work.
I would love an email provider which used actual contact names as a convincing front from which to send emphatic, irrational letters into a black reception-proof ether.
"The requirement for adaption is perhaps not an obvious one in the case of cultural preservation, however orality and the assigning of names has always been predicated upon the ability to create meaning where there previously was none. A name is a symbol laden with malleable context, spoken with intention, and sometimes discovered without warning. A name is born with relevance and dies senseless, its purpose served. While Schafer has employed 12 trombones to mimic the sounds of a lake at dawn, mimicry itself is only language in its most infantile form - a mirroring that deflects rather than nurtures a unique point of view. It is the stuff of bored cetaceans, removed from a world of rich song and instead compelled to babble an unknown tongue in desperation for contact. In comparison to mimicry, we can call the birth of true communal orality a sense because it is a method for expressing the complexities of the immediate and the ephemeral. It is our most accessible method for making ourselves known to the world, and the key by which we assign meaning to the environments we inhabit."- final papers, inserting beluga references all over the place.
you take a year and you have plans - university nearly kills you bc you’re also in the office 50 hours a week and you have a dog who sleeps with her head on your belly every night and you’re getting married in a little over a month as if that was the most natural thing in the world and you realize that your plans were blown up into a thousand unrecognizable pieces and you miss the internet.
Alright. So I have been away for a while. Bid a wretched goodbye to the Southern Hemisphere and returned to North America. Hit Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Montana by kayak and on foot for the better part of a month. Camped in desert and camped in snow. I have since been easing back into Vancouver - I have another apartment, I have another job, I have a University to attend in the fall. I have a new set of priorities, for this life and this corner of internet space. So I’m going to get something a little less personal, a little more public-friendly up and running. Something that will maybe, if and when I have a subject on which to write a sprawl, act as an incentive to be more mindful of what I want to say and how I want to say it.
I will provide directions to such a place should you be interested soon enough, since I still want to keep up with the rest of you but I’m not sure if a lack of personal thought-vomit will make reciprocal follows more or less attractive.
In any case, I hope you are well - and here are some ponies making a run across the Wind River range on the drive into Grand Teton National Park. There have been so many beautiful things to comment on these past few months, but this moment was my favourite.
dry bags. lycra, merino wool, and gore-tex in varying shades of grey, blue, and black. paddle gloves, water shoes, two pots of dehydrated Moroccan stew. blister packs and bandaids in too many sizes. a sling, a tensor bandage, powdered electrolytes. silk thermal underwear. biodegradable soap.
I had planned on swimming everyday prior to leaving in order to stretch out my garbage trapezius but the pool has been closed for maintenance all week, I sold my running shoes before to returning to north america, and my bike is still in transit on some transpacific barge taking its sweet-ass time.
But trial by error seems to work most of the time. I am deadly excited. I am praying for Bison.
quite frankly, there is too much to recount.
I came across this scrap from Alfred Stieglitz a couple years ago about practicing in public (probably pulled from AS-X), which is always how I’ve thought of putting work on the Internet, and which has been moving through my mind at a glacial pace for a while now. Many things find their way online incomplete and unperfected, in the rough state born of our anxieties to share what we make with other people, or to combat the inevitable loneliness of making anything, or, more troublingly, to parade our personal victories in front of those whom we hope might care (or at least click). For all of its shortcomings — the endless promotion of nascent work to the neglect of sitting down and letting things develop, etc., etc. — I think of the Internet as a place to practice in public a la what Stieglitz says. And I wonder: do these things have more life and vitality for being young, fragile, and (potentially) personal? Maybe not.
Practice is — thankfully — amateurish, and it’s valuable not just because it makes us better, but because it reminds us that what we make needn’t always do something: it can just be itself, giving no shade or fruit or scenery or nourishment to anyone. It doesn’t need to answer to the economy or critics or politics, and sometimes it’s better that it doesn’t answer to our peers either. This is dangerous to say, because we can come to forget what shade, or fruit, or nourishment from art feels like — we just see the practice runs, and we feel tired and hungry and bored, scrolling unfed through our tumblr feeds. We also light on whole new territories of boredom here, where the meaning in the things we see — the political in the personal, the higher valences which the mundane gives us access to — become obscure. While I’m hopeful that practice, and sociable practice in particular, makes us more acutely aware of the other things that images can do — make us more pensive and sensitive and humane, and occasionally reanimate the world under a different cast of light, if not a different ideological framework — I worry that what we send out is met with less and less care and consideration. Is this a new worry, or a new lament to meet it with? No. Am I worried enough to stop sending my own paper boats into your tumblr stream? I guess not.
There’s value to the things we see beyond their ability to abate (however briefly) our boredom, and there is, as Adorno says, something which most truly approaches objectivity in a subjectivity that’s honestly explored. So why does this come up now? And why does it come out from atop this little soapbox?Well, I’ve been thinking about the creative windegg: the projects that lack a shell to protect them or a yolk to nourish them, which inevitably die before they are ever really born. It feels like I fall into stretches of time where I trade exclusively in these eggs, which are in many ways the obvious candidates for the shelter of the Internet, where someone will at least look at them, if not look after them. I say this only to pause and ponder, to question my own intentions, to feel a little dismayed at how much we all trumpet ourselves, or in our better moments champion our friends. Lewis Lapham’s essay last year in the Times Magazine may offer a helpful handhold:
“Now I am 79. I’ve written many hundreds of essays, 10 times that number of misbegotten drafts both early and late, and I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.”
Lapham is, of course, the crustiest of crusties, a true NE blue-blood (have you heard his pre-cise el-o-cu-tion?), but I often like what he has to say. Anyway, here we all are, hungry, scrolling, looking at each other, bored sometimes, animated others, and I just want to say: cheers, here’s to practice, to figuring out our complicated human entanglements, and to failing better together.
Two weeks left in a year. We moved house today, checking things off of the list of horrors: camping together, living together, extreme long distance, and moving house within the span of 365 days, 13,000 and something kilometres, who knows how many blinks of the eye. I have such little time - at work last week all the trees lining white-collar boardwalks and glass-tower corridors the cockatoos took over, a weird amass of cooing white in every eucalyptus down the block. Autumn, and the parakeets will return to the mountains (relatively speaking) looking for Chinese pistachios and other timely fruits to wrestle open. Peppercorn trees are the same as willow, but easier to climb. We have scrubbed out the apartment, made out in a bathroom empty enough for echoes. Now home wine-drunk. Sneaking past his parents bedroom, mother-in-law has left a mountain of fresh towels and I love her. This is the closest, most stereotypical definition of family I have ever encountered - two fully grown sons lovingly wrestle dad in someone’s kitchen full of Easter baking. There is an aunt with a furrowed brow but we know we are lucky. I know I am lucky. There is a pocket of genuine maternal/fraternal/parental perfection here and I’ve stumbled in on a gold mine. Riding his bearded coattails. I am sick as a dog and he brings me tea to a mattress set on the floor surrounded by boxes. I.fucking.love.him. Do you know what this means? We fight and I kick a boot-mark into a door and we forgive each other. This is a hard year. This has been tricky, inadvisable, impulsive, expensive. I win. I win. I win. The usual grievances, but they are my own undoing. Learn to be coupled. Learn to be loved. A deterioration into some kind of goofiness. Ignore some things. We are not perfect, I am so much less than perfect save for when we walk down a street and we are happy. Does this cross over? I would burn a thousand North American bridges before I let this fail. The real quandary being our Canadian counterparts don’t yet add up in doubles. I have a list of bed mates and we will brush shoulders, the city is small, the playgrounds are limited. They’ve (you’ve) added up to determination. Here is a scene picked out of a dozen in which someone lays awake at 5am on a Sunday, and asks themselves/myself why the capacity to be kind is so far removed from this bed and that wastebasket of condoms. Fuck you, not for lack of trying but the experience is anything but singular. I don’t hate you for the time spent - as much as you prefer to feel wretched I still walked the distance to your apartment of my own accord and woke up wishing I was wet instead of tired. So consider this the most positive of changes. My one prerogative of choice which had not previously demonstrated the most articulate of foresight. I am so grateful for this man and all his crinkle-eyed kindness. For the circumstances that dictated we make actual decisions, not just neighbourhood walks in the dark. We must be challenged. I am as good as your impossibility has forced me to be.
Song of the Sea is the most beautiful.
Mondays at work aren’t so bad. It’s all bear-hugs and cheek kisses, like a family reunion with all your uncles. I get my hair ruffled a lot.
The Milky Way spilled across a beach covered in scallop shells and cuttle fish bones. Comet mirrored in the tide line. For the love of all magic, bury the highways.
for my next trick, I shall disappear and never come back.