Not Every Story Is About Seeing Yourself In It. Sometimes It’s About Learning To See Other People Too.

Tuck me into the soil gently,

And pat it down around me please.

To join the sunshine and pretty weeds

I will sprout amongst the darling seeds.

let loamy soil gather in my boots.

Oh, to be warm and soft like roots.

Patiently wait for the vibrant fruits.

And care for me, intently.

when steinberg said black sails made treasure island a different book he was right (because treasure island from the pov of silver is now a desperate last ditch attempt to Be Someone and a clear fulfillment of flint’s curse rather than a story about a greedy and manipulative man) but black sails has also made every adaptation of treasure island a different adaptation. they have all become distorted mutilated retellings of a story (about a story) that is inherently one-sided and presents silver as a monster to be feared

Do you fall in love often?" "Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

Jeanette Winterson, from Gut Symmetries (via lifeinpoetry)

Ruminating on Reading

10.2.2022

I worry the things I read may not be artful enough to be ‘worth discussion’. Although they have worth to me, personally. It isn’t that the short stories or books I read are devoid of substance but it’s not like I’m usually struck by a particular phrase that makes my whole stomach drop out or anything. I read a lot of Terry Pratchett, his Discworld series in particular. I think they’re clever and funny. Pratchett is obviously careful and artful with his diction but it’s written in a welcome and plain language. His writing contains a lot of big ideas packaged in a way that makes it easy to engage with. I think I read a lot of ‘sharp’ and ‘clever’ writing in my daily life, I think I am particularly fond of the language and rhythm of comedy and jokes.

I can’t translate myself into language any more.

Alice Notley, from “Ruby Goes to Pieces,” Culture of One (via lifeinpoetry)

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

“Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.”

— Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (via anditslove)

Utility or Art?

10.01.2022

I roll out of bed at 9:00 am and immediately head down to the kitchen to make myself a coffee. While waiting for it to brew I root around for something to eat when I get the idea to make something requiring a little more effort, for the joy of it. I want to make a dutch baby. I don’t have any recipes memorized and before I just start winging it I want to get a simple base recipe I can play off, at least I will have something edible that way. I pull out my phone and search the web for a “dutch baby recipe”. The recipes I find are all portioned out to make a huge pancake, which isn’t what I want. I only want enough batter for a single serving. I would simply divide out the recipe until but the ingredients aren’t easily divisible into smaller portions- how do I divide one egg into thirds? Is that even something I should do? It’s better not to risk wasting all the ingredients. I try to revise my search with ‘mini dutch baby recipe’ this yields recipes that result in the same amount of batter but are just poured into muffin tins. This is absolutely not what I wanted. To me a ‘mini dutch baby’ is a singular, small pancake, not a multitude of muffin sized pancakes. Prompted by that thought I revise one more time and search for a ‘single serving dutch baby’ and I’m rewarded for finally coming up with the correct and precise wording. This is the first engagement with any language I have for the day. A utilitarian, logic puzzle which I solve with the most specific and plain wording possible so that the search engine algorithm will serve up what I’m looking for.

Is language only a utility for me? A tool I use thoughtlessly, artlessly? It’s not that I only know simple words, I know complex words. I know words that add in a hint of art, a flourish of description. I read, I learn- or I think I do. I ingest a lot of information. Short form and long form. I listen to podcasts, I watch movies and shows with complex narratives, I watch video essays on YouTube (I am trying to reach out and listen in on long-form conversations that I don’t get to have myself). But still I feel like all of that is merely consumption on some level. I never “have enough time” to actually dive in and explore. I only have time to play a two hour long video in the background of doing other work. I have stacks of books sitting next to my bed that I’ve sorted into my “reading order” from the top down but the stack never gets any shorter. In my phone’s bookmark section are links to short stories and speculative fiction stories I haven’t read. ‘Someday when I have time to sit down and really digest this properly, in its entirety, I’ll read this.’ I always think, but I rarely do. 

Then again is the mere utility of language bad? is it ‘bad’  that I use language as a means to an end to produce other art? Should I really be framing the most basic form of language use as rudimentary or undeveloped? Naturally I hope to become more enamored with deeper use of language in my personal life as time goes on but then on the other hand the simple utility of language also allows me to create all the same. I don’t think of myself as a ‘writer’. To me that word implies a purpose and competence of wielding language as an art form. I don’t think I really could claim to be that. Despite my lack of ‘artful language’ I hope that I will not place value judgments on the usage of language. Prose and metaphor and artfulness as strictly good and thoughtful and the literal as vulgar and mundane. I’d like to make room for both.

A Completely Utilitarian Dutch Baby Recipe:

1 egg

1/4 cup milk

1/4 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 cup flour

2 tbsp. butter

Heat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit, and place a small skillet or cake pan or other oven safe dish in the oven while it is heating up. Whisk egg, milk, and vanilla in a bowl until combined. Add in flour and gently stir. Take the pan out of the oven, butter the bottom and sides. Pour in batter and bake for ten minutes.

Artful Flourishes:

Add in a little extra flour and 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder, this will make the pancake slightly fluffier and I find it to be a far better texture than the dense chewy pancake that will result without any leavening agent. Add a pinch or two of brown sugar.

Some small amount of lemon juice and zest. Enough to add to the flavor but not enough to curdle the milk in the batter.

If you did not bake in a cast-iron skillet, remove the dutch baby from the oven and lightly butter the surface of the pancake. Bake for an additional 1-2 minutes to slightly brown the pancake.

Improvise yourself a mixed berry syrup by chucking in random almost expired berries from your fridge. Realize that you don’t have enough berries so quickly peel and cut up a peach you find in a bowl on the counter. Throw in some sugar and some cinnamon. Maybe add some lemon juice and zest. Gently boil it on a stove to thicken the juices into a syrup. Pour on top of your pancake and enjoy.

“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious”

— Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

What she says: im fine

What she means: the average age of conception over the past 250k years is apparently 26.9. Let's round it down to 25. Think of your birth mother. Hold her hand. Imagine her holding hands with her mother. Within 4 people, you're back in time 100 years, and it's an intimate family dinner. Just after WWI. Add another 16 people, a small party of 20, and you're in the 1500s. Double it, twice, and you're at 80 people. Your family would fill a restaurant, and you're at the height of the Roman empire. At 100 people, Confucius is alive but Socrates has not yet been born. 100 people. That's a medium sized wedding. A small lecture theatre or concert. 200 people, probably the biggest party i could ever hope to host, takes you back 5000 years. The guests at your soirée of parents would be contemporaries of the Egyptian and Indus Valley civilisations, although you'd probably be too busy fixing drinks and nibbles to talk to all of them. Just imagine it. 200 of you. That's all it takes to get back 5,000 years. And we could go further. 1000 people, a decent sized concert, a large high school, and we're at the end of the last ice age. Your ancestors are comparing their pink floyd vinyl with music played on instruments carved from wood or bones of long vanished species. Wander through the crowd. See your own features and phrases and gestures refract out like a kaleidoscope. What would they make of you? What do you make of them? Why does it feel so unfair that even that first 100 years --that small family dinner of four--is out of your grasp? Maybe it's because questions of spatial distance have become negligible to us now. why, oh why, does time hold out against us so stubbornly