An Update
#134: Here and Now (Neocities, Rivers of London, Renato Rosaldo, T'boli Mermaids)
I’m still in healing mode, and giving it however long it takes—and it’s taking longer than I thought to heal—although I’m seeing some improvement. So I’m making this issue a short update.
The last week and a half have been a combination of back pain punctuated with periods of relief, extreme boredom, malaise, and low-key busywork (although I can only sit up for about hour at a time). As an example of the latter, I reconstructed my little Neocities website, using Zonelets, a very simple blogging program designed to work with Neocities. Because, what the hell, it’s something to do while I wait this thing out. I also realized that I get the same feeling from working on a website as I get from knitting a muffler—or maybe closer to crocheting a doily. Simple coding gives me some satisfaction when it produces a visible product, even if it’s just going to sit there on the internet (like a doily on an end table) for the next 5 years.
Next up, I’m slowly cleaning up my desktop of all my junk files, so I can stow the keepers temporarily in my external drive, and then install open source Linux Ubuntu, with its lovely jellyfish desktop, and finally free myself from the clutches of Microsoft.
I haven’t been making any art during this period. However, I’ve been reading, and am currently trying out Ben Aaronovitch’s series, Rivers of London, an urban detective noir fantasy, replete with the gods, monsters, and ghosts of that haunted city and its rivers. I’m learning a lot of British slang in the process. The series even has its own music video, featuring Ben “Doc Brown” Smith playing the part of constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant:
I guess my reading has been generally “dark” through this period. I had thought of re-reading Renato Rosaldo’s anthropological essay “Grief and the Headhunter’s Rage,”1 but I saw that he had also written a book of poetry about his wife Michelle Rosaldo’s accidental death in 1981 from a fall while they were doing research in the Philippines. The book is titled The Day of Shelly’s Death, and it’s very interesting to read so many years after the event. I think his poetry addresses her death with much more depth in this book. His accompanying “Notes on Poetry and Ethnography” are great, too. Regarding his term antropoesía:
Antropoesía is a process of discovery more than a confirmation of the already known. If one knows precisely where a poem is going before beginning to write there is no point in going further. The same can be said of thick description in ethnography where theory is to be discovered in the details. The details inspire theory rather than illustrate already formulated theory. —Renato Rosaldo
I just took a muscle relaxant that my doctor prescribed for me, so I’d better end this here. I’ll leave you with one more video, about the Tboli Mermaids of Lake Sebu (from Slice):
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Intro to his book, Culture and Truth.