No.154

May, a list:

1. The delight felt by children under the age of four is even more noticeable now, and I wonder how to feel that way about things again

2. Everything becomes green except the ash trees, which appear slow and nervous

3. The sea changes colour every minute of the day and I try endlessly to catch it in between these changes (I never can)

4. My mother said on the phone that planting things in the garden is good because she needs to have evidence of herself being somewhere, doing something

5. So I plant things in the garden here, evidence of myself for myself

6. I’m growing five magnolia trees in pots outside and I try to remember to kiss each one of them everyday to let them know I care (this can be applied to people as well as trees)

7. The label said to burn the candle all the way to the edges every time but I cannot do that because the wick isn’t perfectly in the middle

8. People are always walking up and down the road here and I watch how they swing or don’t swing their arms as this varies hugely

9. At any given time there seems to be at least one thing that has gone mouldy in the fridge

10. At weekends groups of motorcyclists from elsewhere drive loudly around the peninsula and do they actually notice the landscapes

11. When it gets windy enough seabirds float like bits of paper in the air

BOOK NEWS:

In the last newsletter I wrote about the forthcoming Close Again in the fall of this year from Andrews McMeel Publishing, and since then I’ve also learned that it will be published in Japan (accompanying the US, German, and Italian editions). In book terms Close Again is being published exceedingly swiftly, and so while that feels like a fast-moving river, there is also a slower one too, which I can now share—

Since early this year I’ve been keeping something quietly secret, and the quiet secret is that I’m working on a book titled Everything, Beautiful.

After Eating the Sun, my work-direction felt fairly wayward, my thoughts generally, not least because life has been quite unsettled since its publication (even before taking the pandemic into the equation). After a number of book proposals, some of which I mentioned here, I found something that fit well, something that felt right and that the gloriously lovely Meg Leder at Penguin could make an offer on.

It would be fair to say that in some ways now is a strange time to be thinking and writing about beauty, but in others it seems like a really pressing thing—even in the midst of the largest collective griefs some of us have ever known, the beauty never leaves us entirely, and I wanted to make a book that could help people find it. Not our monetised, present tense, homogenised definitions of beauty, but a new more expansive beauty, the kind that is small daily revelations, the kind of beauty that is inclusive and nuanced and only wants the best for you.

Everything, Beautiful will be published in May 2022, and while that sounds like several lifetimes away, my initial deadlines for the book are loom, loom, looming. I’ll be able to detail and share things here and there as I go, so please expect wildly varying moods and periods of both calm and uncalm as I try to unfold what this books needs to be. For now, here is the book announcement from Publishers Marketplace, which provides a sense of things:

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Work by artist and trained architect Ana Frois—pieces that seemed to fit my moods of the last few weeks, seemed to suit my recurring thoughts of landscape and repetition and home and of not much making a great deal of sense lately.

A short while ago I put the washing machine on a 90 degree cycle, empty of any laundry, which one is supposed to do every so often to clean its insides or something to that effect, and the last time I did this there was foam all over the floor, so I will now go and look to see if this is happening a second time—not ideal, but quite fun.

The end.