food for thought

Bodily work

/ Christine Pennylegion

All three kids are coughing today, which meant no church for us; coupled with their long sleeps engendered by the time change, this left me with an unexpected chunk of unscheduled time this morning. I decided to pull out my sewing machine. We bought new curtains for our dining room and den — oh, months and months ago, maybe more than a year at this point. They look great but are far too long, and have spent that time haphazardly pinned up or dragging on the ground, and occasionally stepped- or sat-upon by the small set. I had already figured out the amount I needed to trim some weeks ago, so all I had to do was measure, cut, and hem.

Out came this beauty:

I think I’ve blogged about my machine before: a Singer 403A, passed down by my grandmother, that’s about the same age as my mom. I’ve had to replace a few small plastic parts, but it runs extremely well (especially now that I’ve corrected the small, crucial, error I had been making while threading it). Since I needed room for all of the curtain fabric, I hauled it downstairs to the dining room table — stopping in the bathroom on the way, out of curiosity, to weigh it. Eighteen pounds! Without the case at hand, I had to cradle it closely, like wearing 2-3 newborn babies in a sling at once.

I find great pleasure these days in the thing-ness of things, especially mechanical things. Using this machine is such a tactile experience: the weight and texture of the fabric, the smell of hot steel and machine oil, all the satisfying whirrs and snicks and thunks of the moving parts, the whisper of the thread unspooling. I tell the machine what it must do by manipulating a series of levers and knobs. To make it go very slowly, I use my hand to turn a wheel. To make it go quickly, I press a pedal with my foot. If I want to switch to a zig-zag or scallop stitch, I open up the top and insert a little disc that changes the movement of the mechanisms below. So satisfying!

It’s satisfying in part just because I think mechanical things are clever and cool (don’t even get me started on doorknobs). But anything that engages our bodies and our senses also offers a refreshing contrast to the way that so much of our work and pleasure is mediated to us via screens — and even when that work is good and useful, often it still only engages our bodies to the extent of giving us backaches and carpal tunnel syndrome. The screen provides a way of being in and interacting with the world that leaves me, on the whole, deeply ambivalent.

I’ve just finished reading Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir detailing her time working in Silicon Valley — itself a profoundly ambivalent narrative. Wiener chronicles techbro culture from the inside, from a position that’s both critical and complicit, and there’s a lot to unpack inside — but in light of this morning’s activities I was forcefully struck by this passage:

I sometimes wondered whether there was a unique psychic burden shared by people who worked in technology, specifically those of us building and supporting software that existed only in the cloud. The abstractions of knowledge work were well documented, but this felt new. It was not just the cognitive dissonance of how lucrative and powerful tech companies had become, when their tools did not physically exist, but that all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, and replaced. […]

My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.

I wasn’t alone. Half the programmers I knew between the ages of twenty-two and forty, mostly men, were discovering that their fingers were multipurpose. “It feels so good to do something with my hands,” they said, before launching into monologues about woodworking, or home-brewing or baking sourdough. […]

I envied Ian [a roboticist], who was trained to think in terms of hardware, the embodied world. He stared at a computer all day, too, but the laws of physics still applied. His relationship to the internet was different from mine: he didn’t have accounts on any of the social networks, was unfamiliar with memes and unattuned to the minutiae of other people’s lives. He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley, pp. 218-9.

Note the adjectives modifying “satisfaction” there: unfamiliar, antiquated. Obsolete. And that is the techbro mindset in a nutshell, maybe: the work of the body outmoded; the body itself an obstacle until hacked and gamified; the solution, to everything, more technology. (And here is Wiener’s ambivalence on display, as it often is in Uncanny Valley. Even as she recognizes the psychic hazards of Silicon Valley’s bodiless work to create a bodiless world, she is still at least partially under its spell.) But I would suggest that the satisfaction that she felt in putting together furniture or reinforcing buttons, and the joyous bemusement of her programmer coworkers discovering physical hobbies, in fact points to the great truth that our bodies are not obsolete. They matter, in fact, very much—the things we (can) do with them matter, and our satisfaction in using them is natural and appropriate.

Anna Wiener bought a sewing machine to shame herself. She might do better just to sew some curtains.

John McPhee — two quotes on writing

/ Christine Pennylegion

The writing impulse seeks its own level and isn’t always given a chance to find it. You can’t make up your mind in a Comp Lit class that you’re going to be a Russian novelist. Or even an American novelist. Or a poet. Young writers find out what kind of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place. It is easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.

John McPhee, “Editors & Publishers,” Draft no. 4, pp. 78-9.

…no two writers are the same, like snowflakes and fingerprints. No one will ever write in just the way you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is strictly a matter of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.

John McPhee, “Editors & Publishers,” Draft no. 4, p. 82.

Mixed media

/ Christine Pennylegion

I followed some links this morning to an interesting newsletter post (is that what we’re calling them?) by Lincoln Michel, entitled “Maybe It’s Time to Admit People Just Like Books?“. I’m old enough to remember most of the struggles between physical and digital media, from the rise of Napster to the advent of Netflix and other streaming services. Paper versus electronic books is just another facet of the broader technological skirmishes that the internet age as necessitated. But, as Michel points out, there’s something different about this one:

As recently as 2015 or so, the common wisdom was that physical books were going the way of the VHS tape or CD. Sure, there would always be “snobs” who held onto physical media. But the market would be dominated by digital books in the same way that music, movies, and TV shows have moved almost entirely to streaming. There was no advantages to books except “nostalgia” and “fetish,” the thinking went, and the digital savvy youth would put an end to the outdated physical book. When publishers fought with Amazon to keep ebook prices close to print prices, the online commentariat mocked them for their backwards thinking that was going to doom the industry.

And yet here we are in 2021, fourteen years after the Kindle was first released and many years into an age when music, TV, film, and other media are almost entirely digital. Yet print books are not only strong, they still dominate the market. This is at the same time that pitiful music streaming payouts are crushing the music industry and digital magazines, constantly wrecked by changes in social media algorithms, are perpetually closing and laying off workers.

Maybe, he posits, there’s just something to physical books — something that still appeals, despite the convenience of ebooks, and appeals to a far wider audience than literary snobs, luddites, and fuddy-duddies. The physicality of a paper book is integral to the experience of reading it: the feel of the pages, the weight of it in your hands, perhaps the smell, the dog-eared pages and scribbled marginalia. Among my favourite books, I also have favourite editions. I like Pride and Prejudice the best in the pocket-sized hardback Oxford World’s Classics edition. When I reread The Lord of the Rings, it makes a difference whether I read the movie-tie-in set of three mass-market paperbacks, or the hefty red thousand-pager with its miniscule type and narrow margins.

I think that there is also something about physical books that is fundamentally invitational. Any library, no matter how small, no matter its setting, invites you to browse, to run your fingers along the spines of its collection, to stop and flip through something that caches your eye. A book read in public can spark a knowing glance or a conversation. The colorful pages of board books and picture books invite our children into the mysteries of reading itself — the magical insight that these squiggles and dots carry meaning, a meaning that is always the same but will also tell us different things as we grow and change. The paper itself invites us to read with a pen in hand, joining in conversation with the author, with previous readers, and even with our past selves.

If there are sides to pick here, I’ve always been on the side of physical books. That is probably obvious. But what’s surprised me over the course of the pandemic, as my reading habits have swung wildly between poles, is how much I’ve come to rely on ebooks. And — depending on the day you ask me — they might even be what I prefer.

Is that weird? It feels weird to me, since I’ve been in the paper camp for so long, appreciating ebooks the ease of toting them around on vacations but not much else. A lot of what makes physical books so experiential is entirely missing from the ebook reading experience; no matter what I’m reading, on my phone it’s going to look about the same as anything else. But even with these differences, ebooks have come to fill an important niche in my reading.

During the covid-19 pandemic, especially in the first half of 2020, both what and how I read changed dramatically. There were times I found myself in a sort of paralysis when reading was simply impossible. I’ve sent dozens of books back to the library unread over the past year and change. When I could read, I took a hard bend toward fiction, particularly of the escapist varities: fantasy, science fiction, romance. But what I found was that during those times when picking up and holding a book was somehow too much (in a year that had more than its fair share of too much), ebooks had an approachability that I needed. They felt low-stakes. Checking out and returning them takes three seconds and a few thumb presses. And at least in my library system, the electronic versions of popular books often have far fewer holds on them than their physical counterparts, or sometimes none at all. When I was reading through Louise Penny’s back catalogue last summer, I read about half of her Inspector Gamache novels on my phone, where they were nearly always immediately available. Perhaps most importantly on a personal level, I can read a book on my phone in an otherwise dark room as I wait for my daughters to fall asleep. Over the past year+ ebooks have been, for me, a bit of a lifesaver. I’m still reading physical books, but the ratios are a lot closer to even than they’ve ever been.

Many people have speculated over the years that books, like other physical media, will eventually be relegated to the realm of niche collectors’ items. Lincoln Michel argues that the reverse may in fact be true. While Boomers embraced ebooks enthusiastically, Gen Z is not so interested:

…the gen z “digital natives” that were supposed to ensure ebook supremacy are actually the least interested in ebooks. They get plenty of screen time as it is between movies, TikTok, and video games. When it comes time to read a book, they’re ready for a break. (It’s actually aging boomers who are the most attached to ebooks, making one wonder if it won’t be ebooks going the way of the dinosaur soon…)

Here in the messy Millennial middle, I’m not so sure that either of them is going anywhere. I can finally appreciate the distinct advantages that each form brings to the table, and if they maintain their current market equilibrium, then all the better for all of us.

Women’s work

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

A few months ago I read a fascinating book, Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (that’s right, it’s rigorous enough to need two subtitles!). She traces the history of textile production — perhaps the quintessential women’s work — from the Paleolithic through to the end of the Iron Age, drawing on archaeological evidence as well as written records and even artwork. It’s well worth a read if you have any interest in spinning, sewing, weaving, or their related arts and crafts… or in how to tease out historical accounts from activities like these that are often very marginal to official records, for that matter. It’s a dense read, but an excellent one.

Something that really jumped out at me, however, comes from the introductory chapter, where Wayland Barber asks what it is about these activities that makes them traditionally “women’s work”? She quotes from Judith Brown’s 1969 article, “A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex” in her explanation:

Twenty years ago Judith Brown wrote a little five-page “Note on the Division of Labor by Sex” that holds a simple key to these questions. She was interested in how much women contributed to obtaining the food for a preindustrial community. But in answering that question, she came upon a model of much wider applicability. She found that the issue of whether or not the community relies upon women as the chief providers of a given type of labor depends upon “the compatibility of this pursuit with the demands of child care.” If only because of the exigencies of breast feeding (which until recently was typically continued for two or three years per child), “nowhere in the world is the rearing of children primarily the responsibility of men….” Thus, if the productive labor of women is not to be lost to the society during the childbearing years, the jobs regularly assigned to women must be carefully chosen to be “compatible with simultaneous child watching.” From empirical observation Brown gleans that “such activities have the following characteristics: they do not require rapt concentration and are relatively dull and repetitive; they are easily interruptable and easily resumed once interrupted; they do not place the child in potential danger; and they do not require the participant to range very far from home.

Just such are the crafts of spinning, weaving, and sewing: repetitive, easy to pick up at any point, reasonably child-safe, and easily done at home. (Contrast the idea of swinging a pick in a dark, cramped, and dusty mine shaft with a baby on one’s back or being interrupted by a child’s crisis while trying to pour molten metal into a set of molds.) The only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food. Food and clothing: These are what societies worldwide have come to see as the core of women’s work (although other tasks may be added to the load, depending on the circumstances of the particular society).

Readers of this book live in a different world. The Industrial Revolution has moved basic textile work out of the home and into large (inherently dangerous) factories; we buy our clothing ready-made. It is a rare person in our cities who has ever spun thread or woven cloth, although a quick look into a fabric store will show that many women still sew. As a result, most of us are unaware of how time-consuming the task of making the cloth for a family used to be.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times, pp. 29-30

This jumped out at me because it makes an intuitive sense, and accurately reflects my own stage of life. Women bear and birth children; until very recently on the scale of human existence, only women could feed the youngest members of the species. Women have not traditionally been the cooks and gardeners and sewists and spinners because of an inherent aptitude for that work or an inability to perform other tasks, but because of the biological realities and demands of mothering.

Everything I do at home is mediated by those same concerns and responsibilities. I have three children under seven, one of whom is still nursing; all of my daily tasks have to be fit into the day around breastfeeding, diaper changes, naps, home schooling, squabble mediating, disciplining, reading and playing, and of course the constant, unending cycle of making food, serving food, and cleaning up after having food. I spend 14-18 hours a week putting children to bed. My cumulative breastfeeding time is now up to 4.5 years (and counting!). And so it makes sense that my hobbies are things that fit around these things: reading, writing, sewing, embroidery, crochet. They’re the kind of thing that I can pick up and put down as needed, that can be left on top of the piano for a week before being picked up again, that don’t take more thought or attention than I can easily spare.

And they’re slow. Handiwork takes time: even a small baby blanket can easily take a dozen hours or more to crochet, depending on the yarn weight and pattern. It takes many evenings of work to finish a piece. I don’t mind, really. The time it takes to make something sends its own message to the recipient: that I value them enough to spend my time in order that they would be warm, or that their clothes would be mended, or that their house would be beautiful. And while I’m very glad that I don’t have to make all of our family’s clothes by hand, or spin my own thread and yarn before I can use them, I love being able to feel myself a part of this great historical chain of women working with our hands to make, mend, and care. Women’s work is good work; here’s to twenty thousand more years.

Writing means to try

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

Right now I am about halfway through reading the first volume of Beverly Cleary’s memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill. It covers her early years, from her first memories of their family’s farm in Yamhill, to her adolescence Portland, Oregon, where her family moved when she was six. As a child, Cleary lived near Klickitat Street — a name you may recognize from the Henry Huggins and Ramona books. She was born in 1916, which makes her a few years older than my oldest grandparent, and A Girl from Yamhill is a wonderful peek into the world of children a century ago.

It’s also given me a lot to think about when I consider the craft of writing. I enjoy catching moments from Cleary’s own life that later made it into her books, like the school play in which she played a soldier, bowled over with her leg in the air after being hit with a basketball cannonball; the same thing happens in Henry’s school play. But more than that, Cleary relates an epiphany she had as a young girl of eight or nine, about the practice of writing:

If I lost something, Mother said, “You’ll have to learn to look after your things.” I did. If I was involved in a neighborhood squabble, I got no sympathy. “What did you do?” Mother always asked, leaving me with the feeling that, no matter what happened, I was to blame. “Try,” Mother often said.

And try I did. When Abendroth’s store across from Fernwood [School] announced a contest sponsored by Keds shoes for the best essay about an animal, many of my class planned to enter. I chose the beaver, because Oregon was known as the Beaver State. On green scratch paper left over from printing checks, which Father brought home from the bank, I wrote my essay and took it to Mr. Abendroth. On the final day of the contest, I ran to the store to learn the results. I had won! Mr. Abendroth handed me two dollars. Then he told me no one else had entered the contest.

This incident was one of the most valuable lessons in writing I ever learned. Try! Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying. I also wrote a letter to the Shopping News, which published the letter and paid me a dollar.

Beverly Cleary, A Girl from Yamhill, 105.

Try! I’ve been writing poetry for years and years, since I was a girl not much older than Beverly Cleary with her beaver essay. And I’ve wanted since I was a teenager, in a vague sort of way, to be a published poet. I don’t know how I thought that would happen given that I never submitted a single line anywhere, but want it I did. In the middle of the 2010s I started sending things out — barely — just one or two poems to one or two outlets about once a year. My expectations were not realistic; when I wasn’t instantly picked up by the first places I tried, I just stopped trying. This may have soothed my feelings, but it’s not exactly a path to publication.

Last summer, though, I also came to realize that if this was really something I wanted, it meant, well, trying. Now I sit down once a month, browse open calls on submittable, and send out a big batch of poems. This takes me an evening or two; there’s a lot of fiddly work to do in making sure that I’m following each journal/magazine’s particular guidelines, picking poems that I think would be good matches for their themes or style, and the like. Mostly I submit to outlets without reading fees; occasionally I will pay a few dollars if I think I have a particularly good match. Everything goes in a spreadsheet where I keep track of what I have out for consideration, response times, acceptances, rejections, and a page just for nice things people say about my poems that I can read over when I feel like a phony. And you know what? Trying works.

Here are my current numbers:

  • Contest placements: 1
  • Accepted poems: 4
  • Withdrawn from consideration: 8
  • Rejections: 141
  • Still under consideration: 42

There are some things that have become clear to me. One is that this is a numbers game. Perhaps more than any other genre, poetry is highly subjective, and it takes time and a lot of tries to match up what you’ve written with someone who wants to publish it. The second thing is that publishers need writers. Poetry magazines and literary journals could not exist without writers submitting to them; in a way, editors need me just as much as I need them. And the final thing is that rejections are a good sign. I don’t mean that I’m never disappointed when a submission is rejected (although as time goes by this is less and less true), but rather that I can take every rejection as evidence that I’m trying, I’m putting the process in motion, and that’s a good thing.

Of course, all this trying doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll succeed. I might keep sending things out for the next five years and never publish another poem. I don’t know, and that part of it is out of my control. But I do know this: trying gives me infinite more chances to succeed than not-trying does, and that? That is something I can work with.

Here’s to trying.

The burning of Notre-Dame

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

French Christians sing “Je vous salue, Marie” (Hail Mary) as the Cathedral burns last night:

I’ve been loosely following reactions to the news in a few forums I read. Most of the comments are about what you’d expect: shock and sadness at the fire, relief that no lives have been lost (or even reported hurt, last I’ve seen), speculation about the cause, people telling each other to stop speculating about the cause. Some are mourning the loss of so much of the Cathedral as a symbol of Christianity; others are pointing out that the Church is made out of people, not buildings; both parties, of course, are correct.

Notre-Dame is a building, of far less worth than human life. It can be rebuilt –it won’t be exactly the same, but it will survive in some form. Just look at Coventry Cathedral: despite its irreparable losses in the Blitz, the new Cathedral is beautiful and does a lovely job of incorporating the ruins of the old. Even with the loss of Notre Dame’s roof, and its spire, and its beautiful stained glass, the destruction was not complete.

At the same time, the Cathedral is much more than “just a building”. It is a symbol of history, memory, the sacred, of France herself. Its site has been a place of worship not just for the 850 years that Notre-Dame has stood, but for hundreds of years before that, dating back to at least the Roman era. Many Cathedrals have been lost to fire and other disasters throughout history (again: see Coventry), but this is the first that I have witnessed*, and I was moved to tears as I watched footage last night. We have lost something beautiful, haven’t we?

Notre-Dame is/was a symbol of Christianity in France — it is my prayer that the burning of the Cathedral will not be for nothing. I hope to see it restored and rebuilt, but more than that, I hope that this tragedy moves many in France and beyond to open not just their wallets for restoration efforts but their hearts to God. May these flames spark revival!

* NB: St Jude’s Cathedral in Iqaluit was also irreparably damaged by fire within recent memory (2005); however, I barely remember hearing about it at the time, so for me it doesn’t count as one I’ve personally “witnessed”.