Ally > Recent Status Updates

Today I will watch you hold the violin
bow so delicately, and every harsh word
I've said will become the shrill
sound of learning
how to place the hair between the
bridge and the fingerboard.

Your face becomes the muscle
memory I will tap out on the
tablecloth when everything else
is forgotten.

Everything good that opens and closes, opens and closes.

A song plays unexpectedly on Spotify

Sometimes despair
finds us, in the middle

of summer. The sprinkler
stills, the basil left
half-chopped on the cutting

board.

[...but then there are also these sudden highly lyrical turns, and I can't tell why we flip yet, and we don't remain in the lyricism long enough for me to get accustomed to it.

Also, stunningly little momentum so far, the only thing pulling me along is the question of how Ming's gender issues rise more to the surface. Probably would have put the book down if not part of my read-all-the-trans-Lammy-noms project.]

[Octavia Nyombi's voice is soooo gorgeous (though it's confusing to hear her narrate as pre-transition Ming... does anyone arrive at a voice like that before coming out to themselves?)

The prose style of this book is lovely but a little confusing to me: it oscillates between highly detailed stage direction (which is a style I'm into when we're being asked to pay attention to queerness & bodies & gender [continued]

Even when it was run down, it was a ravishing house. I remember having this feeling of really wanting to spend the night there. Not just to sleep in the house, but to sleep with the house.

[how is anything in the actual novella going to live up to the hotness of an Anna Akhmatova poem next to this Keith Eggener quote!? strong epigraph game]

[enemies -> lovers -> pen pals = best arc.

I'm a little bored that we maybe end in a Paean to the Power of Story?

All in all, fixes sooo many problems with the first book (though I liked a lot of the first book) - a third culture allows us to actually feel a difference between station culture & empire, characters feel genuinely different from each other, the text is less floaty, better grounded in sensation.]

fungal infiltrates

[yes, this turn toward horror is so well-timed]

male-bodied

[erkkkkk, I throw up in my mouth a little whenever this phrase is used... no other three syllables so clearly signal super awkward transphobic-but-trying-to-be-nice-about-it lean-in girlboss feminism...]

[This is an interesting political idea, that threats to empire rely upon a destabilizing, singular person - what is the real-world version of this theory?]

"Conspiring with Shikishi
tanka inspired by Shikishi and her predecessors"

[This form is lovely and totally worth borrowing - the tanka Shikishi is referencing, then Shikishi's tanka, then a sequence of different tanka responses of Hahn's. The multiple responses gives the form some useful looseness; I think a strict three in every set would be too stiff, put too much weight on Hahn's.]

Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

[oh how on brand of me, we meet the art school kid out of his depth and I can now tolerate the filigreed sentences]

"Starting a Zuihitsu on _Eyebrows_ and Discovering _Cocoon_"

[I thought the 9/11 stuff brought me back - but holy smokes the image of pencil-thin eyebrow arches is a time machine]

How to defend ourselves and _not_ plunge into war? Would silence or inaction be a defense of, say--stoning women? [...] Of executing adulteresses, amputating a thief's hand, denying a girl's education, denying a woman's medical care?

[it is wild to watch the paroxysms of paranoia and propaganda of those weeks ripple through these poems - the sudden shock of islamophobia and jingoism and soulless blind patriotism]

Once an afternoon for groceries, it is still an afternoon for groceries--and a fear once called _the bridge, the stray suitcase, the rental truck parked too long on the corner._

[9/11 comes out of nowhere in this collection - of course it does, in imitation of a diary. A striking contrast to Shonagon, where the tragedies are deep in the subtext. I both relate to this material more and it seems infinitely distant.]

Do I know how to slow-dance with a woman? Who would lead?

[sort of wild how this poem criticizes men for weirdly fetishizing queer women while the poet is weirdly fetishizing queer women. maybe this is the point?]

Rolls of waves off Wellfleet. This could be Maui. I could be my mother.

The diction from a vivisection text is so pure.

(What his best friend told me he said)
_She thinks I found pleasure but I was as present as I was able._

[starting this book for like the third time, I'd forgotten how uncomfortable the introduction is - the overwrought intro and the bizarre "the chestnuts weren't *really* saying no" metaphor that opens the first story. I do remember getting into it eventually, though.]

It is lovely when a fragment can be a whole. Not just suggest entirety.
(Or can it?)
Where will she cut? And how much is aggressive?

Not, in the end, quite home.

[!!! what a last sentence!!!]

Nothing touched by empire stays clean.

[wow this book took a long time to hit its stride - what is it, like 200 pages where the only movement is the quest for space inbox zero? - but it works when it gets there. not in a way that justifies the initial trudge, but peak/end theory and all.]

Everything that cries in the night is wonderful. With the exception, of course, of babies.

A priest who gives a sermon should be handsome. After all, you're most aware of the profundity of his teaching if you're gazing at his face as he speaks. If your eyes drift elsewhere you tend to forget what you've just heard, so an unattractive face has the effect of making you feel quite sinful.

Earth is dropping hints
like "I'm real"
and "love me"

[what is this form? it's really close to the proportions and vibe of a sonnet crown but there aren't 14s around or repetition I'm picking up on]

from the introduction, xxi: "...those lists, which could read as quirky, personal cataloguing [...] based on highly individual taste, may well have been intended essentially as catalogues of shared taste [...] In the world of the Heian court, as in other conservative societies and periods, the essential role of taste and opinion was to affirm one's identity with others [...] "

[in conservative settings or always?]

The fifth day of the fifth month is best when the weather is overcast all day. The seventh day of the seventh month should also be cloudy, but the evening sky should be clear, with a brilliant moon and the stars clear and bright.

[who is this person who makes aesthetically prescriptive weather forecasts!?]

"Footnote: Only cats of fourth and fifth rank were permitted in the Emperor's palace."

_Shallow of me_ -- only noticing one bird this afternoon. Now I am sure there were sparrows as well. I keep this a secret.

[why am I still such a sucker for bird poems? how to win me: say bird, say hollow, say bone, say the goddesses, say curl, say tender, say crook, say held in the passive and let that be the only passive verb, say alight, say limb or limn or linger or limber, say last and surface as verbs.]

The snow was as deep as the startling white, and as her feelings for him.

[Every interpersonal moment in this book is so bad!]