17: olivia rosane, microcovids, witch kitsch, the sperm kings, arctic spring
I’ve been watching hours upon hours of Wang Bing films lately, in preparation for an interview. A grim start to the year but there’s something very fitting about a January spent watching films-as-endurance sport. What else? A website and formal call for pitches for BXD: The Journal of Postwestern Criticism—please share widely with your networks!
And—trying something new: I’m going to add on an extra diary/bit of writing every month for paid subscribers, with the first one coming next week. Please join me as I conduct a material archaeology of my decade+ here and somehow cram that which sparks joy into two (2) suitcases. This week’s diary comes from a very dear friend, poet and climate reporter Olivia Rosane. Images are from The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893).
spiky bois
How many microcovids would you spend on a burrito? Pandemic dressing takes a dark turn. Caste aside: the manual scavengers of Tamil Nadu. Our souls are dead: surviving a Chinese re-education camp for Uighurs. The long history of criminalising Hijras. The Nobel Prize-winning, LSD dropping, yet problematic scientist who invented PCR. Colonialism had never really ended: my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes. Love taboos: controlling Hindu-Muslim romances. Almost home. India is targeting defenders of indigenous rights as terrorists. Out of sight, out of mind. Trapped in museums for centuries, Maori ancestors are coming home. The plague year. The memory war.
glouglou & snackchat
My dinners with Le Carré. How high-end restaurants have failed America’s Black chefs. Dutch officials seize ham sandwiches of drivers arriving from the UK. Americans now own the salade composée. Sauces, spices and immigration: the genesis of Kolkata’s Chinese cuisine. What goes into designing a wine label? Voices from the front lines of America’s food supply. 🔊The delicious significance of food in science fiction. Why longtime Alaska residents are called ‘sourdoughs.’ Kaya is more than a toast topping. Real cooking. Dham is a heritage food of Himachal, India. How I found empowerment in the history of Black veganism. Rebecca May Johnson cooks the internet. Shopping lists. Mother, kitchen. The chef recreating 18c recipes from a thrift shop find. A brief history of peanut butter. In her footsteps.
lit & criticism
On the Black Romantic. Caste does not explain race. What if the great American novelist doesn’t write novels? The hater with a heart of gold. Shondaland’s regency: On Bridgerton. Twelve books that form part of the arsenal of Dalit writing. No one belonged here. Trying to teach English literature in the wake of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. What a Jain merchant’s rare and candid autobiography tells us about life in Mughal India. Torrey Peters goes there. How to fight fascism through literature. Ved Mehta on how his life changed after losing his vision. Native lit is dead. These precious days. Almost eighty.
climate change
Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring). The big thaw: how Russia could dominate a warming world. Orange is the new peach. The last two Northern White rhinos on earth. A simple fix for restaurants and diners to help curb climate change. Big Ice art. The ard, the ant, and the anthropocene. The greatest climate-protecting technology ever devised. All systems go. Stormy weather. Climate change will force a new American migration. Under the weather. Climate and the courts. The end of oil is near. Snow machines and fleece blankets: inside the ski industry’s battle with climate change. Qualities of earth.
☞\( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞ yeehaw
The Sperm Kings have a problem: too much demand. Can you poison your way to good health? A league of their own. A new dawn for bodycon. She stalked her daughter’s killers across Mexico, one by one. Witch kitsch and dark history in Germany’s Harz mountains. What covering heavy metal taught me about spotting Nazis. Florida encourages residents to eat wild pythons to help combat overpopulation. ‘Human foot’ in Gateshead field turns out to be a potato. The unlikely connection between wellness influencers and the pro-Trump rioters. The cutest animal on Instagram is possibly in your trashcan. The secret formula. Journey to the center of the earth.
culture diary: olivia rosane
monday
I wake up at 4:30 a.m. for another work week. I write daily environmental news summaries for a company that works on East Coast Time. Normally, I am in the UK completing my PhD and hours ahead of my editors. But I went home to Seattle for Christmas, and now the UK is on lockdown again, which means I won’t be returning to school for the winter term. Honestly, I am glad not to have an ocean between myself and my family during a pandemic and an almost-coup.
I write about a six-foot prehistoric shark baby that ate its siblings in utero, and the fact that the UK has allowed the emergency-use of a bee-killing pesticide at the behest of the sugar beet lobby. Apparently, sugar beets are also battling a virus and need extra reinforcements.
By around 9:30 I am done with the first part of my work day and head downstairs for my new favorite snack of berries and cashews. The idea each day is that I will spend from 10 a.m. on completing PhD-related tasks, with breaks for lunch and maybe a walk. Today I have a good amount of energy, but I end up spending it on a bunch of bureaucratic stuff I had to knock out, so no real scholarly work gets done.
My mother is currently doing a painting class from home. Once she loses the light, the two of us follow along on Youtube with the day’s installment of ‘Breathe’, Yoga with Adriene’s New Year’s yoga journey. Dinner is leftover stew made with smoked eggplants and peppers. I read a bit of The Penguin Book of Migration Literature for my thesis, which is the sort of ideal after-dinner activity that sits on the border between work and relaxation. Then I head to bed early, around 9 p.m.
tuesday
Another early morning. I write about someone carving ‘Trump’ into the algae on the back of a manatee and Paris’s decision to redesign the Champs-Élysées to have fewer cars and more plants. The stories are unintentional mirror images: one trying to force more human onto nature, the other trying to bring more nature into the human. Of course this is a false and harmful binary, but I still prefer plants to cars.
I never fully wake up and my brain fog never really parts, so not much work gets done. I help my mom make dinner: white bean and sage soup. The recipe calls for carrots and celery, and we add to that the zucchini and kale left in the fridge. I have become mesmerized by the beauty of vegetables. The brightness of carrots, the kelpy green of the kale. The end result is warm and comforting. I read more Penguin Book of Migration Literature and go to bed.
wednesday
I rise dark and early once again. Today’s first story at least promises justice: Rick Snyder, who was governor of Michigan during the Flint water crisis, looks set to be charged for that particular disaster of environmental racism. The second is just sad: gorillas at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park tested positive for COVID-19. The zoo spokeswoman thinks they will recover, at least.
It is the first sunny morning in some time, so my Dad and I walk around the lake that is a block from my parent’s house. There was a wind storm the night before. I slept through it, but its evidence is clear in the leaves and branches tossed around the path.
This afternoon, I have a deadline to meet, and realize after half an afternoon’s work that I will not meet it unless I stay up extremely late. This is no longer an option to me because of my work schedule, which leads to a meltdown of panic and self-reproach until I figure out a way to adjust the deadline and get a certain minimum done. In between working and panicking, I check social media and realize that Trump has been impeached for the second time. I think about all the real horrors of this year, which still feels like an elongation of last year. The big disasters, both personal and political, I have mostly absorbed with a passive numbness. It’s still the little, personal failures—the procrastination, the missed deadlines—that get my blood up. And I wonder if it is because I know how to be upset about these things. I have at least 15 years of practice. And so all the anger and frustration that builds up as I watch and report on this world gets channeled there, along the routes my emotions have already carved. I calm myself down by chopping vegetables for stir fry.
thursday
This morning, I write about a study warning that plants, in the next decades, could start emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb. Apparently, heat is bad for photosynthesis. But this is only if we do nothing to lower emissions. Then I write about a wolverine that triggered a trail cam at Yellowstone National Park for the first time. Wolverines need snow, so they are also in trouble if emissions are not reduced. Incidentally, they have the best scientific name: Gulo gulo. My job is an odd mix of wonder and terror.
It is sunny again, so my dad and I take another walk around the lake. The water is still and reflects the blue and rolling clouds. Green Lake has become a sad place to walk because so many people are camping there in tents, having nowhere else to go. The tech boom has inflated Seattle housing prices and now the pandemic has turned desperation into catastrophe. One person or people in a large tent by the entrance have strung a tree with lights that they power with a generator.
I work more steadily today and actually begin to enjoy what I am doing. Then, at dusk, my parents and I take another walk around the neighborhood. The clouds in the east are pink and soft, like a scarf draped across the sky. We walk up the hill that looks west, towards Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. The clouds on this side are orange, with gaps of piercing turquoise.
As the light from the sunset fades, the Christmas lights on the houses glow brighter. It is almost mid-January and most people in the neighborhood seem to have kept their lights up. I have not spent January in Seattle in some time, so I am not sure if this is normal or if everyone is just in agreement that we need as much light as possible this year. We walk down a street we have not walked down before, and just beyond our turn we see a truly fantastic display: a pine tree with branches lit from within so that its center glows red. The trunk is strung with white lights, and the triangular shape of the tree gives it the appearance of a giant fairy toadstool. Even though we had planned to turn one block earlier, we decide to walk on to get a closer look. The red glow, we discover, has been created by turning stage lights with a red gel up into the branches. As we are looking up, we notice the same perfumed smell that has haunted our noses during neighborhood walks for the past two weeks. We have, until now, never been able to pinpoint its source. Then, we look down, and it is right below us, and below the toadstool tree. A leafy bush with tiny, white, bell-like flowers. They are stringy, nothing much to look at at all. But their sweetness follows us down the block.
(For the botanically minded, we later identify them as sarcococca, or sweet box.)
friday
I wake up from one of my two recurring pandemic anxiety dreams. I wander through a variety of public places—a movie theater, the London Underground—and realize each time that I do not have a mask. (The second recurring pandemic dream involves a sudden realization that I cannot smell or taste something that I should be able to, and am now a danger to everyone around me.) I write about a deadly earthquake in Indonesia and a city in New Zealand that has closed a road for a month, so that a mother sea lion nesting with her new pup on a golf course will be able to safely cross it to feed each day until it is time for both mother and baby to journey out the sea.
I work relatively well in the afternoon, and then we take another twilight walk up to the nearby grocery store to pick up some paper towels, corn tortillas, wine, and ice cream. Because it is Friday, my mom and I make cocktails: a kind of negroni with grapefruit juice and cointreau. We try to watch the News Hour but the internet, which has been getting much slower since the New Year, keeps stopping and starting, making it basically impossible. I help my mom cut leeks for a butternut squash soup.
saturday
I get to sleep in until a glorious 9:30. After a breakfast of bagels with salmon, cream cheese, and capers, my mom and I do a full hour of yoga. (We were a day behind on Adriene’s yoga journey.) Then workers come to install fibre-optic cables. (The company’s solution when we called asking about our internet speed.) I vacuum the house and finally de-Christmas the living room. The mantle greens and wilting poinsettia go into the Yard Waste. The Christmas tree is staying until we no longer need the extra light.
My mother makes an anchovy pasta called “Midnight Pasta” for dinner, and we watch the first episode of The Crimson Petal and the White on Acorn. It is a sort of neo-Victorian melodrama about a mediocre upper-class man who leaves his ailing wife at home to have his ego (and other parts) stroked by a sex worker named Sugar. It is not particularly enjoyable to watch, and we decide we will not continue. Sugar looks so painfully bored whenever her customer cannot see her face, and the shift between this expression and her exaggerated smiles when he does look her way makes me feel exhausted on her behalf. I am glad that I no longer work retail.
sunday
After another glorious lie-in, I join my parents for a breakfast of pumpkin bread and bacon. The sun is bright when I wake up, but the clouds roll in over breakfast. We decide to go out and walk anyway in the University of Washington’s Arboretum. Winter walks on cloudy days are defined by sparks of unexpected color: the white, popcorn like heads of the snow berries; the green velvet of moss on twisting tree limbs. There is part of the walk that follows a series of bridges and pathways through marshy islands along Lake Washington. Here, my dad spots a grouping of ducks he has never seen before, with white underbodies, black backs and heads, and white beaks. The family Birds of North America informs us that they are ring-necked ducks.
As the walk ends, I overhear two timely conversations. “I got a COVID test last week,” one woman says. “The strange thing about now is there is nothing to look forward to,” says a man to his friends, “no dates on the calendar.” No, now there can not be dates, fixed future points around which to draw the constellation of the beginning year. I am where I am for now, doing remotely the work I pledged myself to before all this started. I do not know where I will be once this term is over, let alone in six months or a year. All I have are days, and deadlines. I prepare myself for another week of them.
featured creature: venezuelan poodle moth
Regrettably, that first image isn’t a real moth but a felted version doing the rounds, but the real thing is plenty fluffy:
