sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2018-07-05 02:55 pm

Where you're going, there ain't no one knows

I am so tired. With an air conditioner in the window and two fans creating crossbreeze in the apartment at all times we have finally been able to get the temperature down to something I can sort of sleep through, but things like "clothes" or "moving around" continue to feel like very dicey propositions. I resent that the night before last I dreamed of watching a movie I wanted to recommend to everyone and last night I had nightmares about familiar locations in Boston turned sites of semi-surrealist horror. More than five things make up a post.

1. I forgot to stalk myself on the internet for a couple of days and totally missed that I am now part of Wonderbooknow.com, the online supplement to the revised and expanded edition of Jeff VanderMeer's Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (2013/2018). Specifically I am part of the gallery of examples drawn from the flash exercise "Last Drink Bird Head," which when run with a group of 70-plus writers in 2007—of which I was one—resulted in the charity anthology of the same name. Spoiler: mine has mythology.

2. The Kickstarter for Upper Rubber Boot's Women Up to No Good anthologies has funded! So we likely get a new cover for Broad Knowledge and a snippet of my reprint story is part of the most recent update.

3. Rose Lemberg is now reading submissions for an anthology of poetry in tribute to the life and works of Ursula K. Le Guin, tentatively entitled Climbing Lightly Through Forests and scheduled for publication by Aqueduct Press in 2019.

4. I read this poem yesterday: Bob Hicok, "Redundancy Is Only a Problem When It Gets Repetitious: a poem of patriotism."

5. I am looking forward to this collection from Mark Fisher, although not the reason that it is probably the last: k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016).

6. Many of his experiences were not mine, but much of Jacob Plitman's "On an Emerging Diasporism" correponds strangely with the way I was brought up to think of myself as Jewish. My family's stories were always about carrying home with us. The congregation where I was almost bat mitzvah was peripatetic (it still feels weird to me that it now has a permanent building of its own). Wherever we are is home. What we do here matters most. This passage feels like something I have read before, a poem or a short story, Bryher's Avalon: "Maybe we should open an Embassy of the American Jewish Diaspora, elect an ambassador, print a sheaf of letterhead, and begin taking meetings with business and social leaders. There are a thousand short stories to be written, published and tucked like a prayer into the cracks in the walls of our neighbors' homes." If it were mine, of course, the point of an embassy of a diaspora—as distinct from a government in exile—would be that you can find it everywhere.

7. Robert Macfarlane defined "thalassophile" and I felt landlocked.

P.S. Courtesy of [personal profile] spatch: a drunk history of Fort Macon. "So it's interesting that within a couple miles of each other were the 'last battle' of the Revolution and the 'last shot' of the Civil War, and I guess the moral is that the NC OBX is the place to be if a war is technically over but you're holding onto a really long-term grudge."
pameladean: (Default)

[personal profile] pameladean 2018-07-05 07:51 pm (UTC)(link)
I thought of you when I saw that Robert MacFarlane tweet. I hope you may be unlocked soon.

P.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (grand canyon)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2018-07-05 08:03 pm (UTC)(link)
The congregation where I was almost bat mitzvah was peripatetic

Out of curiosity, why "almost?"
cmcmck: (Default)

[personal profile] cmcmck 2018-07-05 08:06 pm (UTC)(link)
I was brought up knowing nothing about my Jewish ancestry so I suppose you can imagine the shock of discovery, especially given the nature of what I discovered.

I knew nothing about my Romani ancestry either.

The harm people do with their well meaning silence!

gwynnega: (Leslie Howard mswyrr)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2018-07-05 10:22 pm (UTC)(link)
That's great you're part of Wonderbooknow.com!
swan_tower: (Default)

[personal profile] swan_tower 2018-07-06 12:33 am (UTC)(link)
The centering of Israel explains why: your own people insist that you don’t belong “here” but “there,” in some ideal struggle very far away. Your time “here” is merely an interlude before you advance into “there.” Everything that happens to you in diaspora is like the early pages of a Bildungsroman.

Now I am intensely curious to know whether this has any relationship to the oddly anti-Semitic white evangelical support for Israel. That group supports Israel because they see events there as a necessary item on the Second Coming checklist, and they similarly tend to fall into a mode of thinking where your time "here" is merely an interlude before you advance into "there" -- only "here" is life before the Rapture, and "there" is heaven where you'll go after you get Raptured.
selkie: (Default)

[personal profile] selkie 2018-07-06 01:57 am (UTC)(link)
I want to write a poem for almost every story in Changing Planes, and I feel like you have a lot of grist from Orsinia. Or maybe The Word for World is Forest. Or the one that's the best one as far as I am concerned but whose title slips away every time. With the winter people.

Please send wireless internets and a conditioned piece of air.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-07-06 03:34 am (UTC)(link)
Oh wow, that Mark Fisher book comes out in time for my birthday. I would rather have had a new book from him.
ashlyme: Picture of me wearing a carnival fox mask (Default)

[personal profile] ashlyme 2018-07-07 03:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Congratulations on Wonderbooknow! And thank you for the heads-up on the Le Guin anthology; I need to ass-kick myself into writing poetry again.

Have a lockpick for the land.