A note on fiction

and some older pieces from the archives

Specific astro dynamic: The Sun just moved into Aries which is where the Sun exalts. This makes sense when you consider that every person you know whose Sun is in Aries has this little nugget of rampant pride and sense of superiority. Normally we avoid that kind of generalization here. In the spirit of Aries, not today. Today we are direct if a little mean.

In many ways the more potent drama in the sky at the moment is happening at the end of Pisces, where Neptune is preparing to break the dam and flood into Aries, the Moon’s nodes are just beginning their journey through the Pisces/Virgo Axis, and Saturn is getting caught up in it all. Do you have any important planets or points in your chart in the last degrees of a mutable sign? If you’re feeling cuckoo then you can blame Neptune and the nodes.

Coast Scene, Isles of Shoals, Childe Hassam

Some thoughts before a week of travel.

I’m going to be traveling next week, a trip to celebrate my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. That’s a number I really cannot totally wrap my head around. It takes a lot to care for and work with someone for that long, I assume. It’s impressive.

I decided that I’d like to schedule next week’s blog ahead of time, rather than sending it this week. I figured one of these at least would be a little slapdash, because I’m still not quite as effective at banking blogs for future weeks as I’d like to be. It’s not even because of busyness, exactly, so much as lack of focus. It’s that part of spring where everything, myself included, is still kind of shaking the sleep off. More sun has done wonders for me, but I’m still slow moving.

I’m also, finally, beginning to share that paid subscriber work next week, so, if that’s you, you can expect the first in a series of more informal, more diaristic blogs -- “letters to friends”. While I’ve got some idea of what that will mean (the first is drafted), I expect it’ll shift a bit. Mostly just assuming that at least some of you are voyeuristic like me and will appreciate this kind of internal reflecting done out loud.

I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale this week and have picked up the sequel, published in 2019, as well. I realized that I hadn’t been reading fiction or poetry, preoccupied with piles of books of essays and history and theory. That’s all well and good and often makes me feel more clear on what’s happening in the world, which is extremely important to me, but I also find that when I’m away from fiction for too long something happens to my brain. Periods of absence from poetry operate similarly.

It’s like this: reading good nonfiction helps flush out my brain, it treats my brain like the electric machine it is, trading out blown fuses and reconstructing the points of contact that allow the whole system to operate. This is, clearly, essential. But without fiction I lose the capacity to take a creative risk. Blowing up my metaphor really quick, fiction adds flesh tones to my internal palette and poetry introduces the potential of mixed media. These are the kinds of questionable images that I come up with when I’ve been hyper focused on reported and theoretical texts. I need those voices, high brow and low, peak technique and potboiler, to balance things out. I’m excited to be righting those scales.

Do you experience this? Do you tend to read from specific genres or in specific forms? What breaks you out of a rut or helps you pivot in a new direction?

Because it’s been a while of me posting on a weekly cadence, I decided I may as well unearth some of the earlier pieces I sent out now that there are some more of you -- they may pique your interest, they may not, but I’m still happier with them than I’d expect so… here you go!

Some things to read:

1. A brutal but beautiful piece about his mother’s cancer and his grief in losing her by Sam Kriss.

2. The excellent and quick read, The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm. You can read the (lengthy for a blog) blog post it started as for free here.

3. Garments Against Women, a book in verse and prose about “survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world.” I first read it around 2017 and it’s remained one of my favorites.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.