#I google it look through images and at the skin and its some pig in a crown so i was like “okay i can do this” | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spamzineglasgow · 4 years

Text

(REVIEW) Pain Journal Issue 3

In this review, Maria Sledmere draws out the material poetics of intimacy, glimmer, memory and salt in issue 3 of Pain Journal, from Partus Press, asking what kinds of dream-writing and ecopoetics we might find among the tangle, the camaraderie, the trace.

> Pain is an immaculate journal of new poetry and short, creative essays, edited by Vala Thorodds and Luke Allan, published by Partus Press and designed by Studio Lamont. Folding out the cover of issue 3, you’ll find an epigraph from Robert Creeley’s ‘The Flower’: ‘Pain is a flower like that one, / like this one, / like that one, / like this one’. Pain is a making, a sap, a sort of seedling and fruiting of where we are in the years. It likens itself to more than we’d tend to acknowledge. A blood, a fur of skin, a flower. It’s such a luxury to hold issue 3 in its peachy, matte dust jacket, admiring the beautiful type and the list of contributors. There’s an air of the covetable to Pain: maybe it’s the print quality, maybe it’s the poetry, maybe it’s the curation. I think it’s also something to do with the cover, dominated by the sans serif title PAIN: when I read this walking in the street, I make some kind of statement. It feels charged with the ambiguity of some high fashion statement, and yet what lucky readers are we that something of the contents may tell the pain — we don’t just wear it.

> Where to start! These are lush poems of communication, intimacy, sensation. Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir’s ‘Gleam & delicacies’ is a surreal and elliptical lyric of superstitious glimmer. Poetry as ‘a trap for the superstitions’. I find myself googling what a ‘glowfruit’ is and find some reddit discussions around the appearance of ‘glowfruit trees’ in Sims games. There’s this line, ‘I still have wild glowfruit trees. Do you?’, which feels like a summons, a challenge. Enter into this logic with me, where the one-time event of the glowfruit’s arrival has seeded the game’s eternal time. Someone comments, ‘They seem kind of random to me’. I had forgotten the magic of games and their luxurious richness and dream logic of glitches and hacks and splintered paths of narrative. Perhaps my childhood adoration of Sega and Nintendo was my way into poetry. The opening veils of an overlain world. Sigurðardóttir’s poetics have that quality of drifting between rooms and scenes, or falling between bodies and scales by one gesture of a linebreak, the slide of a button control, ‘I give birth to suns / for the morning hoax / slippery planets’. It reminds me of David O’Reilly’s video game, Everything, where you can move between a roving shrub, a celestial body and an oil rig in the space of ten minutes. What is meant by a ‘nighthaired waiter’? There is a dream-hand that extends to our proprioceptive venturing, that offers casual refusal (‘I didn’t come here to toothbrush the wolf’) by way of assembling the real and its purpose. The real which feels more like a ‘silhouette’.

> Significant, perhaps, that this poem of mirror-tricks and shimmers stands opposite Ruby Silk’s ‘Re:’, a poem that takes the banal conceit of email and pulling on tights in the swimming pool changing room to figure something of desire and its thirst. ‘we communicate drily’, the poem begins, ending with a slide on the nature of being quenched, on the question. Both poems forego punctuation, and more or less carry themselves on the turns of language: objects form a multiple syntax of moving between. Their cleanness on the page is perhaps what makes them gleam, they seem to hold their own. The gleam is present elsewhere in the issue, with Eloise Hendy’s ‘scrubland’ beginning, in the manner of Marianne Moore moving into Plath territory, ‘i too have a gleaming future. / a future like a fish scale, the eye / of a small bird’. Trauma or remembered pain is a matter of scale(s) and perception, of the body and its existential whittling, whitening. The speaker asks about whiteness, light, memory and dream: ‘all that spilt milk. all that gleaming’. You could say the gleam is metonymy for shame, the beaming cheeks, the sense of glowing or almost burning there in the situation. No capitals, a whittling. The idea of ‘nonsense’ itself, whittling down to the first gleam, its tender origin: ‘as a girl i was very soft’. The way the lines and stanzas slip, enjambed between, the idea of a passing through. The speaker offers her hurts: her fish eye, her pale appetite, her starved future, her dreams of fish bones and choking. ‘be gentle with me’, she implores. I think of this line from the film Lady Bird (2018), after Lady Bird loses her virginity under a pretence of shared experience and the boy Kyle is like ‘Do you have any awareness about how many civilians we’ve killed since invasion in Iraq started?’ and she replies, ‘SHUT UP. SHUT UP. Different things can be sad. It’s not all war’. ‘as an adult i am softer still’, Hendy writes, as though softening herself into the palest ghost and somehow becoming defiant, ‘my hand / is an arrowhead. a future / like a fish eye’.

> It’s no surprise that Pain is tinged with other existential tremors, those of the body and the world, of ecology and domesticity, of sex and dust. Helen Charman’s ‘In the pocket of Big Pig’ wears high theory cool on its sleeve as it sweeps into the muck and dirt of where we are. The movement of ‘manmade’ materials into the ‘natural’ is an aesthetic act: ‘Plastic / can holders entwine themselves around the / sea kelp — to tame and smooth frizz’. In that em-dash I feel the lines reaching out, the kelp and the twine and the human arms, the bristles. Does poetry do more than brush back the mess of the world, or tease it back into static? What are the ethics of pain’s poetic entanglement?

ecopoets try again and again to convince us of the whiteness of the snow drift. I like muddy ducklings dirty reedbeds

(Charman, ‘In the pocket of Big Pig’)

If ‘muddy ducklings’ has that childlike assonance of storybook rhyme, ‘dirty reedbeds’ feels adult, insistent, dark. The place where you tangle and possibly drown. Turning away from the pristine ‘snow drift’ that pulls us into the picturesque, an ecopoetics that continues the aesthetic throwback of nature poetry before it, this is an anthropocene poetics of living in a fraught, affectively entangled now: ‘I think we’re nostalgic for more than VHS when we / fuck in front of the Blue Planet poster misty-eyed as if / we’ll ever get to show the oceans to our own kids’. Sex is ambivalently yoked to procreation in the ‘misty-eyed’ act of fucking to get back to something primal, deep and planetary. The world as it once supposedly was and exists now mostly as mediation: scenes on tv, posters for Blue Planet. And the word ‘fuck’ for sex that feels iterative rather than tender, two bodies trying to make something of what they have, an intensified point in time and space, a mediation or trace of each other.

> A similar kind of iterative sweetness and friction occurs in Jack Underwood’s ‘Behind the Face of Great White Shark’, where some new entry to the ecosystem upsets the home, ‘Since we brought you home from the hospital / I have begged these hours to a stub’. Enter the metaphoric playground of sharks and dogs, worms, rats, beans and bananas. Something of this new love, the baby perhaps, the shark or the tender thirsty thing at dawn, is a hurt: ‘I admit I have been sick / since we met, pursuing this love-wound / like a moon beyond the windscreen’. A love you’d drive to all through the night, to arrive back where you started, chaste in your own ‘dawn kitchen’ with a moony look in your eye. I think of Dorothea Lasky’s ‘wild lyric I’, the one she discusses in her new book Animal: this playful and manipulative ‘metaphysical I’ that ‘can harness all fragmented senses of self and use them whenever it needs to’. Underwood’s I thrashes like a shark on the sick shores of a new love, a birthing tide, dark and light. An I that threatens violence, desire from all angles and limbs ‘fucking ambidextrously’; an I that ‘can keep you safe inland’, that pulls you into its glow, for this is just ‘the lesser work of living’.

> It is tricky to identify highlights from a journal where, as with amberflora (whose sensibilities resonate here), the selections are impeccable: focused, resonant, but also lovely alone. Nina Mingya Powles’ ‘The Harbour’ has something of Clarice Lispector’s radiance, pressed into a teeming poetics of its own. Its section titles add an epistolary quality, italicised as they are, ‘Dear whales,’, ‘Dear dreamer,’. Post-Arika, with all talk of Moby Dick and the mathematics of the whale, it seems these cetaceans are having a real moment. Powles’ address to the whale is elegiac, ‘I can pinpoint all the places you have died, / where I’ve buried you’. She’s putting pressure on the work of metaphor, the whale as so much more than whale, the whale as what cannot be contained, the whale that cannot contain itself. Her whale is more of a comrade, a friend:

When I looked out of the train and saw your deep blue body and you saw mine you stayed close to me, swimming alongside. We were both travelling home.

What if ecopoetics, or anthropocene poetics, were something more like this surprising camaraderie? Does it matter whether the encounter was imagined or actually happened? Running through Pain is this suffering silk with its shadows and texture of echo and gleam, ‘the dream is wet skin against her hands / the fact is echolocation’ (Powles). I’ve been thinking about what the tensile ethics of this fugitive touch are: the touch of the image, the whale and the speaker on the train, the relative distance of speed and time between them, the hospitality she extends to the animal she is also. ‘I’ll show you my mother’s potted orchids’, in a world where to cross one human threshold is to know that later the sea will be deep enough for you once more. Pain asks how much of each other we need to hold. There’s this passage from Hélène Cixous’ novel Hyperdream (2006) that speaks to this:

I hear it, I hear a murmur your skin speaks, a blood thinks, I hear your thought running under the skin I hear your life thinking under the neat eternal spotless silk. I read with my life. I am torn. At the same time I am healed and glued back together again. During this time the world suffers and dies [...]

What is the murmur of our speaking skins, our thinking blood? The body that dreams? One pain can open the next, there’s a gesture of infinity, the way that Anne Boyer identifies in her ‘meditation on modern illness’, The Undying (2019): ‘My new calamity meant it was possible to feel every cell at once and, in these, every mitochondrion, and that it was possible, too, to have a millionfold shitshow of sensations in locations newly realised’. To have your body illumined, intensified, surged to the end of each nerve and cell with this searing consciousness. When I had shingles, I felt real dreams; they seemed to extend to a million tips, concentrated in clusters on the skin of my belly. Real dreams/real hurt. Is a body in pain the body that dreams the most, from her almost-paralysis in sensory excess? I think poems like Powles are asking these questions, declaring, spacing, opening up, leaving us on the brink of a blank that is its own quiet sublime, ‘everything is so !’. And if ‘the fact is letting go’, what of the fact have we been holding all along? Is this like Creeley, gesturing towards this or that flower, as a way of describing, to insist on it. Something we ask as children: does a flower or a plant feel pain? Pain, pain. There it is in the world, it just is, like a flower, or something more tiny and abrasive, salt after salt. A period.

> Rowland Bagnall’s essay ‘The Metal We Call Salt’ closes the journal with a meditation on the poetry of Philip Levine and Elizabeth Bishop, writers who ‘[address] the delicate failure of poetry to say the things which can’t be said’. This is Creeley, surely, with the flowers which stand for the shapeless pain. I’m reminded of a line from Rachael Allen’s ‘Kingdomland’: ‘the glass and salt my crooked pathway; impassable glass and salt’. The glittering remainders which excoriate the entry and exit of threshold, painful debris of the sea. This is the ‘tantalising’ poetics that Bagnall writes of, words that ‘say that they are lost for words’, words that gift and withhold by their material gesture: words that carry traces of what they may be. Salt-tanged and gleaming as glass. ‘What got revealed when the layers of leaves / Were blown backwards?’ Ralf Webb asks, in his ‘Three Sonnets’. What is it to walk over the crunching ‘pathway’ of such poems for pain, ana-cathartic as they move into, above, through, around and from the wound and its ferric sting? The essay also looks at the paintings of John Salt and photographs of Mark Ruwedel, considering how as a preservative and purifier, salt as both an archival and corrosive mineral: art as what consumes and reveals, what glints with the not yet spoken. Salt in the wound for pain will sting, but it will clear. These poems are such interfusions, sweetness and dreams, the ‘torn’: healed and suffering of a life and a world, coming over. And, for just a while, Pain will hold you together, soft in its peachy embrace.

Pain issue 3 is out now and available to purchase here.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 5/1/20

#review #poetry review #PAIN #PAIN Journal #Maria Sledmere #Partus Press

0 notes

ecotone99 · 4 years

Text

[RF] Foodie (~4500 words)

Warning: Contains some violence, as well as swearing and some mention of sex. I don't think this is very risqué, but I submitted it recently for a creative writing class. Most students liked it, but one guy thought I should've warned people before they read it. So I'm erring on the side of caution.

Also, some may consider this horror. I do not, and so I didn't tag it as such.

Foodie

Carol Wilkenson was a foodie. It was a title she wore with pride, the way other women her age might casually mention that they or their spouse were chiropractors or paralegals. Tell me about yourself, Doug had asked on their first date. Her answer was as obvious as it was immediate.

It was their twentieth anniversary. Carol marked it on the calendar in bold red sharpie, her mouth turning into a cheshire grin as she X’ed out the box. Today was not going to be just another Wednesday. Today there would be romance. Today there would be sex—and not just of the five minute variety. Today there would be a wonderful dinner, prepared by Carol, as she had nearly every night since her honeymoon. And perhaps most importantly: today she would cook not out of habit or familial obligation, as had happened every afternoon for the past few years, but with that elusive magic ingredient her mother always told her about: love. That invisible spice that makes everything smell; taste; feel more vibrant and linger in your memory for years after it happened; playing like a tableau vivant in your mouth. The spice that had for so long been scarce was ready to be recaptured.

Doug joined her for breakfast. He picked up the sports section. And said:

“Good news: the Bills are making the playoffs.”

She smiled. She thought he was joking. Then, he courteously thanked her for breakfast, as he had every day since their honeymoon, tightened his tie, and walked cheerily out the door.

It was only after the screen door screeched to a halt that Carol realized she had broken her honey dipper. Its neck lay strangled in two pieces, one of which bit into her palm. Some of her blood mixed with the honey remaining from Doug’s cursory oatmeal.

“Oh dear.”

Carol sucked on her palm (the honey and blood made it sweet and salty, like some exotic fruit), threw the honey dipper in the trash, and washed her hands, careful not to drive the few remaining splinters further into her skin. She bandaged the wound. Then, she woke up Meg and sent her off to school. Carol insisted that her daughter eat some kind of nutritious breakfast, but she only settled for the desultory Honey Bunches of Oats.

She wished Meg would eat more out of her comfort zone. But Meg did not share her adventurous spirit. A few years ago they had a trip to Bangkok for something involving Doug’s work. Carol didn’t remember exactly what. Doug brought the family along, which made it an exciting opportunity for Meg to learn about other cultures and imbue in her a love of food. But whatever they ordered (on big communal platters, common for Asian restaurants), no matter how exotic or mundane, Meg took one bite, slid her plate back, and said “I’m good.” And Doug was somehow worse; she shuddered to think of the memory.

“Have a good day!” she called out to the bus, which was patiently waiting with its STOP sign extended like an enthusiastic middle finger. Meg didn’t look back.

Carol hung her head and busied herself in the kitchen. It was still her anniversary, and she and Doug would have the best goddarn dinner the two of them ever had. And they’ve had many excellent meals. In Venetion diners and Parisian cafes. Black risotto and escargot. Frog legs and couscous. Cajun food that upset Doug’s stomach so much that he couldn’t handle a second bite. All the organic, orgasmic food they ate in all the wonderful, envious places they traveled. Before she made a pitstop in her local Walgreens. And that little plastic stick showed two lines, not one.

They stopped traveling and settled down. They couldn’t raise a kid on the go, in cramped hotel rooms and seedy bathroom changing stations. Still, Carol had loved her career as a photojournalist. It took her to all the places where the best cuisine was hiding. Some of her work was pretty well reviewed too, making waves in the small and esoteric community of photojournalism.

But that wasn’t compatible with a child. The last interesting thing she ate—interesting and good, not the Arbys that gave her food poisoning—was her daughter’s placenta. It was mostly made of blood cells, and was entirely tasteless. She finished it more for curiosity’s sake than enjoyment factor, but it only made her long for the savory, dramatic dishes of years past. As she had sat there, unenthusiastically consuming, she felt like a cow that chews its own cud. Then, there was Doug, who had walked into the kitchen at just the wrong time. He saw the placenta, opened from its styrofoam box that the hospital sent home, per her request, like a perverse McDonalds Happy Meal. Then, he had made a face—the same fucking face—as Bangkok.

Her daughter’s bowl shattered against the fridge.

“Fuck you!” she screamed at the picture of Doug, pinned with a magnet and now soaking in spilled milk. Like the milk puddling on the pool, regret immediately seeped in.

“Oh, God. I didn’t mean it.”

Unconsciously, she bit the back of her hand. Chewing it, testing the muscles and tendons as her fingers flexed. It was an unconscious habit of hers, like Meg when she bit her nails or Doug when he pulled at his tie. She never bit too deeply, just massaged the back of her hand with her teeth. Feeling her teeth grind across the heel of her hand, fleshy as a ripe apple and underlain with tendons taut like piano wire. Her habit was a strange one, but not unheard of. She figured it was the same self-affirming way an infant sucked its thumb; built from a natural yearn to find comfort using the only means at its disposal.

She heard that fingers snap with the same strength it takes to crack a baby carrot. It was an interesting thought: that such a precious instrument, the nimble and adroit hand, could break so easily. Dipped in hummus and eaten like just another Super Bowl dish. She wondered, fleetingly yet not for the first time, what human tastes like.

It was surprising that she didn’t already know. Over the years, she had sampled a king’s ransom of dishes. On her trip to Venezuela, building houses for those displaced in Hurricane Isidore, she was offered local meals from the grateful inhabitants: goat’s blood and guinea pig, the first of which was customary, the latter of which was a delicacy. She gratefully accepted both. Neither was particularly good, but at least she tried them, and that was the ethos of being a foodie, she had explained to Doug. Five years later, they went to the New York State Fair. Doug, hungry and unwilling to wait for their reservations at Le Pamplemousse, a fancy french restaurant twenty minutes from the fairground, bought a stick of fried butter. He offered her half. When she refused, he educated her on the ethos of being a foodie. She chewed. She swallowed.

In a moment of curiosity, she turned to Google for answers. What does human taste like?

After fifteen minutes of patient scrolling and several clickbaity headlines, she found out that humans tasted, strangely enough, like pork. You probably wouldn’t taste the difference if served side by side, the website explained. Is that a challenge? Carol jokingly thought. With her foodie taste buds, she was certain she could sniff out the difference. Not that she would ever try, though. As if.

While she thoroughly wiped the picture of Doug, Carol apologized to his image. She didn’t hold anything against her husband. Nothing. On the contrary, he had supported her in hard times. When her father passed. When she had her second pregnancy scare, this one (thankfully) false. And of course, his constant companionship to all those places—Marseille and Istanbul and Galway and Marrakesh.

The last of the ceramic fragments were deposited in the trash. The milk was puddled up with a dish towel, then thrown in the laundry bin. Carol got back to work.

Last month she was skimming through the Food Network and came across a fascinating recipe: hot and sour soup. She had always wanted to try it out, but never got around to it. Paired with her signature linguine and clam sauce—a dish that always appealed to Doug’s taste, the Wilkensons could have a perfect anniversary dinner. She went to the pantry, which was overflowing with jams and spices after twenty years of marriage, and selected her ingredients.

White pepper. Onions. Vinegar. Bottled mushrooms. Jarred olives. Some shrimp from the fridge. Mozzarella slices. Bits of chicken, diced like cheese. Eggs, but not too many; she didn’t want her final product to be too “slushy.”

As she mixed, chopped, sautéred, and cooked, she cheerily hummed All You Need Is Love to herself, a song that played at her wedding.

She finished the soup and went to work on the linguine with clam sauce, which by now was as habitual as brushing her teeth while Rachel Maddow gave her the news. She lingered in the pantry and brought out her spices—fourteen in all, although Doug admitted that he could only taste three. By now, she had calculated that it took two trips to the pantry for linguini, and one perusal of the fridge.

Spaghetti and bowtie pasta, finely mixed. Olive oil. More onions. A clove of garlic. Lemon juice. Parsley. A dash of Maruso soy sauce. A sprinkle of salt. Tomato sauce, but not too much. Minced clams.

Lastly, Carol went to the cellar and brought up a bottle of Château Margaux. At half a grand, it was the most expensive wine they owned, a wedding present from Doug’s childhood friend, some rich Wall Street guy named Joe, not yet humbled by the crisis of ‘07. Doug had stuck it in the basement, saving the bottle for a special occasion. Carol figured two decades was time enough at last, and stuck it in the fridge.

Oh dear! She thought with a start. I almost forgot the carrots!

She looked at the kitchen clock. It was three minutes short, but Carol realized it was nearly four. Where had the time gone? Doug would be getting back from the office around now. Meg would soon join them—she had soccer practice until five. A teammate’s mom was driving her home.

Carol cursed herself for the two hours she spent watching The Crown while letting the chicken thaw, then cook. As she hurried to chop the carrots, her mind wandered again to Olivia Coleman, venerable and austere as Elizabeth II. Carol was so far removed from all those ladies in the show, who would never burden themselves with housework (they had servants for that), but instead perform diplomatic duties, making speeches and traveling to foreign countries. To Carol, it was more and more unlikely she would ever work or travel again. After her stint as a photojournalist, she worked at home for a couple years, putting her English degree to use writing advice columns in a American Woman, a near-unheard of women's magazine. My boyfriend left, someone would write in. My husband’s not talking to me. She always gave some fancy variation of the same answer, which could be distilled to: Get a grip, girl! You’re a grown-ass woman. Take charge of your life.

Now she felt like a terrible hypocrite, an unemployed housewife with no career prospects, fussing over the thickness of Doug’s hot and sour soup. She paused from chopping carrots, bit her hand, then resumed the task. How could she have ever had the audacity to write such advice?

It had been 2007 when she quit the magazine, when Meg entered the terrible twos and ate up all her time. For the time being, she had said to Doug. But they both knew it was permanent. After an exciting and successful career as a photojournalist, anything less was cripplingly depressing. Better nothing than something less. And they both knew it wasn’t Meg’s fault. If it was, she would’ve had an abortion. She was an independent woman. Neither of their families were picky about things like that. It was just… they both knew—although neither he nor her said anything—that they’d have to stop traveling and settle down. Grow up. Move on with their lives. It was time.

It was time.

“FUCK!”

She looked down at her hand, spouting blood from the tip of her pinkie finger like a water balloon with a hole. The knife rattled against the cutting board. Blood trickled on top of the cut carrots like the decorative sauce drizzled over hors d'oeuvres at some fancy eatery. Carol knew from years of restaurant experience that this was called plating. The top of her pinkie lay with the carrots; just another delicacy.

She hurriedly covered her hand with a wad of paper towels. It soaked through.

She rushed to the bathroom and threw open the door above the sink. Toothbrushes and bottles of aspirin clattered into the sink as she found the bandages. Wielding her teeth like some disgruntled animal, she tore open the box of bandages, then struggled with the waxy strip, tears welling in her eyes and blank black painspots eating up the foreground.

When the bandage was on and she felt healed enough to move, Carol wiped up the blood. Much of it was dried and black.

Black as elderberries.

Carol looked over to the cutting board. The carrots lay there, all in a row, quiet as a crime scene. She used the knife, still bloody, to scrape the bleeding carrots into the trash. Then she stopped. The finger was still there, an unpainted nail like a postal stamp in the corner of the cutting board. It clung on by a sticky glob of blood. Carol recalled a time when she read Meg a book of scary children’s stories.

(Meg was really into that stuff as a kid, and Doug thought something might be off with her, as if she was destined to become the first female serial killer.)

As one story went, there was a boy who ate some soup with a toe in it. After dinner, he’s sent to bed. He’s later haunted by the toe’s owner. Where is my big toe? Where is my toe? Carol always thought that was the scariest of all the stories. But even still, gazing at the piece of truncated pinkie like a crumb of meat left on the plate, it looked kind of… appetizing.

She set the cutting board down. Then, moving quickly as to not regret it, she peeled the finger off the cutting board and threw it into her mouth, nail and all. It caught in her throat for a moment, and for a second she was sure she’d choke on her stupidity, but then it gave.

Down the hatch and ‘round the corner, she thought. Then, out loud, with an air of awed tranquility:

“Tastes like chicken.”

She laughed at her crack, then tended to the mess. She washed the cutting board, not caring about chopping another carrot. Doug will just have to go another day without any carrots, that’s all. He’ll manage.

Doug wheeled his Prius into the garage at 4:30 p.m. By then, the linguine was sizzling on a saucepan, and its tangy scent permeated the house. Carol was ecstatic.

By now, he would have remembered their anniversary. He must’ve felt horrible (just horrible!) all day at work, upon remembering, with a start, that today was December 2nd. He would walk through the door and drop to his knees, exalting her with compliments and pleas of “I’m sorry,” and declaring his commitment to marriage. And love for her.

And this morning? It was just a fluke. His morning coffee hadn’t yet set in, and he was groggy and disoriented. He had forgotten their anniversary, but only for a minute.

The door opened with an anticipatory groan. Carol breathed deeply. The smells of her fresh cooking intermingled in a miasma of spice.

“Hey,” he said, with all the gusto of a cottonmouthed telemarketer. Doug walked into the kitchen. He hung his coat. Slipped off his shoes.

“I prepared a nice dinner for us,” she said.

He said nothing, just trudged into the living room, sat on the couch, and flicked on the evening news.

Not even a “smells good.”

A minute passed. Carol saw a chime on her phone. From Meg.

“Meg’s at Amy’s house,” she told Doug. “Says she’ll be back at nine.”

“Okay.”

“We should eat without her, just the two of us.”

“Okay.”

She set the table and placed the linguine on a dish, carefully so, like an offering on an altar. She did the same with the soup, and stirred it lovingly. She blew into the steam as if in prayer.

“What’s this?”

“Hot and sour soup.”

When she saw the disgruntled look on his face, she added:

“It’s Asian cuisine.”

“Chinese food,” he said dejectedly.

“Doesn’t it smell good?”

“Yeah,” he conceded.

They ate like mannequins, miming out their movements as if reading from a script. Pick up fork. Stab bowtie noodles. Swallow.

“Anything interesting happen at work today?”

“Same old, same old.”

Test spoon in soup. Raise it to your lips. Swallow.

“You haven’t touched your linguine,” she says, once he had finished the soup.

“Sorry. Do you want it? I’m not in the mood for this stuff again.”

This stuff again. This stuff again.

Those words played in her head, round and round, heating up slightly, like the plate in a microwave.

“No, I’ll just put it away.”

She took the plate and ducked behind the kitchen counter. Retrieved a large tupperware. She tilted the plate—a move so simple yet to her as melancholic as the R.M.S. Titanic sliding into the Atlantic. Most of the plate sludged into the plastic. But some noodles remained.

This stuff again.

She took an oversized cutting knife and scraped them off, trying to get as much of the clam sauce as possible. The knife shined silver, the sauce was white as semen.

“It was good,” Doug said, and Carol couldn’t help but smile. She deposited the tupperware in the fridge, and, positioning her back to Doug to cover his view of the kitchen, discreetly removed another item.

“I’m glad you like it. But there’s more.”

With that, she heaved the full weight of her body against the corkscrew wine opener and popped the bottle of Château Margaux.

Pooompf!

Bubbles instantly fizzed up; tiny iridescent balloons in celebration. Like whitewater on a beach. Carol smiled, so lost in thought that she barely understood the words coming out of Doug’s mouth. They must’ve echoed three times around the kitchen before they reached her eardrums.

“Are you crazy?!?”

“Huh?” she was still smiling, pouring the green bottle into the first of two wine glasses.

“That’s Château Margaux!”

“I know,” Carol says, hesitantly at first. Then, with a firmer voice:

“That’s why I’m pouring it.”

“That was from Joe Briggasson. We were supposed to save it for special occasions. You just opened it. You ruined it.”

Carol couldn’t stop herself. As she spoke, she strangled the neck of Doug’s wine glass.

“Special occasions?”

She laughed, a hollow cackle that scared her more than him.

“Ruined it? Did I, Doug? Did I really?”

Anger crept into her voice in the same sneaky way she found herself humming along to a tune in the supermarket she didn’t know was playing.

“Yes, you did!” Doug said. “You’re supposed to sit on that for a few decades.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Doug.” Carol said, with mock sympathy. It was a tone unfamiliar to both Doug and herself. “I guess twenty years of marriage wasn’t enough for you.”

“Twenty years? Twenty...” he trailed off, head turned toward the calendar behind her. Red sharpie accused him. Red like blood.

“I told you, honey.” he said, getting his voice under control. “This morning. I said Happy Anniversary. You must’ve forgot.”

“Liar!”

Shmakkkk!

Carol looked down. Her hand had thoroughly choked the neck of the wineglass. It lay shattered, its glass spread out on the linoleum floor like petals of some deadly flower. Puddled with blood and $500 wine. It was the third time she cut her hand today. That’s a hat trick.

“Oh, Carol,” he said sadly, condescendingly.

“Here, let me help.”

The chair pushed back. He went into the kitchen, wearing a face of both sympathy and disgust. It was the look he wore in Bangkok. Bangkok. The beautiful city with the grilled octopus that Doug was too afraid to try and looked at her funny when she did, as if he had walked in on her performing fellatio on another man. The disgust he wore never left her memory. It was such a minor grievance, so silly that they never talked about it. One of those inconsequential peccadilloes that married people are supposed to forgive, and, if God forbade, forget. But still, like a bad stain, it didn’t seem to fade. On the contrary, it grew. Festered in her mind. Fed there.

She realized, then, that she hated Doug.

She looked at the knife, snuggled in its block of triangular wood.

“Are you cut?”

She didn’t answer. She bit her hand. Most of the wine remained in the bottle, still bubbling up. Up and up and up. Fizzing. Like grease on a skillet.

“Okay, not too bad.”

He inspected her palm. Only a few scrapes. Some blood, but nothing too deep. There was a bandage on her pinkie finger covering the nail, but it looked like Carol had handled that already. So, he crouched down and picked up some of the glass from the floor. Collecting it into a sparkling pile.

She couldn’t look at him. She bit her hand. She looked at the wine. Fizzing.

Like a snake’s hiss.

“I can’t believe this.” he said, head bowed, his balding hair displayed like a half-assed attempt at a monk’s tonsure. “Five hundred down the drain.”

She looked at the block of wood, knife nestled cozily inside. The wine bottle stood beside it. Then, without thinking, her hand left her mouth. She wrung the bottle by the neck and thrashed it against his head. It exploded in a hail of glass and colored fluid.

He doubled over.

“Fuhhh—”

Glass everywhere.

Blood, too, black as elderberries.

Wine, fizzing. Hissing like a snake.

He turned around, and she could see that he fell on glass. Some pieces twinkled to the floor. They sparkled like the spilled champagne. He raised his mangled hands defensively. Fingers bled like the carrots sitting in the bottom of the trash can.

“Carol…”

She pounced on him, driving the full weight of her body into her hand, which clutched the corkscrew wine opener like an epipen. It slid into his throat.

Then, everything was red.

For one fleeting infinity: that awful, scarlet ubiquity.

She blinked, and he was there again. Eyes glazed and trembling like spoonfuls of jello. Beads of sweat on his brow, pustules of blood, drips of wine, all pregnantly static. Lips parted, as if to taste. He managed to croak out one word:

“Whhhhhyyyyyy?”

And she—still draped over him like they were a much younger couple, faces inches apart, ready to do the deed—answered:

“Octopus.”

She twisted the spiral.

He sputtered; twitched; convulsed like having a seizure. She felt every movement. His hands fell sleepily to his side, parting the broken glass.

His mouth was a science project: a volcano oozing magma. Drops cascaded down his chin the way chocolate sauce topped an ice cream sundae. They pooled in his fat neck, which was resting, bonelessly, on the linoleum.

Carol uncurled her fingers from the twisted metal spiral. She looked at them—cut up and covered in both their blood. Like a wounded animal, she licked her fingers.

Finger-licking good, she thought, and released a hollow laugh. Then, she put her mouth to the back of her hand, chewing. Ponderous, but not nervous.

“Oh, Doug. What did you make me do?”

The room smelled sickly sweet, the fragrances of wine and home cooking still identifiable. Its sallange permeated the entire house, clinging like flies to a corpse.

She surveyed the kitchen—all that blood and wine and broken glass, some volleyed across the room—and saw the oven. She looked back to Doug’s volcano face. And knew, just knew, what to do. She kissed him on the lips, wet and still warm. Then she leaned back, licked the blood from her lips, and said:

“You look delicious.”

Meg came home at 9:15 p.m. She sniffed the air. Something was off, but she couldn’t tell what, exactly. She shook her head. Meg had had her period this morning, and the smell of blood still lingered.

Her mother was in the kitchen, cooking, though that was usual for her. Even late at night, she always had something in the oven. With her mother, a bowl was always ready to lick, and a good meal perpetually at their fingertips. In recent months, she felt bad about turning down mom’s cooking, saying she wasn’t feeling the chicken parmigiana. In reality, she didn’t want to get fat. She didn’t want to have a nickname at school like Size-Forty Sandra.

But that would change. She would eat what her mother cooked. She didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings.

Besides, as far as chefs were concerned, her mother wasn’t half bad.

“Hi, Meg. How was Amy’s?”

“Alright.”

“Did you eat yet?”

“Yeah, a little. Some chicken with Amy and her parents. But I have room for more. What do you have?”

“Let’s just say… mystery meat.”

“Sure, as long as it’s not octopus again. I couldn’t stand that when we went to Bangkok.”

“Oh, no,” her mother said, flashing her pearly whites like a walking, talking dental ad. “Much better.”

She plopped a steaming chunk of meat on a plate and turned around, looking radiant. Meg could not remember the last time her mom looked this happy. She looked ten years younger! Even in the wan light of the kitchen, her wrinkles seemed smoothed, her eyes sparkled with brilliance. There was a renewed bounce to her step as she set the plate down in front of her, all the while grinning ear to ear. To Meg, this seemed almost a comical sight. Because for all this renewed vigor and ebullient veneer, her mother had not noticed what was caught between her two front teeth: dangling there, like a fly entombed in a spider’s web, was a slim sliver of meat.

“Dig in,” she said, and Meg did.

End.

submitted by /u/MrGrinch0 [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2Z2c7Tx

#Blogger #Story

0 notes

jaxxonpollux · 6 years

Text

notes for vivien during her whatever of whatever v3

hey pee brain

writing here makes me feel less bitter, and it helps me maintain some level aloofness i think. moreso than calling you twice a day and pining away like a ghost wife that passed away out on the cliffs, the moors or whatever, waiting for her sailor soldier husband to return. i know you're a sweetheart but sometimes you're a real pain in the butt too. a real heck and a half. and i'm not like, dumb. i know what busy is and i know phone calls can still be squeezed in even then, but business and time are never really the problem when this stuff happens. i know i don't make myself very easy to talk to, being a sassy emotional sack of old balls and all that, so i wouldn't expect you to either. just enjoy being where you are and living a big life again and i'll watch your cute butt as you leave the room.

that's like a real mad men thing to think and say huh? "boy oh boy i sure do love to see her leave a room!" even when you dress it up and disguise it, it still sounds piggish. something joan would narrow her eyes at, or at the very least give like that phony 1960s "i'll take that as a compliment, you dumb pig man" smile.

i don't know why i feel bitter. god why do i have my ceiling fan on? i'm freezing, it's been in the 50s here. anyway, i don't know why i feel bitter. it's a gross feeling, it really does make me feel like a ghost wife, like just haunting you from the past and trying to drag you back into the deep black water. very selkie actually. it's loneliness doing its evil things and whispering in ears and gnawing on hearts and making me reach out my ugly haunted hand and trying to either have you pull me out of the afterlife or pull you back in. i just spelt gnawing as "knawing," and it doesn't say that it's a typo, is this some secret alt word i've discovered? some special 4am word?

knaw

Verb

(third-person singular simple present knaws, present participle knawing, simple past and past participle knawed)

Archaic spelling of gnaw.

Verb

(third-person singular simple present knaws, present participle knawing, simple past knawed, past participle knawn)

Eye dialect spelling of know.

what the hell is eye dialect? it sounds like when people talk with their eyes "her mouth says no, but her eyes say YES"

"her mouth says no, but her eyes say KNAW"

or basil's wife perhaps, "oh i knaaawr." you gotta slap an r at the end there because they're british. anyway

writing gets real out of hand real fast at 4am y'know. and i'm writing this on my phone too, what kind of sick fuck writes his autobiography on his phone? that sounds like the kind of thing b would do, but i don't have any business knowing the kinds of things b would do

is there anything i actually wanted to say? i've been buying and drinking wines like a madman. i drank half a bottle in an afternoon when i was trying a new wine and my mom goes "that's a LOT of trying!" like not really tho. wine is a trap cuz you gotta drink it freshly corked or else you're fucked. you gotta share wine, i'm always trying to coax my mom into a glass or two so i don't feel stupid drinking it all by myself. i feel like how my mom used to describe my grandma (on my dad's side), taking her wine medicine every day because "it's healthy" or whatever. i really don't drink like that. i actually forget that there's alcohol in there because it never occurs to me. i've still never been drunk. i was possibly tipsy when we had two bottles in miami and we were sitting out on the smoking bench together, but even then i was just slightly louder and happy.

i've tried merlot, pinot noir, pinot grig, rose, sauvignon blanc, "laurel blanc," chardonnay and i've got a riesling on the way, stashed someplace. i feel such like a stereotypical college early 20s girl when i drink wine, like hmmm like the thing where they order fancy tasty alcoholic drinks at bars and stuff? where they can't taste the alcohol at all and get wasted really easily? not that i'm over here getting wasted, but i mean that i'm picky about flavors, like sometimes wine to me is just bad-tasting grape juice that burns a little and makes you want to burp. i popped open a chardonnay yesterday and the intense oaky "full-bodied" flavor kind of offends me. at the end of the day, i'm still just a real soda jerk at heart, like i wanna drink things that taste good. sugary snacks and orange juice and stuff. sarsparilla. wine tastes bad in comparison to most other beverages (like, let's just be real here for a second, all alcohol tastes worse than a sprite), but makes me feel more sophisticated is all, and i already drink bitter black teas to fill that niche in my life.

i'm more just drinking all these different wines to take a peek into a life i don't live, i think. try to understand people i know that drink wine a little better. i wrote about this before, getting to know you through the back door? watching abfab and fawlty towers and reading swamplandia, following in your footsteps, inching my way through the path you hacked through the jungle. like that scarjo alien movie (another example), living in your skin. why is it so impossible for me to talk about getting to know you without diving into some creepy stalker persona? i don't get it. i must be naive to my own creepiness. i have been called "a creeper," but only once in middle school, and i don't think i was doing anything creepy at the time. just standing somewhere looking sad and emo probably. people just called each other creepers back then left and right. it really is a hurtful term, considering i still vaguely remember it

anyway, i have no idea what you're doing in new york, why you're doing foot stuff with strangers, who you're hanging out with, how long you'll be there, why you can't ever think about me or call me or have any space in your life or in your thoughts for me and i have no idea why everything is so difficult and i have no idea about divorce or wine or new york in general really. and i'm just always over here baking 50 loaves of bread and 600 chocolate bavarians and dumping rainbow sprinkles and maraschino cherries into bowls and putting 350, 850, 1100 pieces of flourless chocolate cake on plates over and over again and checking instagram every time i walk through the halls because it's the only way i know you're not dead. and i know you're awake at 4am when i'm walking into work and i miss you and think of you then, when we're the only souls up at that hour, but then you get like 7 likes on your 4am instagram post and i realize that's actually bullshit and yeah. i'm a dumb jealous bitch, but only like, a little bit, and every person that comments on your instastuff i just imagine that it's somebody that lives in new york and is in your entourage and is more important to you and more interesting than i ever was and i should really just keep dumb mouth shut about everything.

i warned you i was a boring boy, and i warned myself too. you're out there living big again, cool people dragging you into cool big city cocaine club experiences, swapping stick and pokes and fur jackets and call girl stories, writing novels and shooting music videos and hosting parties where you get to avoid your guests and be in the vip back room... (my imagination is endless you see!)

and i'm like a dumb ducking small town country hick boy pining and sending senpai-notice-me pictures of rice krispy treats as if it's anything to sneeze at (it isn't), pretending like my baking or my pictures of clouds or cats is worth anything in your life, because i'm just fumbling and grasping at straws and presenting them to you, like hey look at these straws eh? pretty neat eh? wanna go out with me? i feel like that picture of that kid holding a bunch of roses out to rihanna. a reference which is apparently too dated to show up on google images, grumble

speaking of baking, i went to this japanese bakery the other day to inquire about a job opening and the girl there, well first of all it's really cute because all the girls there wear brown berets and brown overalls, but anyway the girl there said they have TWENTY bakers working there. TWENTY. i keep telling people this hoping for a reaction because apparently only a baker understands how bonkers this is. a small mom and pop bakery with TWENTY bakers. i mean, their stuff is pretty nice, and they do a wide variety of things, but i work at a place with three bakers and we make food for hundreds of people every day.

what else do i have to say, hmmm... i feel like i dropped the ball on the whole self-loathing thing really early, like those couple of paragraphs up there are really more of a finisher but whatever. i'm just rambling, just ranting, just stream of conscious jack kerouac jacking myself off and it's honestly just fine, i don't gotta organize this any particular way do i? nah

but like, don't take any of this stuff too seriously (but do if it makes you like feel really bad for me and miss me or whatever heh), everything is a fleeting thought or feeling nowadays, some times are better than others. some days i text you simply because i wanna share something with you and i'm thinking of you, real simple, and i don't even think about how dumb and bitter i can get, but other days i just want to give up on you and crawl back into my haunted lake and stop trying and kill myself or hurt myself or at the very least make desperate phone calls to people i used to talk to and make myself feel relevant again. but eh. what a soap opera. i like how you think YOU'RE crazy when i'm like just a pile of flesh filled with howling, howling winds, like i'm a real fucking whirlwind in here, a real wuthering heights crazy animal sex energy in here. haunting away from my creaky old miasma mansion. i'm just full of sludge, i'm the swamp and trump never drained me, turns out.

anyway, like i said don't take it too seriously, i'm ok. i'm only flexing muscles, really, but i do miss you, and probably will forever, because i don't think we'll ever be Together Like That. which is fine but it also sucks. "don't you forget about me"

hey also if you happen to read this prior to halloween, or at all, send me some songs for a playlist i'm putting together for no particular reason. i listen to it at work. i've been in a real halloweeny mood even though i never have time or any reason to dress up. but i do all the other stuff, i carve pumpkins and wear candy corn socks and do generally love the season. nobody ever sees it, but i do love the season, i just never share my love with anybody the way i wish i could. just don't send like, the marilyn manson version of i put a spell on you or whatever, unless it's really good, i didn't actually look into it.

sincerely,

from out here on the moors,

the other brian

p.s. just in case new york actually really sucks for you right now and is really not fun or exciting and you are actually feeling very rotten and lonely, i do aplogize profusely! my imagination runs too fast for me to catch up sometimes. just always missing you and always beating myself up. i hope i don't ever rub you the wrong way. https://youtu.be/UDhmnoBVYlQ

p.p.s. 11am now, just wanna say i stand by this big black chunk of coal letter, except i didn't want it to be quite so angry and bitter. your business is your business and i'm silly for assuming i need to be included, as per, i'm really not as desperately invested as i come off. i feel stripped of a friend maybe, but not helpless hopeless careening into a black hole or anything. stay warm stay safe, i'm here when you need my brand of friend again, but i'm gonna make a concerted effort to stop prying. xo

0 notes

erinelezabeth920 · 6 years

Text

Day 7 – The Fourth

The Fourth of July was a strange day, full of ups and downs. The morning started off beautifully. The sun filtered in through the window and I more energy than I had before the hospital. I was skipping my clinic work that morning and just easing myself into the program schedule by planning to attend Spanish class in the afternoon. Instead, I listened to The Lumineers, painted my nails, and ate a breakfast that Monica brought me of tea, bread, pineapple and watermelon. It was delicious. I organized my new room, messaged a few friends and laid on the bed for a while, trying to read. I still felt very weak; it was difficult to be active for long periods of time. I tried to avoid scolling the slow-loading internet. Holidays plus boredom plus internet when you’re travelling are a dangerous combination, as I know from past experiences (ie thank goodness I decided to go out on Christmas in Thailand two years ago and get drunk with some Brits. RIP world cup friends). I did see a few posts though; fireworks, parties, floating, beers etc. I knew Andy was having a party with some friends. I tried not to think about it. At 12 pm I got dressed, gingerly walked downstairs, petted the dogs and walked outside. The noon equator sun was hot, but I felt energized walking down the street for the first time in days. I stopped by Panderia Miraflores, the little bakery near my house to get a pastry. The bus (SUR OCCIDENTAL) wasn’t crowded and I could actually sit down. Riding through the street around lunch time, there were vendors everywhere with bananas, empanadas, oranges, meat stick things, and all sorts of else. (Fun fact; in Ecuador, roasted guinea pig is very popular. It still looks just like the animal, head and all, spinning on a stick over coals. Have yet to try…)

But the other food looked good. Specifically empanadas. I looked for some on the way down Avenida Amazones (the large north-south running avenue I walk down about 10 minutes to get to the Spanish school), but no dice. I headed into the school. A few folks were already there. They looked thrilled to see me (“Lizzy!”) and gave me huge hugs. (Other fun fact; I go by Lizzy here. There are two Erins, and in a group of 8 that’s a little tough, so I took the sacrifice. I don’t mind it. I was going to, you know, just re-invent myself completely but then I got sick and threw up for 5 hours straight and was maybe the most vulnerable I’d ever been. Oh well) I sat down, exhausted from the commute, feeling weak and empty. Some others trickled in. Kayla and Erin from my work site showed up; “My other half!” cried Erin and they both hugged me. It was really nice to be greeted so warmly, with such concern from folks I’d only known less than a week, having missed some bonding experiences during the hospital. Shared experiences make fast friends. I then met my Spanish teacher, whose name is Irma. We have one-on-one Spanish lessons three times a week for 3 or 4 hours each day, to meet the needs of all the different levels. Its honestly incredible. Irma was a straight hoot, lighter skin and short hair. In two short hours she knew most of my life, how I had met Andy, places I had lived, and that I don’t like to cook. At one point I even had Google maps open, showing her the layout of Seattle, and pictures of Pike Place. When she asked what kind of music I liked, I responded country because it was the easiest thing in the moment to say. She asked me to name an artist. For some unknown reason I said Dierks Bentley, so we spent the next 10 minutes google you-tube videos of Dierks Bentley. It was about as close to a 4th of July celebration as I got. The lesson ended with me trying to explain the app “Bumble” (she had asked how I met my boyfriend, to which I responded “telefono…”, and she said “cual applicacion?” and I said Bumble because I did not feel like translating Coffee Meets Bagel into Spanish.) I tried to explain the concept, “los mujeres hablan PRIMERO porque los hombros son muy malo…” etc. She finally understood and was very intrigued, asking if there was Bumble in Ecuador. I told her I didn’t know.

By that point it was 5:30. Class had started at 1:30. I was pure exhaustion. Go from hospital one day to a four hour intensive Spanish class the next day and see how you feel. I said bye to Irma and everyone and weakly walked out the door. I wanted to walk home; I wanted some energy in my body so I would sleep well, but crossing the big intersection past the park I got turned around. It was starting to get dark and I was exhausted, sad, a little nauseous, and probably also very hungry now that I’m writing this. Eventually I found a bus (SUR OCCIDENTAL) and got home. I laid on my bed, feeling sad. I scrolled through Facebook and Instagram, a terrible idea but I did it anyway. I wanted to talk to someone, but who I am going to call with my travel lonliness when everyone is off having fun? My parents and brother were sailing our boat. I wanted to message Andy but he was cooking for friends. Everyone was having parties and I was sick, sad in South America. Or so it felt like.

Finally, Monica called me down to dinner. Hernando sat next to me. It felt nice, to be in a warm kitchen with the radio playing and dogs milling about. It helped unstick me from my funk. Monica served me broccoli soup pasta with meat sauce. I don’t even like broccoli, but I ate the soup up, and the pasta was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. Although I could only eat a little as my stomach was still very small. Primo (I am calling him Primo, which means “cousin” in Spanish because I don’t know his name), came in and sat down. “Where have you been?!” he said in English. “El hospital” I replied, and held my stomach. “Ah,” he said over his white moustache. “You get the revenge.” “Que?” I said. He said some words in Spanish and asked if I understood. I shook my head no. “The revenge,” he said again in English. “There was once an Inca king. You know the Incas?” I nodded. “Atahualpa was his name. Like Montezuma but for Ecuador. Finally one day, the Conquistadors came over the mountains and killed him. The last Inca king. He takes revenge on all the foreigners. You have the revenge.”

“Creo.” I said solemnly. I believe it.

After dinner I felt nauseous, had to lie down for a while trying not to throw up the first real meal I’d eaten in 4 days. I listened to my audio book. It was one of those nights that you just need to ride out, waiting for the dawn.

I think that sometimes with traveling I am afraid to feel vulnerable. I have this image of myself I want to uphold; fun, wordly, carefree. I am afraid to cry while Face-timing my boyfriend; that is not my image of a strong independent adventurous woman. I am afraid to feel beaten, if only temporarily, afraid to admit the difficulties, the homesickness, the fomo of scrolling through Instagram and seeing all the 4th of July parties, feeling very alone. But, the older I get the more I understand that vulnerability is strength. That admitting when things are hard is bravery. That pushing through, seeing the beauty in the weakest moments, appreciating the little things in ways we never did before is the joy of stepping outside of our comfort zones. The intense privilege to sit at another family’s table, on the other side of the globe and drink their tea, hear their conversations. To see the lines clearly, the colors deep and rich contrasted with the dulls and greys. Like the beauty of a sunset reflecting off a snowcapped peak, sending into the air just a little bit of a taste of home; a smaller world under one wide sky.

#travel #ecuador #travelabroad #quito #4thofjuly #writing

0 notes

nofomoartworld · 7 years

Text

Hyperallergic: From Oyster Shells to Cardboard Bales, the Politics of Everyday Materials

Material Politics, installation view (all images courtesy of Institute of Modern Art)

BRISBANE, Australia — When co-curators Johan Lundt and Aileen Burns mined the Institute of Modern Art’s archives, they found an access point to a pivotal time in Brisbane’s material and political history in the 1986 exhibit Recession Art and Other Strategies. That show was created at time when there was very little market for Australian art, and the artists featured all made works within an economy of means: from basic materials and in a modular way. That way, if they sold their work in Australia or abroad, it could be packed down and shipped off easily. The exhibition centered around economic questions raised during a turbulent time in Brisbane’s history: the conservative regime of Queensland’s longest-serving premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. During his reign, Brisbane earned the nickname Pig City, a reference to the corrupt and oppressive police force and generally inhospitable climate for artists who operated with scant — if any — resources. This was also a time when Brisbane’s already politicized punk scene struck back at Bjelke-Petersen’s heavy-handed attempts to squelch it.

IMA’s current show, Material Politics, takes its inspiration from Recession Art to explore how the last three decades of socioeconomic growth, rapid gentrification, increased mobility, the rise of digital technology, and lasting colonial legacies have continued to impact the materials used in Australian art. This collection of new and commissioned works emphasize the way artists use everyday materials to articulate their inherent politics.

In “Foundations II” (2017) by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope from North Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah), oyster shells are mounted on cast concrete and arranged in a 10×10 grid on the gallery floor. Traditionally, oyster shells are used to make middens — mounds of discarded refuse that mark human settlements for many First Nation groups. The concrete references the drudging and sand mining on Stradbroke Island that has led to the removal of many of these middens, but here, each shell stands upright on its cement block as if in defiance. These materials represent the destruction of significant heritage site and express the politics of extraction and displacement. Cope subverts this common modernist aesthetic (the grid) by using it to project colonial violence on the landscape.

Megan Cope, “Foundations II” (2016), oyster shells and cast concrete, dimensions variable

Keg de Souza, “the earth affords them no food at all” (2017), vacuum-sealed food storage bags, food, 5.2 x 2.7m

Keg de Souza’s “the earth afford them no food at all” (2017) is one of the larger pieces in the show. It consists of 12 vacuum-packed plastic bags hanging in vertical rows across the gallery wall, each filled with different native spices and other processed food popular in Australia — 55 foods in total. These simple, quotidian materials reflect how national identity is formed through food culture, and the hermetically sealed bags reference Australia’s strict food biosecurity laws.

Tintin Wulia’s “172 Kilograms of Homes for Ate Manang” (2017) hangs from the wall off to the side, between Cope’s bags and de Souza’s grids. Her bale of cardboard is wrapped so tightly with wire that it seems to pull in the space around it. Some simple drawings in red appear on the side of the bale, which Wulia purchased from an informal network of recyclers who collect cardboard refuse from the streets of Hong Kong, consolidate it, and then sell it off to be recycled in China. The project took an unexpected turn when she traced the cardboard’s movement and discovered a micro economy: The collectors often lease the discarded cardboard to Filipino domestic workers to be used to make temporary shelters. This large population of workers generally has no space of their own, so they construct living rooms in public spaces during their days off. For Wulia, these makeshift rooms became sites in which to record stories and build relationships. During her time with the domestic workers, they made drawings on the cardboard, which helped her locate the pieces once they started to circulate again, and she used these to construct the bale hanging in the gallery.

Tintin Wulia, “172 Kilograms of Homes for Ate Manang” (2017), cardboard, 60 x 80 x 75 cm

There’s an interesting formal composition in this gallery as a whole, with Cope’s oyster grid flowing into de Souza’s vertical array of spices, and Wulia’s cardboard bale balancing the scene. Whether or not this was done intentionally by the curators, seen together, these three pieces use materials — all made within an economy of means — that speak to land rights, ecological vulnerability, and the precarity of domestic workers. Each manages to bind the complexity of these issues into rigorous formal structures.

Elsewhere in the show, Archie Moore’s “Bogeyman” (2017) stands as an ominous presence. The “paint skin” (a build-up of acrylic paint) resembles a white sheet draped over a simple wooden structure, evoking the specter of first contact and racial stereotypes, speaking directly to racially motivated hate such as is found in Abu Ghraib and within the KKK. Behind Moore’s piece is “39 Steps” (2017), a single-channel video of women dancing to choreographed moves, taken at the Women’s March in Melbourne earlier this year. Artists Gabriella and Silvana Mangano project the video onto differently sized and shaped mirrors in order to emphasize how the body carries messages in public space. The women’s gestures explore the kinds of authority or inspiration that can happen when a march gets translated into a dance.

Archie Moore, “Bogeyman” (2017), paint and wood, 316 x 187 x 46.5 cm

Gabriella and Silvana Mangano, “39 Steps” (2017), single-channel video installation, Dimensions variable

Raquel Ormell’s “I’m worried this will become a slogan” (1999–2009) is a collection of double-sided banners made of wool and felt with inscriptions such as “I’m worried I’m not political enough” on one side and a related news headline on the other. The slogans reveal the artist’s anxiety and perceived lack of agency when it comes to conveying political messages through her art. Her work remains prescient, considering the angst-ridden political landscape we all must traverse these days. Jemima Wyman and Zach Blas’s four-channel video installation “I’m here to learn so :))))))” (2017) features Tay, Microsoft’s AI chatbot that existed for only one day. The artists bring Tay back to life in Google DeepDream–scape and then take viewers on a deeply disturbing journey through the politics of pattern misrecognition, dangerous algorithms, and biometrics.

Raquel Ormella, “I’m worried this will become a slogan” (1999–2009), double-sided banners, sewn wool, and felt, 186 x 128 cm

The curators of Material Politics didn’t need to look back, although I understand the impulse to excavate the past to feed the present. This exhibit became refracted through the access point of 1986: Timely political issues placed in a contemporary context take on different resonances today, and artists’ materials aren’t driven by economic constraints as much as they bring to life the politics they assert.

Material Politics continues at Institute of Modern Art (Judith Wright Centre, 420 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane) through July 15.

The post From Oyster Shells to Cardboard Bales, the Politics of Everyday Materials appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2tmM4WS via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Hyperallergic

0 notes

makingscipub · 7 years

Text

The microbiome: Images and visualisations

On Monday 26 June I went to Oxford to participate in a workshop on the microbiome organised by The Oxford Interdisciplinary Microbiome Project (IMP). This was what one might call a meta-workshop. Its aim was to find questions that social scientists can sensibly ask about the microbiome, or in the words of the organisers, this was about establishing a “social-scientific research agenda about the microbiome and its implications for public policy and social change”. The workshop ties in with some of my older and newer reflections on the microbiome.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the microbiomes in two ways, as “[a] population of microorganisms inhabiting a specific environment; a microbial community or ecosystem, now esp. that of the body” (first attested in 1952) and as “[t]he collective genomes of all the microorganisms inhabiting a specific environment, esp. that of the body” (first attested in 2001).

The workshop was held at Wolfson College (see featured image), where I did my JRF in the history of linguistics between 1985 and 1988. It was really nice to be there again and see all the new additions and extensions.

Questions, questions questions

In advance of the workshop we had been sent 120 questions and were asked to vote for 10. At the workshop itself each of four tables/working groups was given a list of themed questions and we were asked to select two high-level ones and two reserve questions. The general aim was to establish about 20 questions overall.

At our table we dealt with the issue of how the microbiome is being conceptualised. One question we found interesting in this context was how the microbiome, a still rather abstract and contested concept, is being imagined and visualised in the public sphere (which is, of course, not the same as visualising microbiome datasets).

While we were discussing this, I quickly had a peak on Google Images and what I found was quite intriguing. So when I came back from Oxford, I had a closer look. Of course, I cannot provide an answer to the broad question of how the microbiome is visualised in the public sphere in one blog post, but perhaps I can stimulate some discussion.

People can also look at other image sources in the future, such as Pinterest, Shutterstock, or the Science Photo Library, for example, which have images of the microbiome that seem to be quite different to the Google Images sample.

Thematic clusters

When you search for ‘microbiome’ on Google Images, you get not only images, but Google also provides you with a list of ‘themes’ (in various colours). (I searched on 27 June)

I am not sure how these themes are generated, but they are really interesting. Here they are without the colours – followed by my attempts at interpreting these thematic clusters:

skin, gut, lung, human skin, colon, stomach – this theme seems to deal with loci of various types of human microbiome

nature, role, health, diet, environmental, food – this one hints at various contexts of the human gut microbiome and how it is fed or maintained

plant, animal, host – here we are dealing with a simple (almost) dichotomy between plant and animal hosts of microbiomes

obesity, disease, cancer, diabetes, dysbiosis [microbial imbalance or maladaptation on or inside the body, such as an impaired microbiota], ibd [inflammatory bowel disease] – this theme encapsulates various illnesses or diseases linked to a disturbed microbiome

Scientific American, New Yorker, Time Magazine, National Geographic, Nature Review, The Economist – here we have a list of the main outlets for microbiome images

core, cell, body, root, fibre, sequence – this list leaves me a bit perplexed – comments welcome

infographic, map, heatmap, pie chart – here we have a list of various types of visualisations of the microbiome

bacterial, microbiota, fungal, candida, candida albicans [a type of yeast that is commonly used as a model organism for biology], C. difficile – this list homes in on various types of microbiome as well as one of the most talked-about afflictions, Cdiff, linked to a disruption of the microbiome in the human gut

human gut, rhizosphere, human intestine, insect gut, phyllosphere [a term used in microbiology to refer to the total above-ground portions of plants as habitat for microorganisms] – here the focus is on the human gut on the one hand but also the insect gut and plant habitats for microorganism – a bit of a strange mix I have to confess

fish, chicken, lefse [a traditional soft Norwegian flatbread], milk, poultry – this might refer to ways of enhancing the microbiome through various types of food

immune system, metabolism, digestive system, antibiotic resistance, hygiene hypothesis – these are scientific topics discussed in the context of microbiome research, and they were also discussed at the workshop

hospital, home, stable – these are, it seems, some places where microbiomes like to evolve

alpha diversity, relative abundance, beta diversity – comments welcome! Alpha diversity refers, it seems, to the diversity of species at a specific site (local species pool), while beta diversity represents the differences in species composition among sites

metagenomics, metabolomics, next generation sequencing – these are high-level science topics as well as technologies relating to research in microbiomics

human milk, saliva, blood – this might refer to interactions between a mother’s breast milk and a baby’s saliva; I am not so sure about the blood

dog, ruminant, pig, swine, bovine, equine – this indicates that microbiomics deals not only with humans but also animals that humans keep and eat

short chain fatty acid, tmao [Trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) is a small colorless amine oxide generated from choline, betaine, and carnitine by gut microbial metabolism], bile acid – comments welcome!

drosophila, human genome, coral, zebrafish, termite, mosquito – these might be model organisms used in the study of microbiomes (apart from the human genome)

sem [structural equation modelling or scanning electon microsope?], 16s rrna sequencing [the component of the 30S small subunit of a prokaryotic ribosome that binds to the Shine-Dalgarno sequence] – science!

pca [principal component analysis], hierarchical clustering, gastric bypass, otu [operational taxonomic unit] – I am not sure what gastric bypass is doing in this list!

Overall, these themes provide some insights not only into who generates most of the images, i.e. which journals are involved, or which types of images and visualisations are used, but also, and more importantly, what topics these images and visualisations are supposed to illuminate, from types of (human) microbiome, through various loci for microbiomes, through (domestic) animal microbiomes, to ways of studying the microbiome in certain fields of science and by using certain techniques, technologies and machines. Surprisingly, these themes did not mention Faecal Microbial Transplants, which are increasingly being discussed in the context of the microbiome.

Types of images and visualisations

I then looked at the first fifty images that were displayed when I searched for ‘microbiome’. I sorted them roughly into the following groups and I list them below in order of importance:

Outlines of human body/bodies/head/hands

Rod-shaped bacteria milling about

Microbiome as a word with or without other text

Various types of bacteria or cells milling about (sometimes) under a microscope

One cartoon

Surprisingly, I could not immediately see an image of a human gut – the most popular location of the microbiome. (Such images seem to be much more prominent on Shutterstock; while rod-shaped bacteria seem to be the domain of the Science Photo Library).

The images based on outlines of the human body were mostly outlines with arms slightly raised; sometimes there were two outlines, for example, of a man and a woman (skirt) standing beside each other; sometimes there were several outlines; sometimes the outline merged with an image of the double helix; sometimes there were outlines of a head or of two hands. The outlines were mostly inhabited or surrounded by round or rod-shaped outlines of microbes. This type of image also included the logo of Human Microbiome Project which adapts Leonardo de Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to the genomic age:

The images that displayed the word ‘microbiome’ were also interesting. Sometimes I just saw the word ‘microbiome’ surrounded by bacterial fuzziness, or else as part of a wordle; or ‘Microbiome 101’ against a background of swirling bacterial soup. There were also images that displayed texts such as: ‘What is the Microbiome?’, ‘Gut Feeling’, ‘The importance of your gut microbiome for your optimal health’, ‘Your body is mostly microbes’, ‘How to feed your microbiome’, and so on. Interestingly, the focus of the words, rather than the images, was on the human gut.

Conclusion

The images and visualisations of the microbiome desplayed on Google Images provide a unique and also biased insight into what types of images are out there of the microbiome. There were three surprises: the absence of faecal microbial transplants as topic or theme; the absence of the human bowel as an image; and the focus on the human gut in the words but not in the images. At the moment I can’t provide an explanation for this. More research needed!

Images: Wikimedia commons

The post The microbiome: Images and visualisations appeared first on Making Science Public.

via Making Science Public http://ift.tt/2snkAS0

#IFTTT #Making Science Public

0 notes

milenasanchezmk · 7 years

Text

10 Tips, Suggestions, and Projects For Improving Your Mastery Over Nature

Humankind’s home is in the wild. It’s where we spent our formative years. Even today, well after the advent of civilization, industrialization, and computerization, almost half of humanity still lives in rural areas. That close relationship to the land is probably why green and blue spaces offer so many health benefits, like lower stress and improved immunity. Going for a hike or picnicking on the beach is much like going home.

Yet we don’t simply exist in nature. We shape it. We’ve always shaped it, from ancient Amazonians building food forests to Neanderthals offing entire herds of mammoths at a time. We start fires, systematically hunt and consume its inhabitants. We make gardens—blends of nature and culture. In effect, we impose our will.

Imposing one’s will on the great outdoors has an understandably bad connotation. Sometimes our interactions with nature result in waste and abuse on either a personal and expansive scale. Nothing irks me more than seeing heaps of trash left behind at campsites or photos of the 19th century American buffalo massacres. But the human agenda can also be thoughtful, inspired, even fruitful. Without humans imposing their will on nature, we wouldn’t have the National Parks (thanks, Teddy and Woodrow), stable animal populations (thanks, hunters), or the millions of miles of hiking trails across the world. You can argue the subject for years and never come to a consensus, but it’s pretty clear that a ton of high quality wilderness, both touched and untouched, exists for our enjoyment thanks to some of the more visionary choices within human intervention.

I’ve suggested you camp in the past. I’ve encouraged you to hike. I’ve even told you how best to optimize your hiking. I’ve described the myriad benefits of spending time in nature. Today, I’m going to discuss how to interact with nature without destroying it. How to dig into it, meet it Grok-style. How to feel at home in your true home.

Subscribe to Primitive Technology on YouTube.

Always shirtless and slightly grey from clay residue, the anonymous star of the Primitive Technology YouTube channel has been making huts, tiles, tools, weapons, ovens and other technology using handmade tools and natural materials gathered in the Australian bush for several years. His instructional videos are well-shot, with no talking and no music. Enable closed captions for added details. He even figured out how to make iron last year.

It’s best to try some of the things he makes, but you can also tune in for inspiration with other, less primitive things using modern, store-bought tools. The display of human ingenuity is worth watching.

Get good at chopping wood.

Wood chopping is the perfect example of an effective imposition of human will on nature. You’re taking an unrefined, raw resource and making it more useful without changing its essence or chemical composition.

This is a good all-around axe for chopping wood.

It also turns out to boost testosterone. Carrying water is optional.

Figure out how you prefer to build a fire.

The last thing you want to do when tasked with starting the fire is vacillate between fire-building methods. It should be second nature. You should operate on pure muscle memory. If that’s not the case, it’s time you figure out how you prefer to build a fire.

The basic method is the tipi: building a small tipi of kindling surrounded by tipis made of progressively larger pieces of wood.

My favorite method is the roofless log cabin. You need a big fire pit to do this, and it consumes a lot of wood, but it really creates a hot flame and, if you plan on cooking over it (see the next section), great embers in a short amount of time. Start with two large pieces across from each other. Stack two more across the top on the other sides, forming a square. Continue until you’ve got a 1-2 foot structure. Then, place a small tipi inside the “cabin” and light it.

Some people build a roof of logs to contain the flames and provide more fuel, but I love the visual of flames spilling out the top. It also burns quicker this way, which is good if you need embers for cooking.

Practice building fires and figure out which way works best for you and your goals. Then get really good at building them.

Learn about foraging, then go foraging.

A little knowledge turns wild plants into human food. It might not be totally accurate, but you’ll at least feel like you could handle yourself alone in the wild.

Go on foraging trips with local experts. I guarantee they’re out there wherever you are.

Check the bulletin board at the local outdoor store.

Look for foraging groups on Meetup or Google.

Grab some foraging books from the library or Amazon. Be sure they apply to your area.

Be careful, of course. But don’t let caution paralyze you. I suspect we won’t see very many more Christopher McCandlesses. The breadth of and access to wild food knowledge is too great.

Cook outside over fire.

When we’re cold, we can turn on the heat. When we want to cook something, we can use the microwave, turn a knob and get the perfect flame, or set the oven to a specific temperature. If we need light at night, we flip a switch. We don’t need raw fire for these things anymore. Today, fire is a luxury, a frivolity.

We can certainly get by without direct exposure to fire, but I don’t think we should. Fire burns within us, and I’d argue within our very DNA. It’s why fire engrosses us and the campfire can coax stories and good conversations from those who gaze into it. Cooking is the most powerful and primal way to interact with fire.

Most people mistakenly assume camp fare has to be substandard. They’ll eat canned pasta, freeze-dried meals, garbage breakfast cereal. Even Primal folks aren’t immune; all of a sudden they revert back to the Standard American Diet just because there’s no stove or refrigerator. Nonsense. Cooking in the wilderness is the best.

Get comfortable with the tempestuousness of fire.

Cooking over a wood fire is more art than science, and you have to embrace that.

It won’t be the same each time. You can’t reliably attain “medium high heat” or “425° F.” Open fire doesn’t work like that. Hold your hand over the embers. If you can only manage one second or less, that’s “high heat.”

But even that’s more a guideline than a rule. The key is that you have to practice. You have to get out there and actually cook over fire to learn how fire works. You’ll burn some stuff. You’ll ruin a few meals. That’s okay. Experience is the only teacher that matters.

Don’t fly by the seat of your pants, though.

Cooking over a wood fire is still cooking. Planning matters, especially if you’re doing your wood fire cooking away from home.

Know what you’re going to make for each meal and assemble everything you need the day before.

Prep the ingredients back at home—or not. There is something rustic and gratifying about doing meal prep at camp, fire crackling beside you, chopping veggies directly on the wooden table.

Get (or chop) firewood before you reach the sticks. It’ll be more expensive if you buy on site, and gathering wood is usually illegal. Hop on Craigslist or Yelp to find a vendor that sells in bulk and fill a trunk. I like almond wood for cooking.

Get yourself some cast iron.

For my money, cast iron is the only way to cook outdoors. It’s impervious to heat damage. It holds heat incredibly well. It looks gorgeous gleaming black against a raging fire or glowing embers. There’s no material better for searing a steak.

You’ll want a Dutch oven for stews, chilis, and soups. Enameled works great if you’re worried about getting too much iron from acidic foods.

You’ll want a portable grill. This portable Tuscan grill is the best widely-available option I’ve seen. It’s a 14×14 cast iron grill with legs that screw on. You can plunk this thing down directly over embers, or remove the legs and lay it across an existing grate. Buy two or more to boost your cooking surface.

You’ll want a large cast iron pan. Francis Mallmann, an Argentine chef featured in Netflix’s Chef’s Table (watch the trailer of his episode, then go watch the actual episode), suggests a chapa—a large cast iron surface about 30 inches by 30 inches set on legs for placing directly over embers. Get one of those if you can. You’ll likely have better luck finding extra-large cast iron griddles.

Mallmann also roasts whole lambs and pigs on the Patagonian cross, a 6 foot tall vertical piece of iron with two parallel crossbars and a sharpened end that sticks into the ground in front of the fire. If you’re really gung-ho, find a metal shop near you, draw up some plans, and have them build exactly what you want.

Try cooking over embers, not flames.

Manning the grill as flames lick up and char your food is a romantic image, but it’s not the best way to cook with wood. Embers are far hotter and produce less smoke and more reliable heat.

Start your fire early. Give your embers time to develop. Start your fire no less than an hour before you plan on cooking.

Bury your treasure.

Once you’ve got a nice fire going and embers and ash are accumulating, move a blend of hot ash and embers to the side of the fire and bury your thick skinned vegetables. Don’t wrap them in anything. They can take it. Winter squash, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, onions. I’ve even buried a pineapple—rind on—to great effect. Just throw it in and come back in an hour.

You don’t have to backpack for five days through untamed wilderness to explore these concepts, although you should make a point to get away as often as it’s feasible. Most of these can be practiced and enjoyed in your own backyard. After all, nature is everywhere. There’s no escaping it, so get out there and embrace it.

How do you embrace and tame—or at least attempt to tame—nature? Got any tips or suggestions? Has anyone else out there got the wood fire cooking bug like me? Something about it that just feels right… Take care, everyone.

0 notes

watsonrodriquezie · 7 years

Text

10 Tips, Suggestions, and Projects For Improving Your Mastery Over Nature

Subscribe to Primitive Technology on YouTube.

Get good at chopping wood.

This is a good all-around axe for chopping wood.

It also turns out to boost testosterone. Carrying water is optional.

Figure out how you prefer to build a fire.

The basic method is the tipi: building a small tipi of kindling surrounded by tipis made of progressively larger pieces of wood.

Practice building fires and figure out which way works best for you and your goals. Then get really good at building them.

Learn about foraging, then go foraging.

A little knowledge turns wild plants into human food. It might not be totally accurate, but you’ll at least feel like you could handle yourself alone in the wild.

Go on foraging trips with local experts. I guarantee they’re out there wherever you are.

Check the bulletin board at the local outdoor store.

Look for foraging groups on Meetup or Google.

Grab some foraging books from the library or Amazon. Be sure they apply to your area.

Be careful, of course. But don’t let caution paralyze you. I suspect we won’t see very many more Christopher McCandlesses. The breadth of and access to wild food knowledge is too great.

Cook outside over fire.

Get comfortable with the tempestuousness of fire.

Cooking over a wood fire is more art than science, and you have to embrace that.

Don’t fly by the seat of your pants, though.

Cooking over a wood fire is still cooking. Planning matters, especially if you’re doing your wood fire cooking away from home.

Know what you’re going to make for each meal and assemble everything you need the day before.

Prep the ingredients back at home—or not. There is something rustic and gratifying about doing meal prep at camp, fire crackling beside you, chopping veggies directly on the wooden table.

Get yourself some cast iron.

You’ll want a Dutch oven for stews, chilis, and soups. Enameled works great if you’re worried about getting too much iron from acidic foods.

Try cooking over embers, not flames.

Manning the grill as flames lick up and char your food is a romantic image, but it’s not the best way to cook with wood. Embers are far hotter and produce less smoke and more reliable heat.

Start your fire early. Give your embers time to develop. Start your fire no less than an hour before you plan on cooking.

Bury your treasure.

0 notes

fishermariawo · 7 years

Text

10 Tips, Suggestions, and Projects For Improving Your Mastery Over Nature

Subscribe to Primitive Technology on YouTube.

Get good at chopping wood.

This is a good all-around axe for chopping wood.

It also turns out to boost testosterone. Carrying water is optional.

Figure out how you prefer to build a fire.

The basic method is the tipi: building a small tipi of kindling surrounded by tipis made of progressively larger pieces of wood.

Practice building fires and figure out which way works best for you and your goals. Then get really good at building them.

Learn about foraging, then go foraging.

A little knowledge turns wild plants into human food. It might not be totally accurate, but you’ll at least feel like you could handle yourself alone in the wild.

Go on foraging trips with local experts. I guarantee they’re out there wherever you are.

Check the bulletin board at the local outdoor store.

Look for foraging groups on Meetup or Google.

Grab some foraging books from the library or Amazon. Be sure they apply to your area.

Be careful, of course. But don’t let caution paralyze you. I suspect we won’t see very many more Christopher McCandlesses. The breadth of and access to wild food knowledge is too great.

Cook outside over fire.

Get comfortable with the tempestuousness of fire.

Cooking over a wood fire is more art than science, and you have to embrace that.

Don’t fly by the seat of your pants, though.

Cooking over a wood fire is still cooking. Planning matters, especially if you’re doing your wood fire cooking away from home.

Know what you’re going to make for each meal and assemble everything you need the day before.

Prep the ingredients back at home—or not. There is something rustic and gratifying about doing meal prep at camp, fire crackling beside you, chopping veggies directly on the wooden table.

Get yourself some cast iron.

You’ll want a Dutch oven for stews, chilis, and soups. Enameled works great if you’re worried about getting too much iron from acidic foods.

Try cooking over embers, not flames.

Manning the grill as flames lick up and char your food is a romantic image, but it’s not the best way to cook with wood. Embers are far hotter and produce less smoke and more reliable heat.

Start your fire early. Give your embers time to develop. Start your fire no less than an hour before you plan on cooking.

Bury your treasure.

0 notes

cristinajourdanqp · 7 years

Text

10 Tips, Suggestions, and Projects For Improving Your Mastery Over Nature

Subscribe to Primitive Technology on YouTube.

Get good at chopping wood.

This is a good all-around axe for chopping wood.

It also turns out to boost testosterone. Carrying water is optional.

Figure out how you prefer to build a fire.

The basic method is the tipi: building a small tipi of kindling surrounded by tipis made of progressively larger pieces of wood.

Practice building fires and figure out which way works best for you and your goals. Then get really good at building them.

Learn about foraging, then go foraging.

A little knowledge turns wild plants into human food. It might not be totally accurate, but you’ll at least feel like you could handle yourself alone in the wild.

Go on foraging trips with local experts. I guarantee they’re out there wherever you are.

Check the bulletin board at the local outdoor store.

Look for foraging groups on Meetup or Google.

Grab some foraging books from the library or Amazon. Be sure they apply to your area.

Be careful, of course. But don’t let caution paralyze you. I suspect we won’t see very many more Christopher McCandlesses. The breadth of and access to wild food knowledge is too great.

Cook outside over fire.

Get comfortable with the tempestuousness of fire.

Cooking over a wood fire is more art than science, and you have to embrace that.

Don’t fly by the seat of your pants, though.

Cooking over a wood fire is still cooking. Planning matters, especially if you’re doing your wood fire cooking away from home.

Know what you’re going to make for each meal and assemble everything you need the day before.

Prep the ingredients back at home—or not. There is something rustic and gratifying about doing meal prep at camp, fire crackling beside you, chopping veggies directly on the wooden table.

Get yourself some cast iron.

You’ll want a Dutch oven for stews, chilis, and soups. Enameled works great if you’re worried about getting too much iron from acidic foods.

Try cooking over embers, not flames.

Manning the grill as flames lick up and char your food is a romantic image, but it’s not the best way to cook with wood. Embers are far hotter and produce less smoke and more reliable heat.

Start your fire early. Give your embers time to develop. Start your fire no less than an hour before you plan on cooking.

Bury your treasure.

0 notes