I have been inhaling all of the Octavia E. Butler coverage for what would have been her 75th year of life. This interactive piece by Ainslee Alem Robson & Lynell George is stunning, and all! the! New York magazine! articles! are somehow still leaving me wanting even more?
She envisioned a future of bold possibilities for herself. Her science fiction writings predicted so much of the world we live in today.
One particular line that has stuck with me is from Hanif Abdurraqib contemplating her prescient journal entries: “Even now, it reminds me that I am worthy of the work I am pursuing beyond production of a product that is received by the world. My ideas, my obsessions and curiosities deserve to be the engine for my dreaming, even if I haven’t clearly shaped them into anything that can be consumed.”
The celebrated musician Toshi Reagon, in collaboration with her mother, the activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, wrote a musical adaptation that brought Octavia Butler's most well-known novel “Parable of the Sower” to life. In 2008, she was set to do it with the New York City Opera. When it fell through, she started her own independent production company to usher her gospel opera forward.
This past summer, she put out a call for folks to perform the Songs of the Living Community Choir - absolutely no experience necessary. That’s how I found myself with fifty or so other people at Astor Place on a sweltering day in July. We stood outdoors under a tent, holding our dampened lyric sheets, assigning ourselves to our key of choice. Toshi and the cast members taught us the songs and we ran through them a handful of times. By the end, it felt like we had been singing together for years.
We made our Lincoln Center debut a week later, now a glowing chorus of 150, feeling somewhere between a campfire gathering and a gospel church. It was one of the most beautiful examples of community organizing I’ve ever experienced. The lyric that still reverberates in my mind, to the point of becoming a quasi mantra, is drawn directly from the book: “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.” Octavia E. Butler wrote those words nearly thirty years ago and they still ring loud and clear today.
People have been flocking to Fort Greene Park with binoculars all week. They’re angling to catch a glimpse of the young male Townsend’s warbler that’s been spotted. A birder told me the reason it’s such a rare sighting is because he’s a vagrant - he should be 3,000 miles away right now, somewhere between his California breeding ground and his winter home in Mexico. Instead he’s gone astray and seems to be favoring the pine trees by the tennis courts.
It’s unclear why he’s wandered so far and this does not bode well for him unfortunately… but I now know a "life bird" is what you call a species that you ID in the wild for the first time. So follow BrooklynBirdAlert and go on a “noc walk” as I like to call it, maybe you’ll catch a sighting.
That made me think back to Jhumpa Lahiri’s “In Other Words”, her bilingual series of essays about mastering Italian. She moved to Rome following her Pulitzer Prize win, craving anonymity and wanting to fall in love with a new language. She hired Ann Goldstein to do the English translation of her work, in order for her to maintain her rigorous discipline of her new tongue.
On the last page, she writes about how she’s about to move back to America, unsure if she’ll go back to writing in English or if she’ll have the diligence to keep up with Italian now that the book is finished. As she’s closing the proofs, she realizes “one could say it’s an indigenous book, born and raised in Italy even if the author was not.” She realizes her book will soon have a life outside of her, in Italian bookstores and a year later, in American ones. But through this writing project, she hopes a part of her can stay in Italy forever. It brings her comfort “even though I hope that every book in the world belongs to everyone, or to no one, nowhere.”
Free biopic idea: born in Australia in 1886, Annette Kellerman was prescribed swimming for rickets in her legs. Most people, even sailors, didn’t typically know how to swim at the time. She defied all the odds, and strengthened her legs to become a champion swimmer, then a vaudeville star, helping to popularize synchronized swimming.
She was ahead of her time, including a monocled drag act as part of her show. She took on social decorum when she was arrested for indecency in the US for wearing her cutting edge one-piece bathing suit. Hollywood came calling and she played a mermaid in several silent films, performing all of her own stunts, including swimming with crocodiles.
The feeling that makes you want to bite the cute puppy with big eyes, or squeeze the squishy cheeks of an adorable baby has a name. Cute aggression is a real psychological phenomenon. It’s not about actually inflicting harm. Apparently the violent emotions help us come down from the high faster, when the cuteness is just too much to bear. There’s a horror movie premise in there somewhere.
If you’re looking for more music without lyrics, Flow State has been saving my ass as I tunnel my way through a new screenplay (with what feels like a teaspoon). Every weekday, you get two hours of great tunes and if you love having something in the background but get tired of your usual playlists, it’s a godsend.
This was a helpful reframe around the metal health crisis. Danielle Carr writes how reification is the process by which choices of power and resource allocation eventually start to feel like concrete, immutable facts. In the current epidemic of mental illness, it means treating the current suffering as well as taking a hard look at the policies that have created the root causes. Individuals are too quick to blame themselves instead of the overarching social structures. “Solving the mental health crisis, then, will require fighting for people to have secure access to things that buffer them from chronic stress: housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.” Adding access to free universal healthcare to that list…
For all of Octavia Butler’s uncanny manifestations and brilliant willpower, she died at the age of 58 when she fell and hit her head on the concrete outside her home. She had been complaining to her doctor about dizziness and swollen ankles but had received no medical advice beyond resting up. Her friend and former student Leslie Howle, who was supposed to pick her up that day, said “despite being the incredibly powerful person she was, she did not assert herself with her doctor. Even today, doctors discount women of a certain age and women of color. Some of it’s racism, some of it’s ageism, some of it’s sexism — but all the ‘isms’ conspired against her in the end is what I feel. She needed more people who were protective of her.”
In the words of the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks: "We are each other's business; we are each other's harvest; we are each other's magnitude and bond."
Till next time,
ASK
I just finished Parable of the Sower last week - I have to say, it messed me up. I wondered if I could finish, because it was so grim, but I had to know what happened to the people in her world, in our world. Before that, I had started my Octavia journey with Wildseed. (Next I'm reading Kindred before watching the miniseries). I, too, am loving the coverage of her, and I can't wait to dive into the NYT article about her!