Flashes from February

Plus, join me and Ben Wakeman this week on Substack Live

February was stormy! And yes, I meant that metaphorically. Luckily, a lot of snow means great skiing. So, literal and figurative skiing are what I am embracing. The Olympics were a nice bonus, especially Mikaela Shiffrin’s gold in the slalom.

On one of the actual ski days, I took my son on a chairlift for the first time. No big deal…except that many lifts in Japan don’t have safety bars and this was one such archaic contraption. My poles quickly enacted, creating creases on son’s stomach. He was absolutely fine. More than that, he loved it. We went to the top of this tiny place called Hounoki Daira near Takayama, Japan. I had to trust that his ‘pizza’ wedge was strong enough not to send him off a cliff, which was possibly harder for me than it was for him.

On another trip, I spent six hours on two trains followed by a seventy-five-minute bus journey to reach the site of the Nagano downhill course. Its starting gate building was remarkably decrepit, and I thought of the Japanese economy in the nineties versus now as well as the two-week blip of an Olympics' existence (anywhere). A couple of nights in the solitude of a tatami room and powdery trails reminded me that we can each move through space and time like downhill ski racers, not knowing what conditions to expect but hoping for a clean and exhilarating run.

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Tactility is re-entering my everyday life through conscious curation beyond book reading. A small candle accompanies morning handwriting before the computer opens. I now subscribe to a weekly London-based newspaper (not so easy in Japan!) and a quarterly magazine of art and design. My stationery drawer is growing as well, as I try to write a biweekly letter to someone, somewhere. Finally, we have been creating occasional messy breakfast tables (at home or a cafe we cycle to) with said newspaper as well as journals, maze books, katakana practice sheets, and playing cards. A lounge-y breakfast feels luxurious and French. I often have two or three coffees and both breakfast and a morning snack before getting up.

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Sorry that this is not fiction.

I have been writing a lot, but this writing has been in so many abstract forms. None of them ready for moulding. Instead of editing, I am scanning the pages of the first novel I published in 2014 in order to change them to text. In that era, I published on Amazon under an old alumni email account. After painful emails and phone calls attempting to recover this account with the digital file that somehow got lost in moves and new devices, I’ve given up and am putting OCR to the test. The first chapter will be here for you soon and the rest will be on Lulu with free ebooks for my paid subscribers.

Recovering lost text makes one consider the process in dichotomies — the ephemerality / permanency of books, the function of writing as forward motion / archives of thoughts and imagination, the curiosity of words dancing on a page that are my own / now those of others.

I’ve also been working on my new project, a discourse exploring art, place, and the rituals of culture. These oppositional threads have made their way into my explorations. Excited to share this with you in a couple of months.

In a couple of days, I’ll be going on Substack Live with fiction author Ben Wakeman. I’m loving Ben’s latest serialization called Daedalia, and he’s been a great supporter of the fiction community through projects like Same Walk, Different Shoes, which I participated in a couple of years ago.

We will be talking about Fiction as a Daily Practice and sharing updates on our latest projects. You should be able to access the link here, and the video will be available after we record it. Pop on live to ask us questions in real time!

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Finally, I have been showing David Foster Wallace’s graduation speech — “This is Water” — for many years to my students at opportune times. This year, I chose to share it heading into mock examinations for my two senior classes. Some of them needed a little boost. I was hearing things like, Basketball season is over and I don’t know who I am anymore and, What do you mean, a weekend? They don’t exist until exams are over.

Anyway, they do get Hamlet, so I thought this message wouldn’t be lost on them. And it wasn’t.

Here it is — “Make your own meaning.”