the slow and unyielding march of time | episode 32

I really love the ocean. I find giant bodies of water to be very calming, which I know is not quite the correct reaction to have to a writhing, teaming entity of liquid that could disappear me without a trace almost instantly. And yet!

I’ve been meaning to sit down and write, but things were really rough for awhile, and I don’t like just boring everyone with all the bummer things going on in my life. So instead, I bathed the inside of my brain with video games and sensory-depriving substances and kind of just turned off for awhile. I basically wrapped my brain up in tissue paper and put it in the attic for awhile.

But it’s time to take it out and unwrap it and make sure it’s still functioning, so I am trying to turn back towards things like sleep, exercise and reading which to my great and everlasting irritation, does help. On the first of January, I went to the ocean, not because I think January first is an important demarcation of the passage of time (I’m sorry, it’s not!) but because it was a really nice day and I didn’t have anything to do.

I was sort of sad I hadn’t brought a swimsuit; a polar plunge was very compelling in the moment. (Although the train ride home would have involved a lot of chattering teeth!) So I had to be content with waggling my fingers into the water to say hello to the ocean. I felt grounded. I’m trying to hold onto that feeling.

Recently, David and I took a floral arrangement class through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was pretty fun; the instructor was kind of “kooky” in the way that niche artisan instructors often are, giving really broad advice that wasn’t always super useful. (“Think texture!” “Rule of odd numbers!”)

I was pretty happy with my final arrangement, and it contained no plants that could kill our cats, so that’s nice.

It felt good to do things with my hands. It feels like I’m really itching to do more generative things. I was thinking about taking pottery lessons at the “Art Shack” near my apartment, but it’s at a price point that feels like a bit much right now. If you’ve done anything lately that felt really fulfilling and generative, I’d love to hear about it!

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Debris

• I’ve been enjoying a couple eat-the-rich style anti-capitalist movies lately (The Menu and Glass Onion notably), which I have enjoyed a lot but I also am a little curious as to what, if anything, it’s doing. This isn’t really a knock on the art — they were both really fun! But it feels like we’ve decided it’s culturally resonant to insist that it’s bad to be rich and that meritocracy isn’t a thing but also it … doesn’t matter??? Because extremely rich people also control all the things, still, and they’re not making themselves less rich, even if we get to watch caricatures of them make bad decisions. Oh well, at least we get fun art.

• I also watched the first season of White Lotus which is probably anti-capitalist, but notably not eat-the-rich, and I think, makes the same mistakes that the unlikable rich people also make. (I’ll probably still watch season 2 when I get around to it.)

• I think last time I was trying to decide whether or not I should do National Novel Writing Month, which means it was written before November! I did about one week of NaNoWriMo before self-imploding (some of the rough stuff alluded to above), but!!! That I have a pretty cool 12k word foundation that I’ve started to reread and think about how to move the story forward. It takes place in an underwater city! There’s competitive violin playing! There’s going to be a heist, once I figure out how to write a heist. I do want to get back into a more meaningful writing habit, since that has historically been good for my ability to stabilize myself. Maybe that will mean these newsletters will become a little more interesting and robust??? (No promises, these are still fledgling attempts at stability.)

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What I’ve been reading:

Okay it’s been *months* so this list feels long but it’s not really that much.

Finished:

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
In a small cafe in Tokyo, there is a specific seat you can sit in to time travel, but you can’t leave the seat, and only until the coffee the proprietor serves you gets cold. Also … it’s impossible to change the present. And yet in this short, quiet book, three people make the decision to travel through time. You can’t change the present, but you can gain context.

Yolk by Mary H K Choi
Jayne and June, sisters with a real sister dynamic, are both living in NYC but haven’t talked in a year. They’re pulled back together because June is sick; but turns out, Jayne is sick too, in different ways. This was my YA book club selection, and I ended up liking it quite a bit even though none of the characters are particularly likable! It was quite gross in places, but it didn’t feel gratuitous or unearned. CW: cancer, eating disorder, body dysphoria, family trauma

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy: A Monk and Robot Book by Becky Chambers
Becky Chambers books are all so lovely. This series is focused on some simple but big questions; what do people (or individuals with consciousness, I guess) need? What happens when all the actual “needs” like food, shelter, and companionship are met? How do we keep ourselves happy and whole?

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
The final book in the Scholomance (a word that I pronounced comically incorrectly as until my friend corrected me, biting down a laugh) series was really fun to read. This whole series is extremely dark, imo, but really great. The questions it raises about what monsters are, and the circumstances in which we can become them are so compelling.

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Oh man it’s been so long that I actually received and read Nona (see notes on Harrow the Ninth below) and I am sorry to all my friends that love this series but I am finding it fairly tedious. Most of the backstory is revealed via a god-like character literally monologuing in someone’s dreams. I think there are some good pieces in here — a child-like but immortal character during wartime is an interesting premise! But for me, this series just gets worse as it goes on.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
This is the first book I read while coming out of the really bad brain part of the past few months (see editor’s note right below) and wow is it really incredible. One of the best books I read last year, I think? (Recency bias, of course.) It’s sprawling and ambitious, centering two friends who came together initially because of their love of video games, who end up building games together. They struggle over the 30 year span of the book to communicate about their feelings and what they need from each other in ways that felt very real and meaningful.

Editor’s note: The next few books I all read while my brain wasn’t working very well because some stuff at work triggered my PTSD and my executive functioning plummeted. I don’t remember them very well, so take all this with a grain of salt.

Version Control by Dexter Palmer
Most time-travel books hold the premise that if you travel through time and something changes, you, as the time-traveled, still hold the context of the world that you came from, so you can identify the changes. Version Control, plays with that understood premise in fun and interesting ways, although this book was like 50% too long.

The Memory Index by Julian Ray Vaca
Yes, I understand the irony of not really being able to remember a book about memory loss. I just found a text I sent to a friend saying that there are some interesting ideas but that it’s not well written, so I’ll let that stand. (I won’t be reading the sequel.)

The Enigma of Room 622 by Joël Dicker (Author), Robert Bononno (Translator)
I think this was a reasonably fun/weird murder mystery with an unreliable narrator and an unknown murder victim until very close to the end. (As I was looking this book up on bookshop.org, I found another book called “Full Overview of the Enigma of Room 622 which says: This is an unofficial Overview of The Enigma of Room 622 By Joel Dicker, bringing you the essential ideas in a succinct and easy-to-read format. It's a quick and easy way to get the most important ideas from this excellent book in minutes rather than hours. WOW that kind of makes me want to die.)

Editor’s note: Okay we’re out of the dark times.

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean
Set in a world where humanoid creatures that consume and learn from eating books live in secluded, tight-knit and extremely patriarchal structures, Devon has a son who had the misfortune of being born with the rarer need to eat human minds in order to survive. Devon’s child is a monster out of need, and out of love, Devon also becomes a monster as they look for a way to curb his growing hunger. This book was pretty fun! Also why are even superhuman societies so sexist?!?!? CW: brain eating, patriarchy

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Uncommon Stars had a lot going on — some insterstellar refugees running away from a plague of existentilism who have ended up running a donut shop, a violin teacher trying to finish up the deal she made with a devil, and a young runaway transwoman who just wants to live her truth and play her violin. It’s a bit much to have aliens and starships in the same novel as the devil, but hey, why not? It ended up being quite a lovely book about identity, art, and family. CW: trauma, transphobia, sexual exploitation

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
I was strongly meh on Harrow on my first read, but I reread Harrow because Nona the Ninth came out and I wanted to remember what the heck happened. Also, I enjoyed Gideon the Ninth infinitely better on reread. I’m sorry to say that I’m still solidly meh on Harrow — it’s an ambitious book and I wish I liked it better. Muir, who can write the heck out of a sentence, spends so much time on baroque descriptions of rooms and body horror that I wish she’d spend on world-building. Most of the world-building and plot-movement happens in a bunch of awkward, rushed expository monologues. Oh well! I’m still gonna read Nona when it gets to the library. CW: body horror

Lemon by Kwon Yeo-Sun, translated by Janey Hong
Gosh, this book felt like it was going to be a crime novel, but turned out to be a parallel narrative to any investigative action. There is an unsolved crime at the heart of it, the murder of Kim Hae-on. The story takes place over the course of about two decades, checking in on Hae-on’s sister, and two of her classmates, and it’s more of a rumination about how things like guilt and the horror of unknowing can stick with us.

Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto.
This was a weirdly meditative murder mystery set in 1950s Japan. The train schedule is a pretty major character, to be honest! Whodunit felt pretty clear to me from the very beginning, but it was enjoyable for awhile to patiently wait for the detectives to figure it out. Ultimately, it was a mystery solved via logistics, which got a little tedious.

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu.
I wrote this last time, and still agree with the sentiment: Like all short story collections, there are some that connect more than others with me, but they are all thoughtful and beautifully written. The titular story was outstanding.

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It’s taken me toooo long to write this, so I am just gonna go ahead and send it. Hope you’re all doing well and having a nice January. Much love and hopefully I won’t wait 3+ months before the next one!

xoxo

d