August ending, a list:
I swam in the river twice, and in the loch once, and because it’s Scotland there is always a tendency to get slightly too cold each time. The loch, ten minutes down the road from where I live, is within an area currently under siege from a large American company who wants to turn 8000 acres of the glen, and a historic castle, into a billionaires playground—if you have a moment to sign this, I’d be grateful
Got to wondering how many total times I’ve boiled a kettle in my life
I learned the number of different ways a pack of cards can be shuffled is a number so large (80 thousand vigintillion, or 52 factorial) that no two people since the beginning of time have ever shuffled a pack of cards the same way. The number looks like this: 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,
975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 and was explained like so—“If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second, and they'd been doing that since the Big Bang, they'd only just now be starting to repeat shuffles.”We heard a tawny owl for the first time in the garden, up in a dusk-heavy tree
I taped a dried Japanese maple leaf into the notebook I use for daily/weekly things that must be done; the page opposite the leaf is headed with “List for week beginning August 21st” but I have not yet done all the things on that list
Within the space of this month I’ve been up and down from Inverness on two occasions (four hour round trip), and back and forth from Edinburgh three separate times (three hour round trip), and arguably and in hindsight this was probably a little too much movement
I’m almost completely out of gouache colours D135 (Sepia) and D043 (Beige) which has come as something of a surprise
I’ve belatedly discovered that one of my most-favoured writing implements, an ordinary-looking Pilot fountain pen from my late grandfather’s study, is not refillable
In the earliest first part of some mornings, a lot of mornings actually, the clouds sit expansively and low enough in the valleys around here that it’s possible to trick one’s brain—even if just for a few minutes—into day-dreaming that the mountains are larger, that the few small remaining patches of mixed, healthy forest grow upwards, far into the clouds, up to natural the tree and snow lines long since removed from this country
“The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like - no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass.” — Ali Smith, Autumn
When enough people are ridiculous, it starts to look normal
Words of note of late:
coruscating
inexorable
sanguine
vituperative
pharmacopoeia
misbegotten
adventitious
restitution
contrite
laconic
reticence
copulate
denigrate
insouciant
acquiescent
perdition
lassitude
orogeny
verdant
ineffable
diaphanous
parochial
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The Autumn 2023 issue of Orion Magazine, Seeking Shelter: The environments of the unhoused and the displaced, will soon be out and about:
“In this issue, Omar el Akkad examines the years-long aftermath of Oregon’s Santiam fire. Carl Safina writes of the abandoned screech owl he’s been watching for years. Kaia Sand introduces unhoused poets Daniel Cox, Randy Humphreys, Michone Nettles, George McCarthy, and Bronwyn Carver. Emma Copley Eisenberg reports from Kensington, Philadelphia, where residents and voyeurs explain how addiction has shaped and undone lives in the area. Zarina Zabrisky reports from the remnants of Chornobyl.”
You can currently read ‘Resiliency in the Ashes’, the featured essay by Omar el Akkad, on the Orion website, which is accompanied by photographs made from the ash of wildfires by Oregon-based visual artist Sarah Grew (carbon from fire colours the photographic emulsion). You can view her complete series here, and this below is one of those I felt most:
My column in this issue is held together by the Mongolian words which mean ‘uprooted trees’, Булгарсан модод, and most beautifully I was able to include some Mongolian punctuation marks within the essay—the Wikipedia page on Mongolian script makes for a very interesting, complex read.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Recent things by Melbourne-based Jesse Dayan, whose work is can also be found in newsletters No.188 and No.205.
“what histories are natural & what artifacts art?
how do we decide the borders of a country
or an era or a solar system? when did we decide
our planet meant only this collection of green?”
— Nate Marshall, from which art? what fact?
“I’m not going to see anybody anymore. They make me talk and exhaust me. If I’m quiet I’ll be alright.”
— Katherine Mansfield, from a letter to Virginia Woolf, February 1913
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The regular, numbered newsletter is currently still free for everyone to read, with paid supporters receiving several additional posts each month, including short stories, previously archived writings, and more detailed looks into creative processes. Love Letter to Foliage is the latest of these paid posts, and an excerpt of this short fiction is readable below:
Thank you for your words, Ella (I signed the petition).
A particularly lovely newsletter today. Thank you!