The other thing that struck me was that the bean man had been making this Saturday crack-of-dawn drive, and usually another Sunday drive to another city market, for decades. He was one of the originals still at the market. He was an Eastern Shore truck farmer, he sold the only fresh beans around — cannellini, Navy beans, red beans, black beans, October beans, lima beans, Dixie butter beans, speckled beans, black-eyed peas — and in the spring, oh my goodness, he sold fresh peas. That is, he had something that the Baltimore of all colors and incomes loved, he could make a living at it, it was good to do, he did it, he never stopped.
One thing we all should’ve learned from the public hearings of the January 6 select committee is that almost nothing is spontaneous anymore. Dig deep enough, and you’ll find someone organizing these “spontaneous” events (as well as someone bankrolling them). In any case, Reuters found examples of this occasionally criminal behavior all over the country. Most of the incidents ran on the same rails.
When I’m not writing, I’m often surfing. Something most non-surfers don’t realize is that surfing is mostly waiting. You paddle out and then wait for the right wave to roll in. When a promising set rears up out of the deep, you try to catch it. If you hesitate, even for a moment, you’ll either miss the wave or, worse, get sucked over the falls as it breaks. To catch a wave, you have to fully commit.
I suspect the same principle is at work when writing about something changes your mind. The brain is an intricate, sparkling, densely interconnected maze—an easy place for ideas to hide in vague generalities. But writing forces you to commit to specifics as surely as surfers must commit to waves. Seeing an idea reveal itself on the page, you may find yourself entranced or repulsed or inspired by its specificity, its naked meaning.
Lynn’s songs defied societal expectations by connecting her musical representations of working-class and rural women to broader social issues affecting women across the U.S.
She aimed for her music to articulate the fears, dreams and anger of women living in a patriarchal society. It railed against those who idealized women’s domestic roles and demonized outspoken feminists.
What was the ocean like? I couldn’t tell him. The sea was too big, and my bucket was so small. Also, it had a hole. I put my hand on the back of his calf. It seemed like my best available answer.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is a beautiful, beautiful novel. Two sound engineers, one a documentarian and the other a documentarist, travel across country with their two children from previous marriages. The book captures and archives and arranges for the sake of memory. It unfolds stories — made up histories, real histories, and current events against a backdrop of geography and family inventing itself and unbundling.
Please read this book.
Logistics: Checked out from the Berkeley Public Library and listened to on walks, and sitting on the front porch so the walk could last longer. Book 12 finished 24 March.
We by Yevgeny Zamyati was written in the early 1920s. The book and the author was attacked by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Zamyati ended up leaving Russia, dying in Paris in the late 30s. The book was a Christmas present from Erica. She found it on a shelf of bookseller recommendations. The billing as a seminal and influential work of science fiction sold her. It’s prescient in the way Trump had so many of saying Parable of the Sower is prescient.
It’s a political novel. The abandonment of the soul for the all knowing regimentation of the state. It is warning of the dangerous future ahead. The one person who discovers a core, a soul that makes him different. The conflict at all levels that creates. You can see Metropolis — which is broadly contemporary, 1984, of course, and the mass weddings and cults of the late 70s. It is a fantastic read an feels so weird with the new version of the Russian state playing out in front of us now.
Logistics: I read the mass market paperback copy — my favorite format for any science fiction novel — in bed. It went slow. Sometimes only a page before falling asleep, sometimes rereading what I’d read the day before. And then it went all at once, finishing it on the front sofa, not even music playing. Book 11 finished 18 March.
I found Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham scrolling through available audio books on Libby. Like almost everyone else, I watched the miniseries. And from that I had a picture of what happened. This book filled in the shadows. It showed people with belief in a system where systemic issues — cost cutting, unrealistic delivery schedules, quotas — undermined everything. Especially when inside a system that seems opposite of learning.
Logistics: Checked out from my local library on audio and listened to while walking. It was interrupted by the availability of Peril, so I read it in two segments. Book 10 finished 16 March.
Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa is a terrifying read. The idea that we were so close to a collapse of democracy. The idea that it was test to find boundaries. Combined with Unthinkable I have even more respect for Nancy Pelosi.
