radiant fracture

What has it got in its pocketses?

(right now)

[ETA] My answer is very dull (phone, keys, wallet). I am at least wearing my Dress Shorts (no cargo pockets). I am impressed, though, by how much people can fit in their pockets.

Oh! I also currently have a card for a local toy and memorabilia shop, for educational reasons.

Question 3 is about hope.

What's an interesting source of hope or faith for a character in an RPG to have -- interesting for you to play?

In Ten Candles hope is a quality that, when used, allows the character the possibility of surviving longer, a source of fortitude represented by an extra D6, so I'm loosely thinking of it that way. 10C conceives of this as a scene you could play out, like "I will find hope when I find my cat again."

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Yep, still thinking about the thing and looking for some quasi-randomized ideas, if you need a distraction. If I use them for anything, you get credit, of course.

This isn't necessarily a 10C playthrough that I'm envisioning, but that's a framework that I know and like, so I'm using it for the moment.

I'm currently just noodling around without much direction, but I'm trying to think of a project to occupy my free time that doesn't cost money or use a tonne of brain lightning.

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Thinking about a thing and looking for some quasi-randomized ideas, if you need a distraction.

What's an interesting weakness for a character in an RPG to have -- interesting for you to play?

Say a mostly-mundane-world RPG like Ten Candles, where the threat may be numinous or chthonic but the people are solidly midgardian.*



Weakness we can define in the 10C way as "a quality that harms your life more than it helps it," which doesn't mean it couldn't prove useful in a sudden surge of dramatic irony.

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*That said, I can also see how supernatural and/or divine powers and flaws could be fun in such a setting, especially if concealed at first, so, you know, fill your boots.

**You can tell I'm posting from work because I have easy access to curly brackets.

Since I am to have an impromptu connection with Norway, here is a poem by Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel Laureate.

Full text on the Granta website. I had not heard of him before exactly now, and I like this.

* * * * *

( From Dreamed in Stone )

* * * * * *

What I like here is the gentle surrealism, the negotiating of an experience that seems both concrete and numinous, the almost-prose uplifted by detail and repetition rather than conventional lyricism.

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Interoception is the feeling of having an inside to your body -- all the sensations from the skin on in. (Unless, like me, you simply contain an infinite starfield.)

Exteroception is the feeling of the body meeting the external world, ex. the surface of the skin -- sensations arising from outside the body.¹

What would be the word for the feeling of the extensions of your body that exist in otherdimensional space, where inside and outside as we usually experience them are not arranged in the same way?

(cf. Flatland for the higher-dimensional ability to bypass barriers that exist in lower dimensions - or maybe it was that YA book with the ketchup)

Interoception, though it sounds official, seems to be a nonce coining from interior + receptor,² and exteroception came into being as the twin of intero-.

Metaperception already means something, our beliefs about how other people perceive us.³

Metaception seems to mean the ability to create internal representations of interoceptive states.⁴

...I could be writing but first I need to invent (or borrow) a word. Surely someone clever has already coined this (or is about to).

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1. The process of sorting out the two in infant development is something I'd like very much to investigate; I've always felt that the object-relation grammars thus given rise had a lot to do with the poetics of any particular embodiment.

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9220286/

3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/social-psychology-of-perceiving-others-accurately/metaperceptions/3F8F12F8D611531B8F451EA380E5312B

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9240682/

Arsenal Pulp Press is having a hell of a sale for Pride month: 30% off all LGBTQ2S+ books plus free shipping (Canada and US).

That includes Canada Reads finalists Butter Honey Pig Bread by francesca ekwuyasi and Shut Up You're Pretty by Tea Mutonji; Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Fiction; the poetry of Gillian Christmas and Arielle Twist; Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead (if you gave away your copy or something); Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez; a place called No Homeland by Kai Cheng Thom; and books by Casey Plett, Rae Spoon, Zena Sharman, S. Bear Bergman, John Elizabeth Stintzi, Vivek Shraya, Larissa Lai, AND, YOU KNOW, MORE. I got tired of clicking through.

It also includes (I think) the pre-order for Sarah Leavitt's beautiful graphic memoir about the death of her partner Donimo, Something, Not Nothing. I watched this take shape on Instagram and it was pretty remarkable. I often use Leavitt's comics as examples of what you can do expressively with visual elements without freaking out about conventional technique.

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Of the three poems J.E. Montgomery translates in his article "Horse, Hawk and Cheetah: 3 Arabic Hunting Poems of Abū Nuwās," I think I like "Cheetah" the best, although I arrived there looking for hawks.


Cheetah

I move through black cloud night—
Dark, at war with Dawn,
Quivers with a fine blade’s sheen—
With a vigorous, widejaw cheetah
Thickneck, spine-welded-scapulae
Leanbelly in taut-twist well-rope body
Cheek-folds plump in a scowl,
Sheeny; black teardrops on masseters
Bactrian lungs in saffron ribcage
Heavy paws, bull neck, sudden dart
A lion but for the spotty coat
Alert for shapes that shift.

A long search sights two herds
On ground flat as a man’s brow
He’s off, a slow stalk,
A trap about to explode
Puff adder slither
Through ground high and low
Face to face with his prey now—
Havoc! He scatters them across the desert
Full stretch, full pelt
Greedy fury.

Why hunt with any creature but a cheetah?

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Montgomery notes that "Hunting with cheetahs was an elite pastime."

This translation, while necessarily free, seems to me to have the most energy of the three hunting poems.

Note that the original poem, which is given in the Arabic in the article, would have had short regular lines and a strong monorhyme (every line ending on the same sound, such as run/fun/sun). This is a much more modernist, playful, word-coining version, which I like -- but I would like to compare it to both a literal and a rhymed translation, to triangulate some imagined ideal.

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Perhaps the World Ends Here
Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

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Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and was the 23rd US Poet Laureate for three terms.

"Perhaps the World Ends Here" was today's poem on The Slowdown. Of course it made me think of Gaza, and of everyone living at the edge of life and death in their own kitchen, or street, or car.

For me, the pair of "a place to hide in the shadow of terror / a place to celebrate the terrible victory" is a powerful moment in the poem because both are offered as possible and both are awful.

What do you notice or respond to in the poem?

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We Lived Happily During the War
By Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

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An old one (2013), probably familiar, but one of those poems that feels to me like it has always existed, that each word is inevitable.

Pádraig Ó Tuama has a Poetry Unbound episode about this poem, and gives a wonderful reading of it.

O'Tuama asks a beautiful question: "who is in your household?"

What do you notice in the poem?

I notice the enjambment, the way the line breaks press the thought into us like a reed into clay. When the speaker talks about the actions of the "we", the line breaks do a lot of work:

                And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

--followed by a line break and then a full stanza break, and then "protested." That is, the space tells us -- there was delay, hesitation, incompleteness, insufficiency.

                but not enough, we opposed them but not

-- again, there's a full stanza break before the second "enough." In that gap between "not" and "enough," I hear things like "not so much that it would get the "us" in real trouble."

And also "enough" standing by itself asks, as Ó Tuama asks: what would be enough?

The poem can also be found at the Poetry Foundation. It opens Kaminsky's collection Deaf Republic, which tells a kind of parable about resistance to tyrrany in a town called Vasenka. (I am hunting up a copy now.)

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[ETA: thank you, sabotabby! You'd think a so-called scholar would look at the receipts.]

A curious and wonderful artefact has appeared in the mail.

At first I thought it was my copy of The Play of Gilgamesh by Edwin Morgan, arrived under another name, perhaps in a new edition. By someone else. Hmm.

But no, upon examination, it is another book entirely, a dual collection of poems in Spanish and English, called Enkidu is dead and not dead/esta muerto y no lo esta by a Tucker Lieberman. Who seems to be a trans poet of whom I do not recall knowing until now.

There is a beautiful illustration of Gilgamesh and Enkidu embracing on the cover by artist Luis Carlos Barragan.

How about this, then (from the first poem, "How I Thought it Worked"):

We live forever, Enkidu and I. This is how:
when we do not like the story,
he breaks the tablet,
speaks the ibis words: Send us back.

or this (from "Enkidu is Gone"):

Enkidu makes the feathers grow on the hawk

Or this:

If I am the rope, and you are the weaver--
If I lower you into a well, and you rip out the threads--
If a space in my heart lets the blood through--
If we cannot weave together, but you weave and I weave-

That is the first poem.

Thank you. It is a beautiful gift.

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