Uproar – a quote every Wednesday

515: “Tell One Teammate” (Antoine Bauza)

                A player “can then tell one teammate something about the tiles in front of that teammate.” -Antoine Bauza, Hanabi

                The tile game Hanabi unfolds a lot like solitaire, except you’re playing with a team—my favorite is two people—and no one can see their own tiles. Instead, they can see everyone else’s. Then players share information through specific rules so everyone knows (or can guess) what to play next. It’s wonderful.
                And, okay, maybe I’m biased, because communication games have been my favorite for a long time. My partner and I have been playing a lot of them lately. Hanabi, and Sky Team. Maybe it’s because in these kinds of games everyone can only win together. It’s a shared thing, the game we’re playing. Maybe it’s because communicating is really hard. Figuring out when everyone’s free to come together and play a game? That’s hard. Coordinating schedules for summer visits to family far away? That’s hard. Working out the gentle intricacies of this is what I’m hoping for, this is who I am, this is how I can meet you—it’s hard. I spend a lot of time thinking about to share with the people I want to share with. And then sometimes there’s a delightful colorful game that makes magic out of all that with these tiles that, tic, nudge each other and smile.

by Azlan

514: An “Archive of Feelings” (Jack Halberstam)

                “In this other archive [of feelings], we can identify, for example, rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, insincerity, earnestness, overinvestment, incivility, and brutal honesty.” -Jack Halberstam building from Ann Cvetkovich’s idea of “an archive of feelings,” “​​The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” p. 824

                I think the archive of feelings I’m thinking from, the feelings I habitually sit inside and move from, has a lot to do with where I am. And so I’ve been thinking about how I make that archive from the people I’m around. How I open myself to these connections. How I don’t.
                I’ve spent the last three days at an academic Research Institute— in depth discussions for hours each—and the evenings at my friend’s house, petting their dog, sharing food, laughing and reconnecting and feeling sleepy. The Institute is a combination of making new, inspiring connections with other scholars, and performing a kind of professional expertise. The evenings are fur covered, with deer grazing just outside the window, muh to the dog’s excitement. Or nervousness? Or interest? After three days of this I’m thinking about the archives of feelings into which my experiences grow.
                My friend, intent on putting up another stretch of wall paper. Fixated, they’ve described it. Determined, I might say. I get that way about a thought or a task sometimes. It’s intense/painful/pleasurable/frustrating/presumptive, like needing to sneeze, but the sneeze comes out as sustained meticulous effort.
                My partner, sitting next to me beneath a blanket. A little while ago (when she was in bed) I asked her how she was and she texted back an image of Boo from Monsters Inc looking almost asleep. And I’ve felt that— the image more than the words. At peace/exhausted/overwhelmed, in place, slow, like happy snot sinking into soil.
                A colleague, leaning forward to share a connection they’ve just started making between two kinds of understanding, a connection they’re inviting us to make. Excited/curious/unsure. A colleague and a friend, leaning back, silent, unwilling to pretend the kind of expertise they’re hearing performed. Angry. Silent. Ready to connect another way.
                I think that, from all these, I learn ways I might be. Ways I am. I sit into them, the ones that don’t fit so well, the ones that do, the ones that bend toward a new kind of fitting.
                The dog, paws up on the windowsill. The deer outside. Where do I graze, like she does, tasting world?

by Azlan

513: “Woohoo, overtime!” (Starcraft 2)

                “Woohoo, overtime!” –Starcraft 2

                Well, it’s happening again. I want to reinstall Starcraft 2. The thing is, I never really want to be playing it…but when I’m not playing, sometimes I feel this building wish to start.
                I think it works like this.
                Even when I was 12 and 13 and 14, the part that drew me to a lot of games (Age of Empires II, Starcraft, Warcraft III, Age of Mythology) was “base building.” You’re dropped on an island, or an alien planet, or in a forest. You have a few villagers or SCVs. There are resources around, waiting to be stripped, and so you expand your little settlement to include more workers, then more refineries and other buildings to help with resource extraction, then a new command center to make new workers to gather more resources on another part of the map. The goal was to create an army, but honestly, that wasn’t the part I wanted. I wanted the workers. The town centers. The ever-growing pile or resources. The controllable world in which I knew the steps to take toward more and more, and therefore toward enough. Toward safety. Toward plenty. Toward something, which was always actually out of reach, outside of the code, as the game gears for war and the erasure of some constructed Other. And finally a dead world stripped of all its minerals and vehicle-powering gases.

by Azlan

512: “My plans are all unmade!” (The Goes Wrong Show)

                “Aaah! Thus with this wound, my plans are all unmade!” –The Goes Wrong Show, “The Most Lamentable…”

                If you haven’t watched it, The Goes Wrong Show puts on plays that—well—wonderfully, and terribly go wrong. Swords swung into theater lights. Scripts aflame. Doors that are supposed to open left locked, and actors stumbling through paper walls that had been painted to look like stone.
                I’ve been talking with scholars lately about their research, and about the strange expectation that they should be able to outline their results or contribution or significance before they’ve started re-ing or searching. How that expectation is even stranger for any research involving community collaborations. How would I know what we want to look for, what we want to do, before we get together to talk about it? Today, sitting on the floor, eyes still half teary from chuckling, all that melds with the silliness of “The Most Lamentable.” Because my plans (such as they are) so rarely go as planned. (A chuckle. I’m even bad at cooking from recipes!). Because in the mad escalation from one mistake to another, one catastrophe to another, there’s a chance to turn from looking for control to playing with a moment. (More chuckles). Nothing on fire—yet—in this writing, but I want that play. And this isn’t quite what I meant to say. Oh dear. I’m stumbling past the point, or around it, or through a painted wall, and then who knows where we are?

by Azlan

511: “Tears Are Precious” (Moses Ose Utomi)

                “Tears are precious, his mama always said. Don’t waste them on your enemies. Save them for your friends.”
                -Moses Ose Utomi, The Lies of the Ajungo, p. 4

                What this means, in the context of Moses Ose Utomi’s wonderful little novella, is complex. Layered. I’m still tracing all the many things it makes me think. But as I struggle with this year’s worries and fears and sadnesses, the line keeps coming back to me. It’s becoming something of a practice.
                I think most of my daily hurts are also kinds of loves. When my friend says (for instance), There’s so much to do, I’ve been literally slapping myself to stay awake, I hurt for them. Because of how much I care for them, because of the place where I see them to be. And so with my family, with my town, with my country. When I tell someone I’m sorry it’s been a rough day, and they answer, not really rougher than others—it’s just, day by day, I could talk about it, but I usually don’t—it’s hard for me to know what to say. What to do. Especially when I don’t know how to help, and then I feel helpless. Thinking back to Utomi’s lines, while I feel the wrongness of the situation they’re in—or the wrongness of the people who are hurting them—I’ve been wondering what happens if I consciously turn towards this person. My friend. The one I want to help protect, care for, cry for. Or with. This, yes, but more than this—you.

by Azlan

510: “A Community’s Emotional Lives” (Billy-Ray Belcourt)

                “I would write a book that reflected a community’s emotional lives rather than just my sensory experience of the present. […] In talking to those who came from where I came from, I also hoped light would be shed on the person I was or the person I might become.”
                -Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree), A Minor Chorus, p. 29-30

                I’ve been wanting to write a post on this quote since October or so. And I haven’t been able to. It’s funny: there are few books I’ve picked up and fallen in love with more deeply than Belcourt’s A Minor Chorus, and still, in the months since I started, I haven’t finished. I think that’s because I realized this book would be useful for my research, and that pushed me toward reading to finish it, and that’s not how I’d started reading. Not how I wanted to read. I wanted to respect it as what I first recognized it to be, which might be something like a meeting place.
                All this is on my mind tonight because I just ran over to my friend Vuyo’s apartment to drop off A Minor Chorus and Belcourt’s This Wound is a World. Vuyo’s thinking through some of her own writing, and these will join the conversations on her page. And all of a sudden this book—which stopped feeling alive to me when I wanted to take something from it; which I had gotten far away from, so even as it sat on my bedside table or my bed or my dresser or my kitchen table, I didn’t read it—this book feels really close. I want to read it, just as I’ve left it with my friend. I think it’s because the book’s enmeshed, again, for me, in a community of relationships. Mine. Billy-Ray’s. Vuyo’s. And more than why, there’s a poignant reminder in the nearness and farness, the wish to read at the moment when the book’s with a friend. Maybe some kinds of being apart weaving through some kinds of being together is part of understanding yourself through a living community. Maybe the emotional lives I’m thinking about unfold in the ways we both have and don’t have a touch of one another. Like a book I’ll fall in love with all over again when it comes back, after missing it, after enjoying the thought of it in my friend’s hands, talking with her.

by Azlan

509: “Become Slow” (Thích Nhất Hạnh)

                “Breathing in, I notice that my in-breath has become deep. 
                Breathing out, I notice that my out-breath has become slow. 
                Deep, slow. 
                Enjoy.”
                -Thích Nhất Hạnh, in this guided meditation

                A long time ago, in trying to help her two kids stay calm and engaged on long car rides, my mom brought along cassette tapes of guided meditations from Thích Nhất Hạnh. I don’t think I remember them. But I absolutely remember being told how much we objected to them. It’s part of our family lore: my mom puts in the tape, and then young voices from the backseat are shouting no, no, we don’t want this tape, turn it off.
                All that makes me smile. Perhaps because, one, as life goes along I connect more and more with my mom, trying to support her kids as they shout back nos (which she listened to, by the way—turning off the tape, though I think she tried again after a while). And two, because I recognize the love in it, the love that tries and struggles and offers and sometimes doesn’t go how you expected (and keeps trying). And three, because my partner and I just shared the Thích Nhất Hạnh guided meditation linked above. Listening to his voice—I was wrong, I do remember it, as we remember childhood before the actions and images of storied memory—I enjoy breathing. Enjoy it like leaves drinking in the sun. Enjoy it as lungs sipping at the sky.
                Breathing in, I notice that my in-breath has become deep. 
                Breathing out, I notice that my out-breath has become slow. 
                Deep, slow. 
                Enjoy.
                I love how some seeds take a long time to grow.

by Azlan

508: “A Magic Trick” (Jonas Hassen Khemiri)

                “Structure is a magic trick to let us keep writing.” -Jonas Hassen Khemiri, at a Craft Talk at the U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on March 6, 2025

                A lot of the creative writers I know talk a lot about structure. I guess for the same reason the gardeners I know talk about seasons, soil, water. It’s how they do what they do. A piece of writing (this one, at least) is a collection of words, punctuation, sentences strung together till there’s space—ground—with ideas growing.
                I often feel bullied by structure. By the expectation to put thoughts together in this way, or that way. Why am I writing these words here right now, instead of telling you about how warm it’s getting in Illinois? Instead of saying the phlox outside is in full bloom, and I might have made a new friend today, walking along through campus. Sometimes I think friends grow like flowers. Another friend, Marina, recently wrote a piece in which they laugh at themselves for talking about the weather, and then say something like, what I mean is that I’m wanting to pay attention. To be grounded in the sensory wash of here and now and who I share this with. It’s warm. A little windy. The phlox is purple-pink, like dreaming magic. You could say Uproar is 508 scattered attempts to pay attention. To what I’m hearing. To how what I hear lives on in what I’m thinking, how I’m walking, how I show up to say hello.
                The structure—the quote at the top, the couple of paragraphs, perhaps a moment from my life—is one way I’m trying to do that. So maybe a piece of writing (this one, at least) is a hope and a delight toward being connected, and the words, punctuation, sentences are a magic trick we’re making together to hold how our wishes come apart and together.

by Azlan

507: What Happens In a Ross Gay Reading?

                “We all know nothing happens only when it happens” -Ross Gay, Be Holding: A Poem, and read tonight on April 16 in Champaign Urbana, Illinois

                Tonight I got to meet Ross Gay, author of catalog of unabashed gratitude (which my mom gave me in 2012, maybe, or 2014), author of The Book of Delights (which lived for a long time on my bedside table, and on my desk, and for a little bit in my garden), author of inciting joy (which I just got tonight), author of a lovely evening reading, as he’s a delightful and delighted person who paused several times tonight to laugh with us or laugh about what we laughed at. And in so many ways in his poems and beyond his poems Ross Gay brings my communities together.
                By which I mean that so many of the local people I’m close to were there for the reading. Old teachers of mine, and fellow students, and older students who told me “this might help you grad school” when I was starting out, and newer students to whom I’ve tried to mumble useful things, and people I work with, like Carmen who was at my house yesterday, identifying all the different plants dancing up now that it’s spring, like Nathalie who I cowrote with all last fall, like another friend, who’s made for herself the kind of work where lots of what she does is introduce people to other people they might like. A kind of work that Ross Gay’s writing does, and is, as we all got together to be part of singing it while saying and listening and laughing.
                By which I mean that these communities are not restricted to local folks here, but brings me to my mother, who gave me the book that I set aside for a while and then drank down, delighted. To my siblings (both far away) who would love parts of what Ross Gay read tonight. To my friend Dani’s mom, Lesle, who learned about (and started to love) Ross Gay after I shared a poem with Dani and Dani shared that poem with her mom. And now I’ve met Lesle and that poem is something we all share together. In this happening that is not locked to tonight’s reading, I’m also sitting with students in Oklahoma circa 2016 when I taught these poems, us all walking along to each other in Ross Gay’s words. I’m going back to old friends who’ve moved away but who walk these paths and so who I might come back to in these poems.
                By which I mean that Ross Gay, asked tonight about the acknowledgements section in his books, and about who he was feeling indebted to, talked about so many different neighbors. The ones who call over because they’re cooking something, and wonder if he wants some. The one who sent that video of a dog and a person playing Jenga because Ross Gay has a dog in the house since December. The ones who all get together to garden. And in this happening that is not just the now of one moment where one thing is happening, we bump together for a moment, but gently. Or tend the arugula that is yes now tall enough to dance when the wind tickles.

by Azlan

506: “Mi Vida Les Agobia” (Alaska y Dinarama)

“Mi vida les agobia
¿Por qué será?”
[My life overwhelms them—
And why is that?]
                -Alaska y Dinarama, “A Quien Le Importa”

                My love and I have been watching La Casa de las Flores (The House of Flowers), mostly because it’s so much wild fun, and so good to lie down and snuggle at the end of the day. Last night the third episode finished with my favorite scene so far. A young man coming out to his family takes advice from a queer performer, and so sings his coming out. But (as his sisters remind us, when he stands up to start) he’s no singer. The show’s filming blends from the awkward, uncertain beginning of his song to a color-washed version of the same performance, the young man shifting from hesitating to alight. From awkward to alive. And then we go back to the first, reserved version. The bright version was “in his head,” you might say. (In that version both his parents are joyful, supportive). Or maybe we were seeing for a little while with our hearts and our hopes and our delights.
                I love when art blends these two: a world “a camera might capture,” you could say (though it’s not that simple), and a world inside. Blends them, and shows how interconnected they are. Last year I learned that broadleaf plantains are edible, and so these days I walk around the neighborhood, and where before I saw weeds, weeds, weeds, I see foods, salads, delights.

by Azlan