Author: Azlan

568: “Alice’s Route” (Juliet & Charles Snape)

                “Take Alice’s route as she chases the white rabbit down the hole…” -Juliet and Charles Snape, The Classic Tales Maze Book, page 1

                Tonight I’m at my mother’s house, and my little sibling (who’s not so little—several inches taller than me, for example) took The Classic Tales Maze Book off the shelf. I remember the mazes in this. Or more particularly, I remember the pictures: the giant puppies crouched in the woods, the tables laden with teacups and saucers, the rivers. I remember the stories: Alice in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote and Gulliver on his travels which I always skipped because I didn’t like it. 
                I remember lying on the floor, book open before me, running my fingers over the oceans and the fields and interlocking paths. Each two-page spread constructs a maze for you to follow along in the main character’s journey. Each spread also has a clever flap that folds back and forth, opening a room or cave you hadn’t seen before. I liked that part, but the paths of the maze confused me. A letter, lying across the path, is meant to block the road. So is the line of a roof if the perspective is drawn so that the path crosses behind the house. The mazes are put together for you to follow a completely uninterrupted line from place to place. As a kid, looking at them, that confused me. I thought you could step over the letter. I thought you probably could go around behind that house, and for that matter, you could cut across these open green fields. I would look in the back of the book to find the solution you were supposed to take, and then look at the pictures again, trying to backsolve why that way was the right way. 
                I liked this book. I fell into it. I was bewildered by it. In its colors and lines, I don’t think I was trying to understand mazes. I was trying to understand the signals and signs by which people say that some paths can’t be walked, and some paths must be.

by Azlan

567: “A Series of Tales” (Arthur Conan Doyle)

                “You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” -Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

                In the last weeks I’ve been spending lots of time at my desk, revising my dissertation, thinking about arguments and stories and how they make different kinds of space for thoughts and relationships. It’s exhausting, consuming. Sometimes inspiring, especially as my dissertation is interwoven with my friends: conversations we’ve had, concerns we carry, hopes we share.
                In the last weeks my partner and I have also been reading Sherlock Holmes stories out loud together. Sometimes in the evening we listen to Holmes audio books and work on a puzzle together, watching mountains and trees as the pieces meet. When I was ten, eleven, and twelve I spent hours doing something similar with these same stories. I was putting together legos, then, my hands playing as my thoughts followed Sherlock Holmes. Reading out loud from Copper Beeches, or listening to my partner read out loud, I find another delight in tales: the delight of telling them again. 
                There’s a lot I love about Sherlock Holmes stories. There’s also a lot of awfulness, from the casual sexism and racism to the rational-as-all triumphalism that somehow protects both. I read out loud and hear the audio books I used to listen to. That voice still in my head. I listen to my partner read and remember untangling these mysteries as a kid. We can make and remake the stories of our childhood, the moments of determination and joy, the quiet misgivings that I didn’t know how to say then but I can say now. How wonderful that stories can live and then live again, changing. Reflecting how we’ve changed.

by Azlan

566: “Lapse Into Silence” (Jay Dragon)

“Additionally, anyone can do the following Whoopsies:
>Drop a soapy dish, and break it.
>Change the subject.
>Lapse into silence.”
                -Jay Dragon, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, page 108

                Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is built around a lot of wonderful, changing game mechanics, One of them is Bingos and Whoopsies. When you play a character, your Bingos are moments of playing to your strengths, fully engaging in the moment and who you are, helping work through a difficult problem, and so on. Your Whoopsies are moments of weakness and old faults coming out, tripping up the situation even more. Both move the story— that is, the game—in different shifting ways. 
                I started this post because, when I sat down to write, I liked the silence more than the sound of my fingers typing. Hours before that some friends and I were playing Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast. The chapter we were playing shows friends trying to share their uncertainty about their place in the world while washing the dishes from a big celebration. In that chapter, all players have additional Whoopsies: break a dish, change the subject (as someone tries to share something important), or lapse into silence. In the context of the chapter, I think “lapse into silence” means stop trying to say something important, or stop trying to respond to the piece of themselves a friend has just shared. But as we played, as the game led us through our characters’ attempts to talk about their place in the world, we found other meanings in that silence. Some of the characters’ most open, connective moments were shared silences. Sitting down to write I kept thinking about that. I didn’t want to write it, not yet. I wanted to listen to all the little sounds of the house. To the sound of voices hours or days after they’ve stopped talking.
                Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is built around a lot of wonderful, changing game mechanics. One of them makes me think about how sharing our brokennesses—tangling a situation even further—can also be part of fully engaging with the moment and who we are together.

by Azlan

565: “All Players Survive” (Kenna Alexander)

                “If you all make it through to the end of Turn 8, then all Players survive and win the game for a collective victory! Time to celebrate!
                In addition, if one Leader has more Status Awards than any other, they are elected as chief among all of the communities and are granted an additional victory. Congratulations! […] while it’s great bragging rights to say you had the most Status and were elected chief, it can only happen if you all get a collective win first.”
                -Kenna Alexander, Wolves (2024) rulebook

                It may come as no surprise to folks who know me that I usually prefer cooperative board games to competitive ones. Concept (2013). Pandemic Legacy (2015). The Crew (2019). Tranquility (2020). Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast (2022). I guess I like working with my friends more than trying to outsmart them. But it was absolutely a surprise, at least for me, to come across Kenna Alexander’s wonderful Wolves. 
                Wolves is “a semi-cooperative game about community survival.” I read the rules today, working out how its mechanics work. Tomorrow we’re having friends over to play. Sitting now, the box at my elbow, I’m struck by how easily I accepted cooperative and competitive as mutually exclusive categories. I remember teaching a friend a game (I can’t remember which), and whenever we came across a moment where one player would make a decision without talking to the others, my friend asked, “So wait, is it actually cooperative?” The question made sense to me. It was cooperative, or competitive. It couldn’t be both. 
                Except of course it can. Tonight my partner and I met some friends to ramble around our neighborhood, enjoying night’s cool. We stopped at a neighborhood park with a zipline. During the day it’s alive with nine and ten year olds, but I guess we stay up later. We took turns. We talked about how we jumped and swung and approached the zipline to go the fastest, bouncing off the far end and returning as close as we could to where we started. We saw how far one another went. We laughed, and then we kept walking. It’s a little thing. And the more I sit with it and Kenna Alexander, the more I’m wondering how many of the competitions I’m part of can only happen inside a larger collective win.

by Azlan

564: “Where Are You Going?” (Davies & Aduba)

                “Where are you going with this?” 
                “Don’t know. Won’t know till I get there.” -Paul William Davies and Uzo Aduba (who voices the line), The Residence 

                I didn’t post this on Monday because my partner and I were camping for a few days, out in the woods. Trees to listen to. Downy woodpeckers to meet. Moments to share. It was so good to be out of our usual rhythms. 
                Last week my friend Ishita and I talked about reverse outlining. She just finished her PhD. I have one more year in mine.I’ve been going back through all the different notes and chapter drafts that make up my dissertation-in-progress. Looking at these pieces. Thinking about what needs to come before what, what needs to be cut, what needs more detail. There’s something wonderful in that practice. Somewhere—in Letters to a Young Poet?—Rainier Maria Rilke quips something like, “When you give someone flowers, you arrange them beforehand, don’t you?” Editing can be arranging flowers: considering shapes and colors before I offer them to you, hoping you’ll like them.
                While I’m arranging, I’ve been writing new poems in conversation with a few friends. We give each other a starting place, like Lampshape or Smudged Mirror, and then (usually that same day) we sit and feel and listen and write and follow the images that come up, the memories, the words, until we are somewhere, and we call that somewhere a poem. We share it with each other. We don’t know where we’re going until we get there. That’s how we find ourselves here.

by Azlan

563: “No Single Thing” (Christopher Huang & Nghi Vo)

                “Surely a man like Colonel Russell couldn’t be the casualty of someone else’s story?” -Christopher Huang, A Pretender’s Murder, p. 116

                “I am a thousand stories of Northern Bell Pass, and an illustrious career in the capital, of a northern tribunal tricked. I am a father and a grandfather as well as a cleric, because no single thing takes away from the rest.” -Nghi Vo, Mammoths At The Gates, p. 112

                One of my least favorite things that fictions do is act like there’s a main character. A someone who all this swirls around. A someone who will necessarily make the key decision at the decisive moment. A hero. A villain. I think A Pretender’s Murder is commenting exactly on that: on the strange patterns some cultures have of reading themselves as the most important protagonist.
                One of my favorite things that fictions do is notice how so many threads weave together here, with no single thinking taking away from the rest. Mammoths At The Gates ends with a series of stories: connected and almost contradictory visions of who someone is, of who we are in gathering to hear about them, of who we all are together as we go on. Maybe I’m thinking about that modern phrase, main character energy, and about how wonderful it is to be another thread weaving through so many stories. I go for a walk and folks walking or sitting nearby wave at me. I wave back. Some of us are friends and some of us aquaintances and some of us strangers who live near one another. I love the stories that feel like that.

by Azlan

562: “Only One Script” (Olivia Atwater)

                “Sir Albus flailed at this, flustered out of his rhythm. He had only one script, Dora observed idly, and absolutely no imagination with which to deviate from it. ‘I…I could not possibly answer such an absurd question!’ he managed.”
-Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul, p. 8

                Many of us might have met a Sir Albus. A someone who, presented with almost any social situation, will probably a) launch into their pet familiar script and/or b) refuse to engage with questions that twist their familiar script in unexpected directions. Atwater’s Half A Soul is a kind of Regency England romantic “season” mixed with fae magic mystery. Albus’—pardon, Sir Albus’—script is purebred horses. The “absurd” question is about a creature that is part horse and part dolphin. It’s a world of magical creatures and humans and inbetween-beings, including the question-asker herself, but Albus doesn’t want to imagine any of that.
                The more worrisome—and perhaps more useful to think about—moments are when I recognize a bit of Sir Albus in myself. The moments when, given half a chance, I set out along my script, sharing my pat observations, tending toward my certain conclusions. I think those moments are part of why I like reading new things. Reading new things from people whose work I’ve never encountered. Reading things from people whose lives are so different than mine. If I have the script, I want to have the imagination, too, ready to hear the question and not simply think it “absurd.”

by Azlan

561: “By What You Do For No Reason” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “And I too seem to know you, not by where you live or what you eat, but by what you do for no reason. Or a reason so obvious there is no need to explain.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned, p. 69, in learning from “spinner” dolphins

                Earlier this evening my partner and I came back home from a long day and instead of going to the couch or the kitchen or the kitchen table where we play board games sometimes, we curled up in bed. Cool feet pressed against cool feet, beneath the covers, warming. After a little while we talked. After a little talk we were quiet again. Then we got up and I ate an apple. Sweet, bright, sunlight and rain grown together. She ate peanut butter and a banana: earth and rain gathered together, I’d guess, but I didn’t taste it. We sat quietly after she read a poem from a book that had leaned off the shelf in the library today, whispering to her, here. 
                I love knowing by what we do for reasons too obvious to explain. A kind of echolocation of the heart. Look: I am lying down. Look: I am licking apple juice from my fingers. Look: I am listening.

by Azlan

560: “The Age of a Thing” (Daniel H. Wilson)

                “The age of a thing is in the feel of it. Secrets are locked in the fingerprints of cracked porcelain and the bloom of rust on metal. You’ve just got to pick up a dusty artifact in both hands and squeeze your eyelids shut. With a little thought, the mind-reeling eons of time will stretch out before you like a star-filled sky.” -Daniel H. Wilson, The Clockwork Dynasty, p1

                Here’s a game, or a practice. Or an artwork with you as one of the paints:
                1) Pick up something. Most recently reading Daniel Wilson, I’ve played this with an orange and a plastic fork in the airport.
                2) Hold it in both hands. 
                3) Think about what you know of this piece’s history. Of the movements and relationships and materials that brought it here. That many-crossed web that now includes you.
                4) Think also about what you don’t know. I can imagine an orange tree, imagine soil, try to shift my image from the idyllic scene my mind goes to first to the giant farming operation that surrounded this orange I’m holding. But I don’t know where the tree was. I don’t know who tended it. I don’t know the path it took to here.
                5) Return and remember that you’re holding the object in both hands. Perhaps you can smell it. Perhaps you shift your skin against its skin.
                Wilson’s paragraph reminds me why I love museums, paintings, sculptures. Depending on how you count, I haven’t gotten to hold very many artifacts. I don’t want to diminish how some specific objects are poignant with time and life. But I do start wondering, what does the artifact of this orange whisper? And this plastic mass produced fork? As Wilson describes so beautifully, with a little thought, time and space open for me in ways that make me reel—and rebalance.

by Azlan

559: “What was it…?” (Rita Dove)

“What was it
I wanted to tell you?
I forgot. That’s how
everything goes now,
all of the time.”
-Rita Dove, from “Apology, With Interruptions”

                I was having particular trouble with this post. Flipping back through the powerful poems in Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and the interlaced stories of Daniel H. Wilson’s The Clockwork Dynasty, trying to land on a passage. Then going outside to where the jays and a cardinal and another bird I don’t know are landed in a maple tree. Talking. The wind licked by. A rabbit stood still, watching me. I stood still, not watching it. Cloudy sunlight on my bare shoulders. Then I went back inside and listened to a moving truck beep beep beep at my neighbor’s. This morning I checked, and the arugula seeds are sprouting, tiny drops of green like ink dropped upward into air. The leaves opening for a drink of cloudy sunshine. 
                I don’t know what piece of all these intersecting moments and lives I wanted to point to. I don’t know what I wanted to point out. If point out it to bring out a small piece, a certain this, I guess I wanted to—to circle in? Weave in? Web in?
                I let myself forget. Maybe I haven’t yet seen what I’m listening to. Maybe I want to listen until the urge to point fades into winds, chirps, beeps, bare skin, maple branches.

by Azlan