June ending, a list:
The neighbour’s elderflower tree is now dropping its billions of tiniest flowers onto the pavement, a confetti of the smallest kind
I knit, with some ferocity, until my right elbow hurts
Noticing a women walking home with, held in one upturned palm, several large books and balanced on those a sculptural fish
A desire to paint more birds, but also just a desire to be the person in this illustration, tucked under a protective feathered wing:
As anyone in Europe and the UK knows: there was a heatwave, it was bad and dangerous and some people died, a wildfire started in Derbyshire, lots of people thought it was gosh lovely summer weather to enjoy but actually it was yet another urgent planetary screech for us all to collectively-actually damn well do something instead of flapping about, arguing over made-up things, rewarding narcissistic egomaniacs, indulging states in their genocides, and pretending AI-tech broligarchs are going to be even one jot of useful when it comes to attempting to gently weave our ecosystems back together can you tell that I’m very angry about the current system
Saw a clip of a young American woman on a street being asked a question along the lines of ‘describe the US right now’ and to this she said more or less ‘three incels in a polyester trenchcoat’ and there was more after that and it was all very perceptive and afterwards I thought huh, she’s not wrong
I would recommend listening to, or reading, Dr. Carrisa Véliz’s (Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University) thoughts on choice within technology, authoritarianism, ethics, and the by-design misleading nature of AI models (her newest book Prophecy came out earlier this year, which I plan to read)
The garden already knows that the nights are getting darker, ever-fractional, ever-inevitable, and this results in a feeling of vague and protective panic but for me or the plants I cannot tell
Part of publishing a book is forever emailing other people who have also published books to tell them about your new book and hopefully send it to them therein hoping they will read and like said book so that you can tell everyone else they read and liked the book
Sit and rest a while:
Three herons fly over the house, which is unusual because I only ever see one heron in flight at a time
Pithy, adj: consisting of or abounding in pith. Early 14c., ‘strong, vigorous’, meaning from the 1520s onwards ‘full of substance or significance’
In Copenhagen for a week, I am ill but nevertheless manage to consume a lot of pretentious coffee and get caught in a freakishly torrential thunderstorm while in a beautiful cemetery and Cat, if you are reading this, I regret this illness because our dates overlapped and it would have been so nice to see you
Radical looks increasingly like just having a conscience
Why do flies always need so urgently to get out of the window until the very moment you open the window for them, a trick
I wish there was an alternative for the gardening term dead-heading
Scattered is putting it lightly but truthfully; my brain of late scarcely begins to focus on something before I find myself off to the next thought, rabbit-like, the next needing-to-be-done, and I don’t doubt this is an internal reflection of exterior chaos. The only things which right now manage to slow the frantic any discernable amount: gardening, reading, confining myself to the bath
Perhaps because those three things are concerned with a) the speed of plants, b) the suspension of the present and c) the speed of still water
Before we know it the leaves will start to fall and I for one will be there to catch them
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
You can currently read my latest Root Catalog column, on the Finnish wordjokapäiväinen, in full on the Orion website. It’s from inside the new summer issue, ‘The Deep Dive: Our History & Future With the World's Largest Mammals’ which was quite brutishly long thing for me to design (I am also Orion’s designer) as it contains 112 pages rather than the usual 96, and I also illustrated a Lost Vocabulary of Whaling.
“Every weekday morning, I see the same two people walk to work in high-vis clothing, both wearing backpacks, the heavy black boots of one always five minutes or so behind the other—I have therefore assumed they are not going to the same place. Also on the good days: When I notice someone in turn noticing a bird, it feels like some important chain of attention paid, of atoms, of ancient memory.”
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Good bright pastel things by Australian artist Anne Lynch (b.1956).
“Kurdish is a language in which words often break down into image. A friend, haur̄ê (هاوڕێ), shares your path. A lover, hauser (ھاوسەر), shares your head. I do not wait for you, çauer̄êm (چاوهڕێم), I put my eyes in the road. You do not disappoint me, destî şkawm (دەستی شکاوم), you break my hands. No one confesses, danî pêdabnî (دانی پێدابنی), one steps on one’s teeth. To comfort, dłdanewe (دڵدانەوە), one gives back the heart. This element of Kurdish delights me: to crack a word open and peer inside it, to find a world within a word, a world where the abstract is embodied. The Kurdish language calls the body into every conversation, fashioning idea from body. There is no hiding the body, not even to protect it.”
—Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse on translating Abdulla Pashew’s poem “Resurrection”, with the full essay here
