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You say it's elemental, I say it's alchemy
In traditional fashion, I believe I mistook this morning's earthquake for trucks out on the street. I feel a little as though I should visit the Bloody Bluff Fault and a little as though I should just leave the crumple zone of our bedrock alone.
I have been in a kind of free-fall of sleepless pain, but Uncanny Magazine is running its 2024 Favorite Fiction Reader Poll in which each reader can vote for their top three favorites of the magazine's year of fiction and since I had a story in Uncanny last year, I am self-interestedly boosting. It's a magnificent roster of fiction to choose from all round.
I hate finding out about local art through the news that it was mysteriously and aggressively stolen. I still dream of discovering the one sculpture of my grandmother's that is unaccounted for in a private collection or a museum with no idea of its provenance. It went missing when the temple that had commissioned it was vandalized: I have only ever seen my grandfather's photographs of it, the stark-lined armature of a hand in her characteristically half-fleshed style, the lava-black beading of its solder ominous in light of its title, Auschwitz. I do not like to imagine it was destroyed when it was made to hold memory in its empty, upwrenched palm.
History is a yahrzeit candle.
One terrible wind could blow it out.
—Jane Yolen, "Tombs" (1996)
I have been in a kind of free-fall of sleepless pain, but Uncanny Magazine is running its 2024 Favorite Fiction Reader Poll in which each reader can vote for their top three favorites of the magazine's year of fiction and since I had a story in Uncanny last year, I am self-interestedly boosting. It's a magnificent roster of fiction to choose from all round.
I hate finding out about local art through the news that it was mysteriously and aggressively stolen. I still dream of discovering the one sculpture of my grandmother's that is unaccounted for in a private collection or a museum with no idea of its provenance. It went missing when the temple that had commissioned it was vandalized: I have only ever seen my grandfather's photographs of it, the stark-lined armature of a hand in her characteristically half-fleshed style, the lava-black beading of its solder ominous in light of its title, Auschwitz. I do not like to imagine it was destroyed when it was made to hold memory in its empty, upwrenched palm.
History is a yahrzeit candle.
One terrible wind could blow it out.
—Jane Yolen, "Tombs" (1996)
no subject
It kind of feels like a sort of terrorism--just out to destroy people's pleasure. Like with your grandmother's art. So your grandmother was a sculptor? How cool!
Good luck in the reader poll!
Theoretically the earthquake was feelable out here, but I didn't feel it ...
no subject
Right! Which is why it feels more like vandalism than theft, but then what the hell. And I would have loved to see the rest of the local exhibition. I'd have bought a postcard of that painting.
It kind of feels like a sort of terrorism--just out to destroy people's pleasure. Like with your grandmother's art.
That is a good way of phrasing it. Hers wasn't found destroyed, which is one of the reasons I hold out the imagination that it's still out there in the world, but it's hard for me to believe that the kind of people who take objects from a synagogue treasure their thefts.
So your grandmother was a sculptor? How cool!
Yes! She was primarily a sculptor: she stopped welding when her vision in one eye began to deteriorate to the point that she no longer felt comfortable handling a torch. She sketched, drew, modeled my mother as a teenager in plaster, had an enormous mass of oil clay under a tarp whose thick slightly sharp smell I can still remember. My parents have several of her abstracts and two of her more figurative smaller pieces; I see them whenever I'm at the house. Others went to other relatives, including of course a bunch before I was born. I was hoping to find a picture of it, but when last I heard her large-scale Icarus (1983) was still at the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine. I remember it as a tall abstract of walls or wings, which it would be nice to know if it actually resembles. My aunt visited it with her partner and made some arrangement to donate to its upkeep.
Good luck in the reader poll!
Thank you!
Theoretically the earthquake was feelable out here, but I didn't feel it ...
I don't know if I should wish you a minor earthquake of your own just for the fun of it. So long as nothing happens except the earth dances briefly.
no subject
I'll take a small, undamaging earthquake, yes please.