Even in Arcadia Am I @miriam@octodon.social
Poet w fieldwork-derived practice / investigating modern nomads / cycle tourer / Texan in HK, S'pore, Berkeley / happy cynic+shy loudmouth. Tapir-whorf on Mefi.
When I first started dating my wife, a French woman, I thought it would be good to learn some French. I got an intro audiobook. Likely not the best approach for me, because after the first couple of hours, my most pressing question for her was, "Who in the world is Vousette?" [Vous êtes...]
We have a worm compost bin with a few thousand worms in it. All of the worms are named Vousette.
the wonderful witches of witches.town have introduced me to the glyph ꙮ
it is "multiocular O", a variant of Cyrillic O that is used in certain religious texts in a phrase that translates to "many-eyed seraphim" and basically nowhere else
I honestly am having a hard time thinking of a single witchier Unicode character unless the Leviathan cross is hidden somewhere in the codeplanes
In the meanwhile, letter of recommendation for the Slow Holler tarot: it's the first deck I've ever sought out and paid for, the first that feels like the oracles are barefoot catching minnows in the creek, weaving their own laurels of speckled guinea hen feathers. It's queer in the non-commodified, anti-assimilationist sense; it's augury for an articulated community of feminists, activists, punx; it's anarchist, and its authors probably sketched the first draft from a grainer porch. #tarot
Soon I'll get all my unbridled yearning for the old internet out on the page [such that it is, the four-columned feed] and get on with my life.
BTW, this is the first time I've been overtly female on the public internet (roughly speaking; I do have a fairly impersonal, non-interactive author site) since 1999, and it's neat.
@kingu_platypus_gidora This is more wonderful than the Hong Kong rubbish bins, which only a British colony could've thunk up: https://coconuts.co/hongkong/news/cleaning-city-hong-kong-removes-cum-trash/
@luckyduck However that said, my list is largely not made up of doorstops! Dhalgren and some of Richard Powers' novels are probably the only ones that'd break a bone if you dropped 'em on your foot.
@luckyduck It's def not epic -- more magical realist in subject and style. For expansive epics I might recommend... Dhalgren, or The Bully of Order, or reading a whole pile of Louise Erdrich in chronological order, or Isabel Allende, or Salman Rushdie, or maybe Station Eleven (which is fantastic, but not vast) or The Country of Ice Cream Star, or A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Or probably just about anything by Richard Powers.
New Garbage Pail Kids alter ego: Uncanny Valerie.
Oh Mastodon, you have the queerest set of emoji I've seen since the days when I eagerly awaited the newest issue of Holy Titclamps, two decades ago when the emoji analog was a little guy with a shovel at the bottom of your personal home page. 
Reading Deepak Unnikrishnan's brilliant story collection, Temporary People. It's One Hundred Years of Solitude for the gulf states' guest workers, laboring in resource extraction as miners might, though the resource extracted is of their own bodies. Read a NYT review here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/temporary-people-deepak-unnikrishnan.html #fiction #books #bookreviews #temporarypeople #migrantworkers #immigrantlit #deepakunnikrishnan
Like, the mere concept of a public library would probably be considered radical if it was a new thing just being introduced in 2017. After all, we tend to treat knowledge like any other commodity. It's something to be bought and sold. Many university students think of themselves as consumers paying for a product, rather than learners exploring ideas.
Cold out there this morning. The tracks showed up nice and clear in the thin crust of dry snow, three claws forward and one back. It was hard to tell how many of them there might have been, as they travel in a narrow line.
She still hadn't caught sight of them, just the damage they left behind; claw marks 7 feet up the siding, a mutilated chicken, an overturned tractor. They seemed to be growing bolder as they found new things to eat, she wasn't sure how long the lock on the barn would hold.
Meanwhile everyone at home in the Bay Area posting Instagram selfies in masks and air filters. (Finally, all the California ang mo [wypipo, I mean] go full Asiaphile with everyday mask-wearing. I'm waiting for old white ladies to adopt forearm-sleeves.)
18/ And by leaving to support your family, you have some control over the narrative: rather than leaving a shitty husband or boyfriend who felt entitled to all the promises patriarchal parochialism offers and being burdened with the reputation of a failed relationship (or pressured to try again), instead you're making good, giving--financially--rather than taking--via a degraded reputation.
17/ And to be clear, these were educated women--with college degrees [but not university degrees, in this case at least]. They'd left home to support their families, their children, usually with the added complication of a difficult relationship in their past. Divorce isn't possible in the Philippines, which means leaving an abusive or merely unpleasant relationship may mean leaving the country entirely.
16/ It was so hard when we first came, they said; at her first job, one told me, "I cried in every corner of the house." These were young women, in their mid- or late twenties by now; they'd left home five years ago, or so, but they'd been friends from high school or in college.
15/ I was the newcomer to the group, they all knew each other, and their night winding down--so I started asking them questions about their lives and their work. Oh, we have great jobs, our employers aren't bad like some of the stories you hear, one told me. (And you do hear--of the woman who fell from her boss' balcony under suspicious circumstances, etc.) Her friend said Noooo, she's a writer, we have to tell her the complicated version of our stories!
14/ They were a group of four domestic workers from the Philippines who were letting loose on their one night off per week (so now that I think of it, it must've been a Sunday night since domestic workers typically live with the families who've hired them, sleeping anywhere--under a table, sometimes, though sometimes they have their own rooms--and they usually have curfews).
