June 19, 2024
Gleanings
- Pity is only possible, it seems to me, when you see yourself as apart from the worst thing that happened to someone else.
- The song is timeless, but the video is not. Not for the grimy 1980s Britain it shows – though that too. And, to be honest, not because what happens in the video, a boy being beaten up because he’s looked, ever so tentatively, at the wrong, super-defensive, I’m-not-gay guy, isn’t something that happens today. But, maybe, because this was kind of a depressing but not unfamiliar story at the time, in a video played over and over again on all the top hit shows of the era. Watching it with 2024 eyes, it’s just brutal.
- It wasn’t until the 1970s that crossword-constructing started to become a job for male “boffins”. But it didn’t take long for them to displace women almost entirely, and their dominance has continued into the 21st century: today around 80 percent of crossword constructors are men.
- She says it isn’t the work or sending the work out or seeing it published or reading it to an audience or seeing it on a bestseller list or seeing it win a prize. Instead, she asks, “Isn’t the really good time when you are just getting the idea, or rather when you encounter the idea, bump into it, as if it has always been wandering around in your head?” She says, “It’s not the story—it’s more like the spirit, the centre, of the story, something there’s no word for, that can only come into life, a public sort of life, when words are wrapped around it.”
- I guess my taste in break up albums rests in the tough-ladies-of-country-music genre because the only other time I remember having a full, start-to-finish album that I associated with a break up was when I left an awful boyfriend in 1999 and listened only to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams for months on end.
- What is it about June, the month where the shift to full-on summer and outdoor living beckons. Am I standing on the threshold, a buffet of options in front of me, unable to fathom if I’m making choices because I really want to, or because the season somehow demands that I change gears?
- Did you know that similar to tree roots, our veins are defined by the same fractals? In fact, blood vessels are one of the most impressive examples of a fractal branching pattern. Every cell in the body must be close to a blood vessel to receive oxygen and nutrients. And this is only possible through a fractal branching network where blood vessels branch and branch ever smaller.
- I’ve had these dresses for twenty years, some even longer, and up until recently I’ve looked to that portion of my wardrobe as a place that I’ll return to when …. When what? When I feel the verve to wear the kind of outfit that turns heads, the kind of outfit that pairs well with dancing and witty repartee. Someone draw me a bath –– I’m tired just thinking about it.
- Time and time again I expect life to be like the movies, people to think in a way that’s similar to me, events to unfold logically. And they don’t. And how could I know that? When was I supposed to learn this? I can’t even manage life’s most basic things well. Add other people and reader, it’s a gosh darned mess. Things don’t turn out the way you expect. Leaps of faith don’t always pay off and people don’t behave the way you think they will.
- I’ve been thinking about fractals lately. Thinking about how rivers look from the air, as a plane crosses the Rockies or the prairies or as I flew from Madrid to Granada in March and looked down at what was both unknown and also kind of familiar: the s-shaped curves, the smaller bends echoing the larger ones. Thinking about them in relation to family relationships too. And trying–that old word, the one at the heart of essay itself–to write about the patterns of our relationships to others. The Y of the maple branch that grows into air and breaks into another Y and another and another. The rivers meandering and bending and curving.
- I feel fortunate that I came across this definition of what a poet might be early on in my writing career. It’s expansive; it’s spacious. We’re all in this art dream together, using life as a time of approaching.
