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[sovay]

Because it is lashing rain against our windows even as we speak, the contractors have not been drilling and hammering our porch since daybreak and in consequence I slept and dreamed of the late discovery of an extra novel in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, newly published and illustrated in the style of Evaline Ness. (I had no idea she had taken her surname from her second marriage, to Eliot Ness.) In the way of dreams, it melted into a kind of AU remix by the time I was a few chapters in. The WWII echoes are always easier to see in Westmark, but they're all throughout Prydain far beyond the inspiring geography of Wales where Alexander was briefly stationed on his way to France; I assume someone has mapped them like the ghosts of the Western Front through Middle-Earth. There is presumably a larger project here about fantasy and war literature, crystallizing and changing shape throughout the twentieth century. Query: Susan Cooper and the childhood imprint of WWII, but also the cold white flame of the Light whose calculations and sacrifices would not turn a hair in John le Carré? "It is a cold world you live in, bachgen . . . I would take the one human being over the principle, all the time."

I feel as though I have stopped writing about almost anything that matters: I know that part of it is that the move and then injury and illness ate the month and concomitantly my concentration and my physical health is ground down beyond the question of reserves and has been since well before this time last year, but some of it is also feeling that there is nothing I should be talking about. I had a terrible time walking around Davis Square last night and feeling that I was surrounded by people playacting at 2019. As far as I know, I will never eat inside a restaurant again. I can't hang out all night in movie theaters or all afternoon in museums and I interact with bookstores in quick careful dives and it's no one's problem but mine, why can't I get with the program and pretend I have no medical factors that did not just evaporate when the economy needed to get back on track and ignore how much of the infrastructure around me has disintegrated in the last three years and everyone I know has been scraped past the bone. I don't think this country I live in understands grief.

On the other hand, I just fixed my twenty-six-year-old sound system by stripping and re-cutting the wires of the leads so that the speakers plug in more cleanly than their previous frazzled state and now it makes noise again and I feel a lot more competent than I did an hour ago when I had unscrewed everything and dust was obviously not the issue.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Yes, the continual nagging to move on is a blockage against grief.

I wonder what kinds of fiction and poetry and essays Reason's half-generation will write from this--old enough to be bone-certain that there was a before, but perhaps not to understand it very clearly. Seems a bit like the Pew divide between Xers and older millennials, which meanders due to Cold War or no--perhaps family history and awareness more than age (a bunch of my classmates didn't care when the Berlin Wall came down, but I sure did, in high school).

[sovay]

Yes, the continual nagging to move on is a blockage against grief.

It falls into the category of behaviors whose existence I acknowledge and whose roots I am versed in and which otherwise make so little sense to me that I can't talk about them without sounding willfully naive. I mean, I object to the fact that it is causing me emotional damage as well as physical hazard and is obviously not serving the country well as a whole, but also just what the fuck.

I wonder what kinds of fiction and poetry and essays Reason's half-generation will write from this--old enough to be bone-certain that there was a before, but perhaps not to understand it very clearly.

I don't know. I feel like there's been such a whiplash already in the kinds of art coming out between last year and now, I have no way of estimating.

Seems a bit like the Pew divide between Xers and older millennials, which meanders due to Cold War or no--perhaps family history and awareness more than age (a bunch of my classmates didn't care when the Berlin Wall came down, but I sure did, in high school).

That is an interesting factor to consider. I assumed it was culturally ubiquitous so long as one was sentient, but I gather not? I was in elementary school at the time, but I watched with my parents and it was so clear it was important.

"I assumed it was culturally ubiquitous so long as one was sentient, but I gather not? "

[kathmandu]

I was talking with my brother a year or so back--we were both feeling the weight of so long into what was supposed to be a brief and solvable crisis--and I said, "Well, at least we have the training for it."

He said, "I feel like I don't have the training for it," so I reminded him of the AIDS crisis and living under the Doomsday Clock.

It turned out that being six years younger than me meant he was just young enough to *not* hear about the Doomsday Clock until *after* its hands had been set back.

Re: "I assumed it was culturally ubiquitous so long as one was sentient, but I gather not? "

[sovay]

It turned out that being six years younger than me meant he was just young enough to *not* hear about the Doomsday Clock until *after* its hands had been set back.

My father and I were literally talking about the Doomsday Clock this evening, right after I fixed the sound system.

Re: "I assumed it was culturally ubiquitous so long as one was sentient, but I gather not? "

[thistleingrey]

Yes, the AIDS crisis is a reference point for me as well--I never expected covid to be brief, but I didn't expect people to be quite so self-centered, either. Ah well.

[thistleingrey]

but also just what the fuck

*nods*

I have no way of estimating

I hope that some amount of self-pub continues--seems to me that "multitude of voices" and "diverse" whatever are only going to splinter further, which isn't bad at all yet may complicate how people find audiences in and after the influencer era.