No.264

During the course of the day (a Friday in June) I have had time to: panic mildly about everything including whether or not I love strongly enough, put up a poster depicting an Italian man being uncomfortable in a chair, conduct a load of laundry, drink two coffees, water half a garden, read a great deal about greatly terrible events, reply to emails, stare immobile—and yet frantic?—out of the window at intervals, notice the rain re-washing aforementioned laundry, been unable to resolve the source of a ephemeral but very bright light patch where the bedroom ceiling met the bedroom wall, eaten a croissant, thought a lot about the fact that things could be good if psychopaths were not deciding who is deserving of care and if people could lift themselves out of silence if it could be a consensus that poisoning the ground which sustains us is wrong and is 4pm too early to drink red wine?

From Everything, Beautiful (Penguin, 2022)

Finding-myself-losing-myself reading the novella Aerth, by Deborah Tomkins, which is so far unsettling and powerful and very good and interesting; two jackdaw fledglings fell out of their nest from up in a garden conifer during high winds and have since resided on the ground tucked in together-slightly-apart-together-again amongst a patch of day lilies—there are neighbour cats which pass through and my solution was to stand guard twenty-four hours a day but this is not reasonable; from the ground from the actual ground I cut half a kilo of Swiss chard to put into Sumaghiyyeh (السماقية), a Palestinian stew native to Gaza and mentioned in texts as early as the 11th century—everything is at stake; a friend lent me a heavy box of infrared light to supposedly help the wounds on my face heal swiftly having fallen off a bicycle at speed and met with a road; I look back at some of the two hundred paintings I made for the new book and think did I do that how did I do that they feel like I must have conjured them; you tell me not to eat all of your cereal.

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

Manuscript edits for book six are taking longer than anticipated, the back and forth of it, especially the correspondence with speakers or translators of the eighty-or-so languages included within the book.

On that note!

Given delays in queries being responded to or dead ends (a saddening phrase), if you are a speaker or translator of any of the below languages—or know someone who is—and would have a small amount of time to read over between one and a handful of definitions, to confirm pronunciations, then please do get in touch with me—your time can be compensated in the form of a mention in the acknowledgments and a copy of the book in the spring:

Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, Turkish, Hindi, Hawaiian, Arabic, Basque, Cornish, Euskara, Farsi, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Iñupiaq, Latin, Mongolian, Norwegian, Russian, Uzbek, Guugu Yimithirr, Hmong, Innu-aimun, Malay, Malayalam, Manx, Nsyilxcən, Ojibwemowin, Pitjantjatjara, RuKwangali, Shetlandic, Somali, Tarahumara, Telugu, Teochew, and Yaqui.

The book in question, Words to Love a Planet, is so nearly there, despite the above entire paragraph of languages suggesting otherwise, and although I didn’t know about this you can already pre-order it, which is strange and also very critical for the book being at all visible within the endless ongoing sea of books which are released at seemingly all times.

I believe this one is important.

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THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Paintings by Neil Tomkins, which make me feel like long summer shadows have taken up residence in the lungs.

And at the end of the day,
the reality is
that whether we
change
or whether we stay
the same

these questions will
remain.

…

Who are we
to be
with one
another?

and

How are we
to be
with one
another?

and

What to do
with all those memories
of all those funerals?

…

We Wake
and take
this troubled beauty forward.

— Pádraig Ó Tuama, [the] north[ern] [of] ireland

Again and for however long necessary: (Actions for demanding a Free Palestine and an end to occupation.) / (Reading list for a Free Palestine.) / (Postcards for Palestine, free PDF downloads.) / (Send a physical postcard demanding an end to UK arms sales.) / (Ten free ebooks for getting free from Haymarket Books.)

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