declog a vacuum with enthusiasm
but maybe also wear a dust mask
In 2022 I published a short piece that was supposed to pay $50. The check has yet to arrive. After a number of calls and emails, I learned from a staff person at the organization affiliated with this publication that the editor had promised money they didn’t have (printing is expensive). Shortly thereafter, leadership changed and said editor left the work of cleaning up the lit mag finances, by which I mean receiving voicemails from me for two years, to this staff person.
Most lit mags run on volunteer labor, deft funding-cobbling, a sense of literary citizenship, and a desire to learn how publishing works tinged with latent Marxism—seize the means of production! So I’m not trying to besmirch that particular publication or this staff person who frankly had a bunch of other jobs to do. She really did try to get me the check (it turns out I have multiple accounts with different addresses in their online disbursal system with no evident way to consolidate.) I am writing about this experience to reiterate that it’s tough out there for the artists. It was tough before the federal government started withdrawing and terminating National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants; it’s even tougher now.
speaking of lit mags: due to an unexpected series of events, I am now the nonfiction editor at a literary journal based in eastern Tennessee called The Tusculum Review
A lesser but pernicious challenge of the current political onslaught is the fragmentation of our attention (which, as various writers have identified, is strategic, not accidental). Before I could finish thinking about those slashes to NEA (and NPR!) funding, I received emails about rising food insecurity, the feminist recession, cuts to library budgets, and the attempted resurrection of a pipeline project that activists have already stopped twice. While I’ve since tried to corral my inbox, today’s fascism refracted by the prism of the internet feels like being trapped in a pinball machine: ejected into a flashing, booby-trapped maze, you bang around, subject to the zigs and zags of unforeseen levers for who knows how long until you free-fall and plunge once more into a bumpy darkness.
Is that a melodramatic portrayal? Is it possibly overwritten, given that I can imagine more than one of my writing mentors crossing out some or all of it as well as these rhetorical questions? Yes and yes. But you know who likely feels ambivalent about voting, disinterested in canvassing, tired of donating, nihilistic about the future, unmotivated to try, and barely able to get out of bed in the morning? People who are stuck in the pinball melodrama and identify with it being described as such.
Using the internet without intention (individual responsibility) and without guardrails (systemic responsibility) has repercussions. There are many kinds of levers—algorithms, notifications, comments, non-consensual data collection—that swat you around and weaken your political efficacy. So if my mention of declining funding for the arts sets off a pinball melodrama cycle, you might try closing all your tabs, using schedule-send for work emails, deactivating Facebook or removing social media apps from your phone (you can post to Instagram from a desktop browser) and then reading Chris La Tray’s conversation with Anne Helen Petersen about microfunding and community-driven support for the arts.
One of the postcard-sized collages I made for paid subscribers in the Bombazine color scheme <3
As for me, I’m contemplating switching to a Unihertz Jelly Star (smartphone with a screen the size of a credit card). I also attempted to follow my own advice from the last newsletter and called some of my reps as directed by Chop Wood, Carry Water.
In true fork-in-the-glue fashion, I fumbled through the spelling of my own email address in a voicemail, using a half made-up version of the NATO Phonetic alphabet. Immediately after hanging up, I reviewed the official version with a site containing this gem of an introduction: “I was inspired to recreate this page and post it online when I overheard a co-worker say ‘L, as in Log’ over the phone.”
At this point I think that if those fifty dollars ever appear, something magical will happen. The end of a rainbow will materialize; a portal in the fabric of the universe will open. Brace yourselves.
I’m leading a mending workshop at Queens Collaborative in Long Island City from 7-9 PM on Wednesday, August 13th. Ah! If you live in NYC or happen to be in the city that week, here is the ticket link! Tell your friends :)
When I moved to Brooklyn, I found a woven laundry basket on the street, probably there because the rim was damaged. The basket has been shedding reed bits all over the basement in the years since.
To be clear, I actually know something about re-weaving because I decided to repair a pet-scratched chair, a project that only got finished because my mom helped and because I didn’t know how long it would take when it started.
The beige parts are the new ones! The other arm was similarly damaged and the back legs looked like they’d suffered a cat. Soon the chair will be repainted and all the same color.
Rather than empowering me to attempt the basket, the chair experience made me reluctant to try. I’ve already ordered a giant quantity of situation-specific reeds from California, thank you. Once was enough. However, during a recent weekend putter, I had the idea to replace the missing reeds with plastic drinking straws I’d stashed from takeout orders (it is illegal in New York City for restaurants to give takeaway customers single-use utensils they don’t ask for AND YET…) [I digress.])
The straws fit surprisingly well, so I used them to re-weave missing chunks and further connected the new segments to the intact parts of the basket with embroidery floss. The repair is not pretty, but it’s functional and enormously satisfying.
“As a writer, I’m less interested in the question of plagiarism or whether the reading public can tell the difference between what’s written by a human or a machine. I’m interested in what happens to our minds when people are systematically discouraged from thinking, from putting pen to paper. There is something particularly dire at stake if you believe, as I do, that language is fundamental to the human condition.” —Terry Nguyen on Chat GPT et al in “Crisis of Mystery”
I’d like to finish this missive with a little catalogue of delights & directives:
FABSCRAP, a nonprofit that diverts pre-consumer textile waste for re-use and recycling, is hosting a visible mending workshop where participants learn basic mending skills and then PRACTICE THEM ON WORN FABSCRAP BAGS THAT ARE ESSENTIAL TO THEIR COLLECTION SERVICES TO GET THE BAGS BACK IN WORKING CONDITION. Let us all be inspired by this clever, communal model!
The multi-part Simone Biles documentary (Netflix) is incredible. I haven’t seen many profiles of athletes that explore how past trauma affects performance.
Today, World Central Kitchen resumed cooking meals in Gaza—donate here.
The company Blue Q makes bags by grinding up salvaged rice sacks and reconstituting them into new pouches and totes.
Queens Collaborative (co-host of the workshop I’m leading next month!) began an “art-fridge” initiative called Spare Arts where they collect people’s extra arts & crafts supplies and distribute them in public containers, modeled after community fridges and little free libraries.
I finished a black-and-white miniature zine with instructions for how to plastic weld, a repair technique for rigid plastics. If you’d like a copy, reply to this email with a mailing address and I’ll send you one!
I can’t get enough of Bad Bunny’s latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” and the way it layers contemporary & traditional Puerto Rican forms.
I loved this post from the Global Fixers Discord server about cleaning up street vacuums and donating them to the City of Berkeley (screenshot below.) Declog a vacuum, fight bureaucratic inefficiency (could be DOGE’s slogan in an utterly alternate reality)
Alright, somehow we ended up with another thousand-word email. In the spirit of Leo season, I hope you feel emboldened to wear sparkles or exude them: declog a vacuum with enthusiasm! Dance under a disco ball, literal or proverbial! Beautify your surroundings! Call your representatives, even if you now fear saying “L, as in Log” due to the power of suggestion (sorry not sorry). Grab your sequins and go forth!
In solidarity,
Abby