typowriter - Tumblr blog

[typowriter]

Shuttin’ ‘er Down

Farmers before and after a drought are different people. This is not a metaphor for my sobriety—no booze for 50 days, though—it’s really about thirsty plants and a lack of rain. It can affect a green-thumbed motherfucker.

The summer memories of 2016 were not all of vegetation and water, but there was much wishing for less plants and more wet. Greenhouses got hot! Des pousses ont crevé! Chipmunks drowned in rain barrels! Sunny house windows confused birds! I buried many critters this year... C’est la vie. It only seemed to rain once September ended, just like the Almanac said it would. Wondering if the ground cherries and zucchini would bounce back, how long the asparagus would last, why we did not have more mulch—we bought a sprinkler system and timer early in the game. Karine grew flowers for a wedding and the bouquets were explosions of lust and joy, all painstakingly fed and encouraged until we beheaded them for a happy couple. I kept up the beans, tomatoes and kohlrabi, with mixed results (salad) and harvested puffballs and berries (foraging ahead of Capucine is key).

The beauty of the flowers, the hard-fought watering schedule, and the burial of small critters all touch on life at the farm. It’s an honour to witness and perform rural happenings and duties. And I recognize the privilege of working a slab of land, my sliver of the planet, but it can be too much. When it grows out of hand, it becomes a lawn that’s just a breeding ground for mosquitoes and landmine field of shit, the ivy and talls grass choke out the natural fences of cedar and highbush cranberry. It just piles up.

Mononc’ Ben said it would be a lot or work. Pessimistic but correct, I didn’t really listen. I just thought of the house, this cabin in the woods, this island. It blotted out pain and grief, it felt hopeful to have a house. And it is, but it’s a fight.

I used to dream of curses lifting. Of demons banished and waking artisans finding completed work, or a single meal that cures cancer and philosophical answers that dispel insanity. But I don’t dream much anymore. I live a kind of lucky dream, where everything costs exactly what it gives back and the natural world is harsh in its indifference. This lucky dream is cut off from the rest of society, until I ask for the world to come visit, to help crush apples and rake leaves and shut ‘er down.

Maybe dismantle the greenhouse. It really does get too hot, and we might not need it next year. Always experimenting, those gardeners...

[typowriter]

All I have is what's in there, yeah? That belongs to me... The thing to do is to keep people out of it... Well, unless you invite them in as I'm inviting you in!

Marty Feldman, in “Six Degree of Separation”, indicating and tapping a plaster reproduction of his head. https://youtu.be/oChBT5B3Ulg?t=1m34s

[typowriter]

Lynda Barry wrote What It Is, among other great & strange things. 

By Lynda Barry  May 2016

[typowriter]

There is a well-established law in the unwritten annals of canine-human psychology that it is impossible to maintain a conviction of universal despair for a significant length of time when you are in proximity to a Bernese mountain dog.

Martin Kihn, Bad Dog (A Love Story)

[typowriter]

YEP!

Follow this artist on twitter!

[typowriter]

#tbt to October five years ago: a post from young bibliophile on weed. Note that 1939 is quite older than some American teens chillaxing. At this point in his writing, Lovecraft was still testing the waters of horror, and had not yet entered the cosmic... Blair Blake of Tool knows what I’m talking about! But for anyone interested in his earliest horror fiction actually worth reading, I’d recommend “The Rats in the Wall”, “The Colour Out of Space”, or “The Music of Erich Zann”. 

Happy reading 420!

Half-Way to Four Twenty

It’s 4:20 a.m. somewhere in the world, I tell myself with the countdown to the twentieth of April. I know, I know it’s Oct. 20. Nonsense is needed, thank you.

Theories on the origin of 420 — coincidentally April 20th — are legion! But to the millions who just want to blaze, it’s usually not of interest. Wikipedia says some kids in Cali lit up every 20 after 4 p.m. and so White Castle sales spike once a year, without fail. Or perhaps a famous pothead was born/killed/castrated on that fateful date twentieth of April, and so…

No matter? Hey, this is history we talking ‘bout!

I say listen up! The oldest known usage of the digit is from a short science-fiction piece co-written by a certain Kenny J. Sterling and another youth named Howie P. Lovecraft ;). To any sensible person this means get baked and read your eyes out. Visine accordingly. I wouldn’t, however, recommend the story from where it came: “In the Walls of Eryx”. 

Published in 1939 in Weird Tales, Sterling wrote the draft in 1936 about a spaceman hunting for crystals and fending off lizard-men in the gassy swamps of the planet Venus. (Why else would you go to Venus?) The narrator is just doing his job — he’s just a guy from Richmond, Virginia — and around 3:30 the hero runs into what he calls the “mirage-plants” that bloom “gaseous, dream-breeding exhalations”! :D 

They disorient and baffle the cosmonaut who trudges a little too deep as he becomes stoned, ripped even. His loss of common sense, no balance, dancing lights in his eyes, and an odd concept of time… they all lead to a fate inside the “walls”, which I won’t spoil. 

In his own words, Operative A-49, Kenton J. Stanfield says: “My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-plant’s pervasive influence. Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20. Though eternities had seemed to pass, the whole experience could have consumed little more than a half-hour.”

Bam. All y'all other theories can go belly-up. I’m gonna #bakenbook.

[typowriter]

A 3rd Lilac Fest: Perhaps in 2017

This time last year Karine and I began to plan out Lilac Fest 2. Well, no. That’s a lie. Around December 2014 we started talking about how LF2 would be bigger, badder, and better attended than the first year. And on May 23, 2015 we got just that. 

It exceeded our expectations and we came away from the second “inaugural” with a feeling of warmth and accomplishment after a sleepless night. The mix of bonfire, music, potluck, homebrew and blooming lilacs made it a perfect way to celebrate our little piece of land.

This year we won’t be having a flower festival in our backyard! My apologies for those who have had the date on their calendars. No, we won’t be having a music festival with four acts nor a $5 entry fee to pay for them. We’ll be focused on the garden, which is what we’ve always tried to be about.

Full disclosure: last year I stood on my homemade pallet stage with mic in hand to welcome 125 people onto my lawn, and I wondered to myself how I was going to afford groceries the next week. Instead of aggressively chasing writing gigs I spent a lot of time fussing over a treasure hunt for all the children (two of ‘em) who would come to the festival. Instead of developing new skills and discovering new markets in which to sell my writing, I worked on our gardening workshop (which was mainly ad libbed in the end) and on coordinating artists, roadies, and various Lilackeys.

It was a blast but I fucked up. A few weeks later, after the glow of lilac pride finally washed off, I got a job in a dish pit at the local restaurant. I had found my answer: this was how freelance writers made money! Yeah, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let an afternoon and evening of fun and, let’s face it, debauchery do that to me again. Though it’s fair to say I did it to myself...

Other factors also came into play on this decision:

Karine has been given the honour and challenge of supplying flowers for a friend’s wedding this summer. It’s a kind of dream coming true: that our garden can be part of such a special day. But again, we need to focus on that, and though we have always benefitted from the “due date” of LF to get all our planting done, this year we’d much rather get it done for our own reasons. Not because we need to clean up the house because guests are coming over!

& & &

We unofficially named our property Pourquoi Pas Potager not because it’s alliterative — or because it translates to “why not vegetable garden” — no, because we wanted to make the place feel special. Lilac Fest made it even more so. But at one point I realized that I can have a garden without a festival but I can’t have this festival without the garden.

So: sabbatical. There is wisdom in the sabbatical, which was a Judaic law for landowners to observe the seventh year (as each seventh day) as a Sabbath. They let the land rest and that’s what we are doing this year.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being a part of this.

JRM

PS: Maybe I’ll stop pretending May 23 isn’t my birthday this year.

[typowriter]

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it's a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before we settle on one. We go to a bookstore and look at twenty novels before we pick the one we want. We filter and rank and judge. We have to. There's just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day.

Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

[typowriter]

I remember a guy at book club asking me why I hadn’t written a memoir. I said, “I don’t remember all of it.” This was how I learned to articulate something about fiction writing: that you write to describe something you learn from your life but that is not described by describing your life.

Alexander Chee (via austinkleon)

[typowriter]

It’s four years to the day of my father’s death. Lessened by his lack of life I am also more of myself without him. I am filling the void he left. There are parts of my life that wouldn’t exist without his passing, and instead of feeling torn I feel glad thinking that he would have liked that house in the far background and he would have loved this dog in the fore and he would have enjoyed the fact my website went live today.

He would have been happy to know that I am doing my best... although he wondered out loud if my best couldn’t be a little better. And I realize that I don’t miss that little jab of his because there’s nothing to miss—it is still there. He is still making me go.

[typowriter]

Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it's not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.

David Allen, Getting Things Done

[typowriter]

(via chibird)

[typowriter]

In times of unrest and fear, it is perhaps the writer’s duty to celebrate, to single out the values we can cherish, to talk about some of the few warm things we know in a cold world.

Phyllis McGinley

[typowriter]

When Canada's prime ministerial enfant terrible Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously contemplated his (first) retirement while walking in an Ottawa blizzard one night, not a single Canuck of any political stripe thought it a stupid or unconsidered way to make a decision: we'd all been there, we all understood. Snowflakes both speak and listen. Making decisions in a snowstorm is our birthright.

Leslie Anthony, White Planet

[typowriter]

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

Albert Einstein

[typowriter]

Mon chéri, ma chérie, je t'en supplie, respecte ta singularité, sois intime avec toi, cultive tes DÉSIRS, non tes caprices, évite de conjuguer les verbes au futur ou au passé, n'écoute pas les aigris qui te conseilleront des compromis, reste digne de celui que tu seras à cinq ans, rebelle au diktat de la raison, folâtre peut-être, rieur sans doute, mène une vie qui te ressemble et, surtout, n'oublie pas que la réalité ça n'existe pas ; seul ta VISION compte. Mon petit, bonne route. Que le monde ne te blesse pas trop. Ton père a confiance en toi.

Alexandre Jardin, Le Petit Sauvage

[typowriter]

If life is purposeless, do you feel it’s worth living? Yes, for those who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder. A capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong—and lucky—he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent. But if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness we supply our own light.

Stanley Kubrick, Playboy Interview with Eric Nordern, September 1968