance. About what I’m surrounded by and enmeshed in. Abundance of thought and creativity, abundance of lives and relationships, abundance of community powers and vitalities and delights. 
                TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, Gay says, “means, simply, dailiness.” The dailiness of walking into this. The dailiness of being met by so many wonders, and meeting them, open armed and ready to join not just with the possibilities I’ve saved up but the daily possibilities lighting like fireflies or pausing to chat like neighbors.

by Azlan