Asakiyume mita

Wakanomori shared a PDF of this (probably paywalled) article from the Atlantic, "The Costs of Instant Translation," by Ross Benjamin. This guy expresses so eloquently a lot of what I was reaching for in this post.

( extensive quotes )

I'm not a literary translator, but I definitely am drawn by the cultural specificity of languages, the "shimmer of ambiguity," as Benjamin puts it. The creation, together, of meaning when the languages don't line up.

P.S. If the article is indeed paywalled and you'd like to read the whole thing, and if you're willing to share your email, you can message me and I'll email it to you.

P.P.S. Bonus: the part of his SNL monologue where Bad Bunny goes into Spanish

What a breathtaking book Saint Death’s Daughter is. Truly magnificent in all respects: its exciting, imaginative story, its absorbing, immersive worldbuilding, its soaring writing, and its sharp, compassionate observations about human nature. I loved it completely.

It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaín meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to Doédenna, Saint Death.

( There's so much! This is just scratching the surface )

So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.

It's a general truth of online life that you shouldn't read the comments--it's where the virulent nastiness lives.

Every now and then, that's not true though. After falling in love with the song "Xam Xam," by Cheikh Ibra Fam, I let Youtube take me on a tour of related songs.

It brought me "Gambia," by Sona Jobarteh, a beautiful song written to celebrate 50 years of Gambian independence (in 2015).

I happened to glance at the comments, and--my heart!

I'm a German, 55 years and my husband was a Gambian. He died here in Germany in 2011 (cancer). Today he would have celebrated his 62nd birthday. In 1998 he took me to his country and we spent there two years. This was the most beautiful time in my life. For the first time in my life, I felt like real living – I felt alive like never before. So I want to say "thank you" to my husband again, who showed me a place where my soul could breath. Whenever I feel down, doubting what this life is all about, I go back in my mind and think of those glory days.

And this...

Oh, i can recognise my grandmother at the end of this clip dancing with a group of women's. Thank you sister sona for futuring my granny. This will go down in history. Gambia for ever true.

And this...

I am from Ukraine and this music made me cry. It touches something deep in my heart. I think we missed Africa and we miss it. I play it and dance in the kitchen. I would like the whole world to go out in the streets and dance African dances. As not only live in our brains, but also in our bodies and our hearts.

And this..

From Somalia 🇸🇴 much love ❤️ our brothers & sisters 🇬🇲 beautiful country & beautiful people ❤️

And on and on...

"Am from Uganda ... I am from the Caribbean ... I'm a dutch old (63) man ... I'm latina from Colombia ... Je suis de la Côte d'Ivoire 🇨🇮 ... I'm Argentinian ... I'm a Proud ERITREAN-AFRICAN ... I am from India ... I'm a japanese student ... I'm from Morocco ... I am welsh ... I am from Spain ... I am white African from Mozambique ... I'm Nigerian ... I am peruvian ... I am from Croatia ... I am from Bangladesh .... I am Congolese... Sending love from Ghana ... Greetings and best wishes from Latvia..."

(And several from the United States, too.)

All full of love for the song. Really made me feel like part of one human family.

Billy Behind Me, who was a character in the Patricia Russo flash story "Mena, Until," which I talked about back in February, makes an appearance in the second of this trio of short poems.

I like everything about that poem. I have a broken pot whose shards I want to try drawing with (though I have brilliant street chalks, so I don't really have the need--but it's the principle of the thing).

The end makes me think of how we talk with people when we can't talk to them in the waking world anymore. How we talk in dreams. Makes me think of what Ailton Krenak says, and about what the characters say in Embrace of the Serpent, and also of the story The Lathe of Heaven.


Some music for you: Baixi-Baixi

sovay linked me to a story from 2012, "Aquatica," by MC Clark, in which a male anglerfish's effort to avoid his own biological drive and the blandishments of a female anglerfish lead to profound conversations. Really gripping story that creates a full, meaningful vision of the anglerfish life cycle--which is one of those life cycles that seems really alien from a mammalian point of view. It's easy to sympathize with the male anglerfish's desire to outrun biological determinism, but it's not merely survival he's after--as the female anglerfish points out, death comes either way--it's wanting to perceive or understand something more than just the cycle.

* * *

On the way to visit my dad on Christmas Day a small murmuration passed over our car. It was breathtaking--thinking about it makes me stop breathing. Dark bodies, wings, pale sky--a tessellating collectivity. Then on our way back later in the day, we saw bobcats in a meadow. Bobcats are so strange, if you're used to domestic cats: they're like someone has taken a domestic cat and given it extra-strong, extra muscular legs... and reduced its tail.

* * *

Saw this and wasn't sure at first whether it was a branch on the path or the shadow of a branch.



(It was a shadow)

There are rivers whose personhood has been recognized--in New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh, Canada, elsewhere too. And now, on the occasion of COP16, the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference currently underway in Cali, Colombia, there's a legal petition to have Ecuador's Los Cedros cloud forest recognized as a co-copyright holder for a song, created by writer Robert McFarlane, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, mycologist Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito--and the forest.

In this Guardian article, McFarlane says,

It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest. This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers comprise. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.

The organization they're working through is the More Than Human Life (MOTH) project, which describes itself as "an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all." They have a book, MORE THAN HUMAN RIGHTS
An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing, edited by Rodríguez-Garavito, which is free to download on their site (link here), as they want people to have access to the ideas and thinking.

In other news, an owl perched in a lilac right by our door this morning, looking for all the world like a person in a parka with a fur-lined hood. Her feet were invisible where she perched, her eyes were black and only black when she swiveled around to look at Wakanomori and me. We had come to see what the disturbance was--crows were making such a racket. Apparently they don't like Madam Owl.

When Crinklewing (as my husband dubbed him) was blown away, I thought that was the end of the story, and so I made the entry with that endpoint.

But stories keep flowing! So much of storytelling is about deciding where to begin and end your tale ...

Later that day, I found Crinklewing again in my yard. All through the day, I took breaks from work to continue what I described in the last post, taking him to different flowers, tempting him with sugar-water. As evening came round, he climbed up on my sweatshirt, right up to my neck! And then he fluttered off, back into the milkweed patch by my door.

Or so I thought: later I found him on my kitchen floor.

All right, friend, spend the night here in my house, where it's warm, I thought. I put him on a brightly colored piece of cloth on my ironing board and wet it with sugar-water.

proboscis out!


Today is another sunny day. I don't want Crinklewing to end his days cooped up in a dim indoors, so I decided to take him to a pollinator garden by an elementary school. It's a beautiful place, and he looked at home stretched out on a ... not sure what it is. [ETA: Likely Tithonia, also known as Mexican sunflower--ID courtesy of pameladean--thank you!] A bright flower.



But I heard a group of kids and a teacher coming along, and I realized in this spot, he would be vulnerable to lots of people noticing him and possibly poking at him. So I took him down the hill to a wild spot with lots of goldenrod (which has delicious nectar beloved of bees and butterflies) and set him there. Lots of food, and warm sun.



As I came up the hill, one of the little kids greeted me. "Hi! How are you? What are you doing?" And I realized the group was a special ed class (not from the greeting, from other things). There was one child in a wheelchair with a screen for touching for communication.

I told the kid about Crinklewing.

"Can we go see?" the kid asked.

"Let's just look from here," the teacher said. "It's better for the butterfly."

That seemed to satisfy the kid. He and the others got busy exclaiming over the flowers, squatting down to look at things, asking questions--clearly learning and enjoying themselves.

All crinklewings of one sort or another. It feels too on the nose, but it's really what happened.

I wanted to try to bring some of the good things that I saw in neighborhoods in Leticia to my neighborhood in western Massachusetts--the sense of (mild) commerce and work mixed in with homes, of people doing things by foot or small transport, right in their neighborhoods, interacting with each other in the spaces by their homes rather than life lived in a series of space stations (the home station, the work station, the shopping station, the kids' activities stations) only reachable in your spaceship, which you pilot through the vacuum of space.

To that end, I decided to press the little wagon that wakanomori had built for my bicycle into service to sell ice creams in the neighborhood. But not to earn money: for one thing, I already have a job that earns me much more. For another, I think it would be, shall we say, confusing for my neighbors. But selling things for a cause is okay: people are used to that idea. One of my neighbors was super enthusiastic about the idea and came up with the notion of choosing a different local cause each week to raise money for (and suggested that we do rounds once a week all through the summer). The advantage of two of us is that if one of us can't do it, the other one can take charge.

The Icicle Bicycle--not yet loaded with ice cream, but with a llama balloon.



So we launched the Icicle Bicycle! We've done it for three weeks now, and it's gotten (touch wood) really good reception so far. We have some repeat customers, and each week some new ones. We get parents with little kids, teens on their own, and adults. It's wonderful!

Last week was also Tanabata, Japan's version of the pan-East Asian star festival, which commemorates the one day a year when the Weaver Maid and the Oxherd Boy (aka the stars Vega and Altair) cross the Heavenly River to see each other. Japan celebrates it on July 7, and one of the traditions is to hang wishes on decorated branches of bamboo. So I invited people who were buying ice cream to hang wishes on a branch of, uhhh, burning bush:



I kept the branch in my front yard for a few days for people to enjoy, but rain was causing the wishes to fall off, so I took everything down, and I confess I read the wishes. And oh my heart, such a mix...

( Tanabata wishes )

Please join me in praying for all these wishes to be fulfilled, especially the one about the father.

And if you're in my neighborhood on a Friday around 6 pm, you can pick up an ice cream for a dollar ;-) This week's cause is our town library. I'll be away, but if it doesn't rain, the Icicle Bicycle will be making rounds.

I was in the supermarket, and an old guy came up to me--I thought I recognized him--and he asked, "Are you my neighbor?"

In that moment I realized who he was: he lives at the top of a cul-de-sac in the housing development I live in; his house is unlike any of the other houses in the development, a totally idiosyncratic pattern, never quite finished, with cinder blocks propping up the porch and real wood shingles instead of vinyl siding. I think he lives alone, except for his dog: he always has a golden retriever friend. He grows flowers and vegetables. He's always friendly whenever I'm with my friend, another person in the neighborhood, and we walk past his house.

"Yes, yes I am. You live in the house at the top of the XX cul-de-sac. You have a golden retriever."

He smiled. "Yes, yes, I do. Well. It's nice to see you."

"You too."

I don't know if just putting those words down conveys how special the moment felt.

Back at home one of the little girls who live to my left was sitting inside her house at the front window, which was wide open. She had some kind of tablet in front of her; she was focused on that, but at any moment she could look up and see whatever happened to be going on out front.

A kid came up to me in the early evening of my first full day in Leticia as I was going into an eatery. She was skinny, with hair going every which-way and dark patches on her face that might have been bruising or dirt or a birth mark. She said something to me that I didn't quite understand--but I suspected that she was asking for money, so I opened my purse to get out some money.

"No, no," she said. And then something else ending in "sopa" (soup).

"You want me to buy you a soup?" I asked.

She nodded.

So we sat down at a table, and when one of kitchen staff came over, I ordered fish for me and a soup for her--and with my eyes I tried to ask silently for indulgence/forgiveness/understanding because I know that one person's idea of a good deed can cause trouble for other people, but the woman just nodded, like she did understand and wasn't troubled.

I asked the kid how old she was, and she said eighteen. I highly, highly doubt this, not just from her size, but from the way she acted. But maybe she truly was: not getting enough to eat can stunt your growth. Or maybe she had reasons for claiming to be not-a-minor. I asked her what her name was, and she said "Jennifer," pronouncing it like an American. I asked her if she had any brothers or sisters, and she said she had older brothers.

The woman brought out a soup.

"And can I have a soda?" Jennifer asked. So I got her a soda.

"Boy they sure are slow here bringing you your fish!" Jennifer said in a loud voice. The women at the next table, who were wearing uniforms for the Claro mobile phone company, looked over, frowning.

"It's fine. The fish takes time to cook," I said.

"I think they're just SLOW" she said. And then, brightly, "Hey, when it comes, you'll share your rice, won't you?"

"Sure, okay," I said. And I asked the woman from the kitchen if we could have two plates.

Eventually the fish came, and I put half the rice on the second plate.

"And can I have some of the fish, too?" Jennifer asked.

"Okay," I said, and gave her half the fish. This was fine: I couldn't have finished the whole thing anyway.

She ate with food-flying gusto, sometimes shooting rude remarks to the kitchen staff, who replied that she'd better behave herself or they'd call the police, whereupon she offered her thoughts on snitches who call the police.

At other moments she seemed about to fall asleep into the plate, her eyelids half closing. I suspected narcotics rather than exhaustion, and the fact that she put a teeny-tiny twisted plastic bag of something on the table strengthened my suspicion. But she always roused herself.

After she finished eating, her remarks to the staff got more provocative, and they repeated their threats. I felt anxious and sorry--anxious that we were well past wearing out our welcome, sorry for the employees, sorry for the other customers, and extremely sorry for Jennifer and her situation.

"Jennifer, you've had something to eat. Maybe now would be a good time to leave?" --I said this knowing full well that she likely had no place to go to.

"Okay," she said equably, and sauntered out. One of the Claro employees offered her a half-empty bottle of soda, and Jennifer took it.

After she left, I apologized to the Claro women and the kitchen staff, and everyone said no, no, it wasn't a problem at all. I asked the kitchen staff what Jennifer's story was, and they said that her parents were likely drug addicts and that she lived on the streets.

I didn't ask about social services. I know there are some around--I looked, later on. But there are always reasons why, and times when, what's available doesn't help, as I know only too well from how things work here in the United States.

I can imagine Jennifer's story any way I want. I can imagine that she finds her way to people who help her out. That she's able to escape the road that seems mapped out for her. But my imaginings are only that: imaginings. In the end all I actually did for Jennifer was provide one meal.