Tag: fiction

548: “Thinking and Seeing” (Nick Sousanis)

                “Perception is not dispensable. It’s not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing, we expand our thinking and concept of what thinking is.” -Nick Sousanis, Unflattening, p. 81

                I’ve been making space to think by looking lately, and in looking, I’ve been finding paths of my thinking. Some thoughts in images:
                The overwhelm of this particular work week in the scatter of the kitchen table where I’m typing, the lunch bowl and rumpled napkin and loose handwritten pages and book stacks and dried mango and fingerless gloves. The overwhelm and the delight, too: these inspiring books, that sweet mango, those delicious noodles now a memory in the bowl.
                The power of warm soft touch: my partner beneath a blanket, stretched on the couch, typing her own overwhelm or inspiration. Seeing her steadies me, and when I snuggle in beside her I’ll make sure to tuck the blanket around our feet. It’s 9 degrees outside.
                Which reminds me: a squirrel’s tracks and mine and a bird’s in the bright snow. A neighbor’s red hands at the bus stop. Our shared smile-grimace-smile. The snowy road, worn to patches of cement, as we look back, waiting for the bus, trusting, trust and community infrastructure a pattern of bare trees with sleeping leaves inside and the road and the bus coming soon.
                I’ve been looking as a practice of thinking. Thinking along the paths and branches and tracks and patterns I see.

by Azlan

547: Stories Together (Acosta, Dragon, Harris & Veselak)

                “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly.” -Mercedes Acosta, Jay Dragon, Lillie J. Harris, and M. Veselak, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, p. 310

                Tonight I stepped out from the cozy room—that’s what we call it; it has a fireplace!—to chop some carrots and celery for snacks. By the time I got back, our friend Margie was drinking tea, and Bella had set on the table a bag of sour gummies. (I love sour gummies). They were talking with my partner Majo about holidays, family dynamics, relationships, cooking. We kept talking. Munched sour gummies. Carrots. Celery.
                “Sal sighed,” alone, isn’t much of a story. “Parish sighed” isn’t much of a story. But “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly”—that’s a story I might want to be part of. And luckily I could be, because Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast is a storytelling game, the kind where friends gather around and make up a story together. (The game has pieces and patterns to support that). Tonight the four of us played for the first time. I don’t have a new idea in this post—at least, I don’t think I do. Just the old idea, or that returning feeling, that writing is my favorite when there are many hands drawing out the words, and my least favorite when it’s isolated, locked in a word processor, individually controlled, alone. Typing this I’m looking down at lyrics Bella wrote on one page of our shared game. At Margie’s little doodle on another page, titled, “Bath salt.” At the colors Majo gave Amelie’s character portrait. And now I’ll stop writing and keep talking with Majo about the game and our days and what snacks to have before bed, because Sal sighed, Parish sighed, Amelie buzzed softly, and it’s in the mix I feel a story moving.

by Azlan

537: “A Live Fish?!” (Badell, Rebottaro, & Bender)

“Bunker: ‘A live fish?!’
The Wraith: ‘The true crimefighter always carries everything she needs in her utility belt, Tyler.’”
                -Flavor text for The Wraith’s Utility Belt card in Sentinels of the Multiverse by Christopher Badell, Adam Rebottaro, and Paul Bender

                I don’t love this quote just because I love the image. A Batman style utility belt, and inside a live fish—maybe a little dace—of course in water because otherwise it won’t stay alive for long. And I don’t love it just because my friends and I were playing Sentinels of the Multiverse yesterday, and Hannah stopped us, saying: “Wait. This card’s actually pretty funny.” Though maybe in part this post is a you had to be there moment. So much of language is, isn’t it? A connection in a place and time. A hand holding a fish. You had to be there, and it all made sense.
                There’s also something ridiculous about that superhero trope of carrying everything you need. Of somehow being fully independent of context and situation, as though prepared enough could keep you dry in a rainstorm, cool in a heatwave, could help you chat with friends around a board game, cure your cancer, ready you for a loved one’s death or an old friend’s return, or the pipes freezing, or your joints aging, or life, or death. Could be ready for all the endless perhapses and certainties of a changing world. For that you really would need a live fish. Or maybe, instead, you could let the fish go back in the river, where it would rather be. Swimming along. Not helplessly, not mindlessly. Not ready for anything but responding to this. These changing currents of river and world. You had to be there, but luckily, you are.

by Azlan

531: “Undermine Your Own Authority” (Stacey Waite)

                “17. Undermine your own authority, be certain in your uncertainty, develop a voice that can be trusted even as it is subjective, unreliable, and impossibly to pin down, unless of course, you want to be pinned down in a sexy way.” -Stacey Waite, “How (And Why) To Write Queer,” Re/Orienting Writing Studies p. 45

                Stacey Waite develops a wonderful, poetic list of 63 rules for writing queer, which can mean many things including (for me, at least) write against the ways you were told it had to be written, and write into the ways you need. Which means part of the joy of Waite’s rules is that you can’t follow them, or can’t get to where they point by following them. And part of the joy is that it’s a delight to pick them up like dance steps you’re trying to learn by watching someone across the crowd. In these last weeks as I write cover letters for job applications—so many “Dear So-and-So’s,” so many “Sincerelys,” so many “my experiences”—I’ve thinking back to Waite’s rules. Imagining a few more to go with them.
                64. Write without getting to the point, and then when you realize you’ve meandered off just go back to what you meant to start saying, or as close as you can get to it, by which I mean this is a post about how exhausted and overwhelmed I was at about 3:32 today (and 3:25, I suppose; it doesn’t happen all in a minute). Even with everything—especially with everything—my family has patterns for speaking the things we need to say, so that with my brother I say I’ve just been reading Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season, it’s so good, and with my dad I say I’m out for a walk just saying hi, and with my mom I say I hope you slept well last night, and with me my partner says do you want to sit and breathe together for a few minutes, and maybe none of those are exactly where we meant to end up, but they’re where we make space to remind ourselves to start.
                65. Start every sentence with “so.” So we can see you thinking. So you can keep thinking. So the train of your thought can puff its steam as it gets going. So we can hear the steam. So you can mix metaphors willy-nilly. So words are a dance and even if we’re out of step we hear the steps, hear the music, hear how we’re lagging or catching up and dancing.
                66. Forget where you were going. Do you need to be going? Did you want to be coming back?

by Azlan

525: “The Dark Gulp of the Sea” (Emily Tesh)

                “So it came now, the dark gulp of the sea, roaring through the Wood.” -Emily Tesh, Drowned Country, p. 129

                Emily Tesh’s Drowned Country walks, in part, through an ocean that was once forest before the waters flooded over. Through the twists and turns of the book’s magic, a knot of friends travel back and forth through time: from the ocean bluffs they were born near to the Woods that lived there before the ocean washed over the land, and back again.
                In Illinois I live on earth that was once oceanfloor, and before that was forestfloor. Earth that knew glaciers and their long melting. I remember one of my first walks when I moved here, staring up at the clouds, trying to recognize the wonderful beauty of this particular place. The closest I could get was a scrap of song: the sky here’s like an ocean.
                I can’t travel like Tesh’s characters. But outside today, I wonder if we all walk the same grand changes. Forested bluffs worn away to oceans. I’ve been in those rolling waves. Lakes filled in with silt till they’re meadows. I’ve disappeared into those shallows. In my short lifespan it can be hard for me to see the currents of these changes. The Woods (Tesh says) see them differently. So today I’m watching the trees, thinking about what they might see, wondering what I can feel of time and earth and sky painting together.

by Azlan

524: “Reading Here and There” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Slowly, I go through the stacks, reading here and there until I find the book of which I must read every word. Then I do read every word, beneath a very bright lamp. When my brain is stuffed my daughters and I go swimming, play poker, or eat. Life consists of nothing else.” -Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, p. 94

                My father in law texted me yesterday: “Santa Rosa -> SFO -> Nashville -> Urbana?” 
                Yes, I texted back, although “Nashville -> Indianapolis -> Urbana.” For the last leg of our flight Maria José and I were skirting around a big storm front. The pilot took us out east past Columbus before turning back west toward our airport, the clouds outside our window washed with lightning.
                Today I spent hours thinking about and feeling and rearranging thoughts and words for a 700ish word passage in an article draft. Eventually I found, yes, this is what I’m trying to say. Trying to sit with. Yesterday we spent fourteenish hours, all in all, coming home. Or traveling from the home that is being with my parents in California to the home that is here, our garden patch, our zuchinis grown giant while we were traveling. Before bed we read a bit from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. The first time I started reading that book, I ploughed through 50 pages, pulled along by some productive impulse to finish and understand. Then I skittered off and stopped. This time Maria José and I are reading a few pages almost every night. Another garden patch we come back to.
                So today I’m thinking about Louise Erdrich and how she reads. How I read: sometimes with that learned, enforced impulse to get through and comprehend, but sometimes grazing, tasting the grass, tasting what’s growing, until I find someplace I am and sink in. Until I’m done reading and go swimming with family. I love the time and space to go all over before I pause someplace. I need that time and space to start. To find a pause, lightning aflicker, and then the rain starts playing its pianos.

by Azlan

523: “Comes Back” (Hap Palmer)

                “Sitting in a high chair, big chair, my chair, sittin’ in a high chair, bang my spoon!
                -Hap Palmer, “Sittin’ in a High Chair”

                “She always comes back, she never would forget me…”
                -Hap Palmer, “My Mommy Comes Back”

                This week I’ve been showing my beloved Maria José some of the places where I grew up. 
                The path outside my dad’s house, grassy now and scattered with dry pine needles, but deep with snow midwinter when I’m 9, stepping outside to help him shovel. 
                The pier at the lake where we jumped in, the cool dark breaking open to hold us.
                The beach where, at 16, I built a warm, dry little driftwood house with my best friend.
                The pool where my mom held me in the water, and later I learned to swim, somewhere back before my memory of years and ages.
                The hills where I watched tadpoles and frogs, always unsure how one becomes the other, already waist deep in the wonder of mud and algae. 
                Tonight, inside after these places, we listened to songs I remember from before I remember. I’m struck by how lush and joyous such childhood tastes of the world could be. Worlds so full of flavor. I sit with how scary, how sad, these tastes could be. I was a kid sometimes so lost. And grounding. A little more than a year after our wedding, it’s a delight to be sharing these children we were, these delights and uncertainties we’re rooted in, these places we grow.

by Azlan

520: “I hold onto her foot” (Louise Erdrich)

                “Sometimes I look at men, at the way most of them move so freely in the world, without a baby attached, and it seems to me very strange. Sometimes it is enviable. Mostly, it is not. For at night, as she curls up or sprawls next to me and as I fall asleep, I hold onto her foot. This is as much for my comfort as to make sure that she doesn’t fall off the bed. As I’m drifting away, I feel sorry for anyone else who is not falling asleep this way, holding onto her baby’s foot. The world is calm and clear. I wish for nothing. I am not nervous about the future. Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books.”
                -Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, p. 53.

                For the last several nights I’ve been having pretty intense nightmares. And when I do, when I wake up at two and three in the morning, my thoughts spinning in ways I don’t know how to sit with, I reach out and hold my beloved’s hands. Or wrist. Or shoulder. Sometimes knee, if we’re all puzzled on the bed. It varies, like the sense of love and peace and connection varies, and it also flows along to a related touch.
                Perhaps that’s different from what Erdrich is describing here. I also remember holding my little sibling when they were one and falling asleep. Or holding my brother’s children when they were infants, and older, remember their small limb nestled in my hand. Dreaming. I remember being a place where they could sleep and dream. In another way, I think I remember and still feel my own small wrist or ankle or arm held in someone’s caring hands. My mother’s. Father’s. A family friend’s, which means family.
                A lot of my cultural training emphasizes freedom as being not responsible for others, as being free of other people, to choose and do as you want. Whether or not you want to call that freedom, that’s not what I’m seeking. I don’t think I know anyone who’s been made happier or more vibrant in spirit because of such lack of responsibility. And I know too many people who are sadder or lost or frightened from searching for it. So I want to be held, to reach out, to be holding.

by Azlan

518: “I Needed You Once” (Split Fiction)

                “I needed you once, but not anymore.”
                […]
                “So, she’s finally gone? Good for you. ‘Cause that Dark Mio? Total party pooper.”
                –Split Fiction

                My partner and I are almost done playing through Split Fiction. We’re loving it. But one scene from last week keeps making me shake my head. So yes, minor spoilers ahead.
                Split Fiction ends up sending its two main characters into their own subconsciouses (one after the other). In each subconscious, the two heroines fight some part of themselves. You can guess the parts: Fear. Anger. Guilt. The common “negative emotions” of storytelling worlds. Mio helps push a massive cyber scythe (it’s all robot themed! The whole game has very cool artwork) into Dark Mio’s angry guts. Mio says: “I needed you once, but not anymore.” A few beats later Mio’s friend confirms, “So, she’s [Dark Mio’s] finally gone? Good for you.” Everyone’s healing path is their own, and there’s a place for letting go of ways of thinking that aren’t helping. But for me, I guess, there’s a difference between letting go and actively trying to murder. There’s a difference between trying to get rid of and trying to make peace with.
                I’m thinking here about developmental psychologist Gordon Neufuld, who points out that people in the US and Canada are taught to rely on “cut it out” language with kids—stop hitting, stop yelling, don’t bite. Neufeld says cut it out just isn’t a very helpful instruction: if you’re angry, there is an urge to yell. Maturity (he says) comes not from murdering the angry voice, but from adding in a counterbalancing voice: remember that you love your brother. Remember that hitting hurts, and you don’t want to hurt your friends. Beyond that, there will be plenty of times when you do still need your anger, your fear, your guilt. Even if right now you don’t need them controlling your every move.
                In Scott Pilgrim vs The World, doesn’t Scott end up having to fight Dark Scott— and instead they talk, get to know each other, realize they can be friends? That story makes more sense to me. Or feels more sense. I didn’t want to kill Dark Mio. I wanted to make peace with her, and see how she and Mio could meet, listen to each other—whole, strong, compassionate, angry when they need to be, caring when they need to be.

by Azlan

516: “Emphasis on Personality” (Chana Porter)

                “Trina moved into performance, both sound and video, involving her own body in the practice. She got a little bit famous and had some minor love affairs, made Deeba proud of her celebrity wife. Then she got bored of the art world; of its pageantry, its emphasis on personality.”
-Chana Porter, The Seep, p. 14

                Almost a decade ago (wow! Time sure washes along) I wrote about Julie Lythcott-Haims and the way passions are commodified into something we have to find—and perhaps sell. Six months ago my partner and I read Chana Porter’s The Seep. And I laid in bed, wondering if cults of individuality lead in part to this dead-end emphasis on personality.
                These days that’s often staged on social media: the influencer’s brand, and how whatever else they’re selling—investment software or skincare serums—they’re selling them. Their energy, fast and larger than life, homey and honest. I think it long predates social media: think of Hollywood stars. Think of celebrity artists. Think of politicians. Think of me, a teacher, told to develop my “teacher persona” and consolidate it into something authoritative and approachable and boundaried and wise and easy to understand and consumable. If individuals are so important, the most important thing around, then a distinct personality has to mean something.
                For me, I think, it means very little. I’ve been reading Moses Ose Utomi’s novellas, but I don’t think it’s his personality that I love. In part it’s the way his imagined world pulls at, reveals, and complicates the world I imagine to be true. In part its the sensory rhythm of sounds. And in person—well, is it really my friend’s personality I’m drawn to, the performance of a particular self? I think it’s more specific: this conversation. This walk together. This game. And more general: this shared gentle silence in which we care for each other. It’s at once more action and more being, and less a pageantry of self.

by Azlan