The Seven of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
A poem that is on the surface about gardening but also applies to healing, connecting, writing. I was feeling good about my most recent screenplay and then a tremendously thoughtful read from Liz made me channel my inner Lauren Groff. When the Pulitzer-prize winning novelist starts a new draft, she does it from scratch. She files the old one in a bankers box and never reads it again, working from memory so “only the most vital bits survive”. I opened a blank Final Draft document and went on a tear - the whole story poured out of me over the course of three days. We had a reading with ten film friends in our living room and it was incredible hearing it come alive. Highly recommend! Groff also writes in longhand but everyone’s process is different…
Here’s some floating debris for your perusal — both the flotsam (cargo not deliberately thrown overboard) and the jetsam (items tossed by the crew in distress to lighten the ship's load):
eSims for Gaza for people to circumvent the blackout and keep them connected.
Watching James Murphy take the stage at Brooklyn Steel for LCD Soundsystem’s holiday residency. He said into the mic by way of introduction: “This is our 60th show here and I still felt like throwing up before I got onstage.”
Raquel Willis on representation: “My relationship with visibility has become more complicated. In the time of the deaths of Leelah Alcorn and Blake Brockington and the emergence of Caitlyn Jenner, representation for representation’s sake was still the dominant frame. It was the end of the Obama era. Something that revealed itself during the Trump era is that identity isn’t enough. We see that right now with conservative politicians — in Tim Scott, a Black man running for office, or Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley. These figures make clear that identity isn’t enough. The values piece does matter. And then, of course, Caitlyn Jenner has shown her entire ass. Just because she is transgender doesn’t mean she’s invested in trans liberation. It’s become more complicated because now we have more case studies of the pitfalls of relying on identity as a signifier of progress. But there is utility in visibility if we understand that it must be connected to changing the material realities of the most marginalized in our community.”
I had her in mind when Sasha told me about Dorothy Brown, the first black female surgeon in the U.S., who was also the first American state legislator to attempt to legalize abortion. “Although Dr. Brown would continue to win accolades for her work as a physician, activist, and devout Methodist, she lost her bid for a second term as a representative, largely because of her determination to get an expanded abortion law on the books in Tennessee.”
I’m halfway through Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future" and the passage about the Gini coefficient of the planet being greater than any single country is striking. It measures the extent to which distribution of income deviates from equal wealth distribution (a coefficient of 0 expresses perfect equality where everyone has the same income, while a coefficient of 100 expresses full inequality where only one person has all the income).
The playlist Kishori made for her mother turned planting one hundred daffodil bulbs in the backyard into an absolute breeze. Do not shuffle — it builds in the most delightful way.
Post strikes, Franklin Leonard on 74 ways to fix Hollywood.
The great horse manure crisis of 1894 seemed intractable - Manhattan’s 100,000 horses produced more than 1,100 tons of excrement a day, with the city “literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting”. Right as the issue was reaching a breaking point… cars were invented. Human ingenuity found a way.
In 1972, Italian musician Adriano Celentano sang “Prisencolinensinainciusol” in deliberate gibberish with the exception of the word "alright". The song was intended to sound like English to prove that Italians would love any American song. He was right - it was a hit.
The Chicken Run creators have not run out of the clay they use for their Wallace & Gromit franchise! We can all rest easy.
Casey McIntyre posthumously wiped out $20 million of medical debt. May her memory be a blessing.
How geologists collect lava samples from an active volcano.
A clear-eyed photo essay by Kitra Cahana about two teens aging out of foster care in New Mexico, the difference a stable adult can make and the obstacles built into the child welfare system itself.
Rabbi Elliot Kukla on intergenerational trauma, calling for ceasefire and being the child of a Holocaust survivor: “Now as Gaza is being bombed into a place of dust and ashes, my father is entering the last phase of his life in a hospital room in Toronto. My dad’s life once again has tapered to living only within a narrow room, while atrocities swirl outside. However, this time, unlike those who are gravely ill in Gaza, my dad is well cared for. He is warm and dry, held and loved. When the time comes, there is enough fuel and food to ensure that he dies with dignity and ease. My dad didn’t enter the world being treated like a person, but he is leaving it being cared for with humanity. Everyone deserves this.”
Field trip!
What: Screening of Astra Taylor’s 2008 documentary “Examined Life”
Where: Metrograph
When: Sunday November 26 at 4:30P
Till next time,
ASK