Notes from a night of underestimation:
You have softened me. You have softened me to the point where I can no longer wring my hands together, and I find it hard to live with that softness, here, surrounded by ungiving things.
1. “Crepuscular animals are those that are active primarily during twilight (that is, the periods of dawn and dusk). This is distinguished from diurnal and nocturnal behavior, where an animal is active during the hours of daylight or the hours of darkness, respectively. The term is not precise, however, as some crepuscular animals may also be active on a moonlit night or during an overcast day. The term matutinal is used for animals that are active only before sunrise, and vespertine for those active only after sunset.”
2. It is difficult sometimes not to feel pulled by my earliest morning hours, the four and five in the morning of it, while I know that you are there, living inside an evening I can strain to see through glass. It is like being carried downstream, my body moves willingly but only when I am hit against something hard and unforgiving do I realise that I am actually standing still. We remain in a state of permanent circadian disrupt, possibly.
3. I have run out of things with which to occupy myself, so I fight with one of those familiar sinking sensations, bare hands against its weight, feels like looking down at fistfuls of feathers, wanting desperately to both hold them and let go, and so instead of deciding I just try to stop and stop and stop.
You must tell me if you are having second thoughts—or first thoughts, or third thoughts, or fourth and fifth thoughts.
Is it normal for my teeth to move, and other questions.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
You might remember, if you’ve been here for a while, that work (words) from my first book Lost in Translation currently forms part of an exhibition at the Tokyo museum 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT. The exhibition director Dominique Chen was interviewed last week in Forbes Japan, and although I can’t read it, I know he will have said interesting and super things because he is an interesting and super person.
The exhibition also had announcements/reviews in The Asahi Shogakusei Shimbun on November 5th, and in the Numero TOKYO November issue (below).
Aside from my at-a-distance thrill about the exhibition, I’ve been keeping myself cooped up working at the top of the house (not so difficult in a lockdown), on eight pages of illustration for the Orion Magazine essay in their spring 2021 issue, on freelance projects, on taking apart the most recent book proposal and then putting it back together—I have a good feeling about this variation, and a phone call on Tuesday.
Below are some of the unsurprising components, I suppose sections, of a book proposal. I like to spend time making them look like something other than Times New Roman because I am a) slightly crazed and b) full of strong feeling. ‘This Book’ is really a ‘book overview’, but in this instance it is this book.
Lastly, my episode for The One You Feed podcast was posted on—of all days—November 3rd. As the world seethed and resettled and seethed and then felt something like relief, my conversation with Eric Zimmer was unleashed in a bid to provide a calmer 48-minute break from the incredibly intense American proceedings. Eric and I talked about the half-life of facts, plant and human characteristics, possibility and panic, universal chaos, and remembering, and other things. You can listen by clicking on the illustration below, or anywhere else for that matter.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Photographs by Alicia Peiró, ones that sooth with their muted-ness. They have a certain directness too, which goes some way to persuading the month of November that it cannot decide everything—that we can in fact choose.
I’m currently reading novelist-and-artist Sara Baume’s first non-fiction book, Handiwork. It is a beautiful and somehow shocking weaving of so many threads: grief, birds, time, a creative practice, family, other people’s words and wounds:
“I flail for small absolutions”
The end.
