It took me a minute, but I realized that the intent of this graphic is not just to list deep, complex, and historical problems: The graphic also defends the Hong Kong protests to skeptics by portraying their inevitability. (See the translation, below). So as the graphic pre-empts negative attacks, it also provides a roadmap for reform.
Thus it works to simultaneously legitimize the democratic protests, while focusing the goals: it's a great economy of communication.
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Starting to work on my next eight (!) books, the titles for which appeared in a dream. Admittedly, I forgot five of the titles upon waking up. “One of them seemed like a female, a name or character,” I jotted down. Three I remember pretty clearly. One was something like “Pelage.” Another, The Roman Knife (or Night?). The last contained a word like vega, verde, verdigris…Vegas.… I have my work cut out for me on those, as dream titles might only symbolize actual titles. Currently I’m reading in preparation for a pelagic project: depths, the deep, open ocean, rolling seas, The Waves. Meanwhile, I started a side-project, which contains another writing prompt:
The basic idea uses the theme of ‘escapement.’ An escapement is a clock part, and the word interests me because it’s slightly awkward. It’s as if someone new to English built a word using the ending “—ment,” intending to mean “escape,” without knowing they could skip "—ment" and just use escape. By escapement, they meant escape. If clock produces ticks, words also tick, in rhythmic syllables. What if a syllable escapes, or a letter escapes? I started to play around with the idea of lost letters. I drafted poems with the following rules: 1. Start with a word. Remove a letter, so the remaining letters form another word. I may be a recognizable word or a plausible coined word. 2. Find the emotional link between those two words. What is the world like, now that (word A) has become (word B)? Ideally, your word pair will suggest a narrative or call up some emotional state. Use this step to weed out less productive pairs. “Slipshod” changing into “lipshod” is maybe more interesting than ‘book’ changing into ‘boo.’ (Or maybe not. It’s your call.) 3. Draft a poem relating the emotional narrative or exploring this new reality. Perhaps explore the tension of the lost link. Does lipshod vanquish the slipshod? At what cost? 4. Write one poem for each letter of the alphabet, so that all letters are permitted a chance to escape. This just in—my manuscript is a finalist for the 2018 Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press. Congratulations to the prize winner and my fellow finalists, and many thanks to the editors at Two Sylvias Press!
For any writers who may have liked the wordlist prompt, I found wordlist gold in a random box of papers—9 whole forgotten printouts of junk e-mail wordlists.
They're all completely different arrangements and words, although I notice a few repeat strays here and there. This is like whole poetry books worth of material...though I personally would mix in other composition methods for something as long as a book. Below are a couple reassembled into custom lists for anyone's use. (Note: 'busboy' makes an appearance in one of these lists. Busboy also shows up on an older list, which I used, in part, to create this poem in DIAGRAM 17.1) Much gratitude to PageBoy for including some of my poems in the upcoming Issue X, which features their invention, the Seventeen—a poem of seventeen words only (and be careful about hyphens, I should add.)
A couple of these poems are part of my manuscript-in-progress, which happens to offer several other numbers setting out on the count-up downs. Subscribe, purchase a copy or find more about PageBoy at their site. This blog slowed a lot: apologies. It's actually a good thing—I'm editing a new manuscript and it needs my time. I took a picture of it a while back: I may repurpose this little blog into something more manageable, or it may simply self-destruct and/or take a nap offline for a spell.
Charlie Olsen interviewed me last month and the results are up at Ashberyland! A big thanks to Charlie and all of the student writers over at this cool blog.
Of the works of prose I read in 2017, what book most affected me? Children of Grace, by Bruce Hampton, a history of the Nez Perce War of 1877. It was up against some great contenders, including novels by Doris Lessing, Max Frisch, and works of non-fiction including Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. The ‘children of grace’ of the title refers, ironically, to the phrase some White-European settlers, in the later nineteenth century, used to describe themselves. There are many books on the topic of the 1877 war; I’ve read two so far. Hampton’s work impressed me with its objective (and deft) treatment of primary source details, a method of corroborating eyewitness narratives into a vivid panorama of on-the-ground facts. I felt physically dragged, marched, and coaxed over the landscapes of Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, squeezing with the Nez Perce horses through trail-pinching stands of lodgepole pines or crawling up from creek banks like the wounded tourists, caught unawares, who ended up shot and maimed in the brand new Yellowstone National Park. I think it’s a reasonable guess that the Nez Perce War of 1877 is often understood as a conflict of ideology (manifest destiny) against native ancestry and territorial claims. After a dubious decision under President Grant to reduce the size of their reservation lands, the Chief Jospeh band of the Nez Perce tribe essentially fled. The result devolved into warfare, and it is this larger hybrid of retreat/persistence, aggression/defense, that Hampton fleshes out in detail. In doing so, he seems to trace the path of every bullet—I presume the retelling includes its portion of visceral gore both because of the nature of the record keeping of the U.S. Army, and the specificity of the tribes’ oral accounts. For those turned off by military histories and obsessions therewith, Children of Grace can help elucidate the genre. Perhaps there is something to be learned about human violence—and non-violence—that can only be gained by studying the daily grind of a war. A view into the interior of an “Indian’s Agent’s” cabin, Spalding, ID, Nez Perce Reservation. As a nearby placard reads, “From the time of its arrival the agency was responsible for protecting Nez Perce lands from encroaching miners and farmers. This cabin represents a government policy that failed.” I won’t soon forget Hampton’s account of the battle at Big Hole River, Montana, reasonably interpreted as a massacre. It’s important to remember that the Nez Perce ‘army’ was in fact the entire Chief Joseph band of the tribe, including women, children, the elderly, and any ill or infirm, along with a massive herd of horses. If Colonel John Gibbon, who surprised the Nez Perce by shooting directly into tipis full of sleeping families early on the morning of August 9, 1877, faced the dilemma of a war against people in flight, rather than against an army, it is not a dilemma he deliberated over very much. (Hampton does note his paranoia about a perceived trap laid by the Nez Perce.) Assessing the fallout from this, one of many wrenching episodes, Hampton contrasts differing accounts side by side. On the numbers killed, for example, Chief Joseph estimated 30 warriors and 50 women and children; Wounded Head claimed 63 dead: 10 women, 21 children, and 32 men. Duncan McDonald, who interviewed survivors in Canada the following year, estimated 78 dead, with only 30 of those actual warriors. For some in the tribe, the events were difficult to discuss: “Decades later, when historian Lucullus Virgil McWhorter began collecting Nez Perce accounts…those who were children at the time were often the only witnesses willing to relate their stories, many of the older people finding it still too painful to speak” (Hampton, 165). The White-European narrative, in contrast, was sometimes jubilant: “the most gallant Indian fight of modern times,” proclaimed the Missoulan about the battle (181). Colonel Gibbon was promoted; one officer purportedly responsible for the death of nine women and children received the Medal of Honor (182). A deer rests and hides in the shade at the Spalding township site, Nez Perce Reservation, October 2017. The events of 1877 tend to get lost in general presentations of United States history, overshadowed as they are by the Civil War, or, equally likely, ignored on purpose. Gratitude is due to any, like Hampton, who patiently draw our attention back to the Nez Perce story, one in which so many of the white so-called “Children of Grace” behaved wholly ungraciously (with some important exceptions). We continue to see strains of racism and dysfunction, directly inherited from that time, in government and culture, especially in the current deliberate attempts to return almost nostalgically to violence, to revel in ignorance. If we consider nostalgia as a kind of a-historical craving for the positive acclaim that accompanied racist aggressions of the past, it’s worth investigating to what extent such nostalgia also feeds the drives of advanced resource stripping in the pursuit of capital. Indeed, as resources deplete, the two motivations—nostalgia and capital—appear intertwined. Looking down from a viewpoint along Idaho State Highway 95, above the Clearwater River, near Lewiston, ID and the Spalding township site. Emissions from a pulp mill vaguely reflect the the shape of a sunflower in the foreground. The war that ended 141 years ago strikes me as having created, for the European-settled Pacific Northwest at large, some genuinely bad karma. Our detachment (intentional or not) from a more fair and complete history is disorienting; it lends the currently more dominant culture a kind of ephemeral spookiness, as if we’re non-cognizant of where we are in time or even place. Hampton’s work can help one gain proper bearing, in both senses of the word, not just in location, but in sum: to know how one fits in such a history requires effort—at the very least that of recognizing and remembering the burden of the past.
* For those interested in more on this topic: William Vollmann’s novel The Dying Grass covers the same events. I haven’t read it, but it will probably be my first book by Vollmann. The Last Indian War by Elliott West is quickly readable, though by necessity less painstakingly objective. West also explains connections to the contemporaneous developments, e.g. the telegraph. 1877 was a tumultuous year, as Michael A. Bellesisles describes in 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently, which I haven’t read. As it feels like we are in the 1870’s right now, I may check it out soon. |
Susan ParrCorrespondences, incidentals, hypotheticals, visuals. I also hike. Archives
June 2023
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