Catching up on a tough episode of Popular Front, which explores life for Armenians behind Azerbaijan's blockade in Artsakh/Karabakh.

Russia's war on Ukraine also emboldened other regional conflicts, since it's understood that Russia is stretched too thin to serve as a proper mediator.

Add in Azerbaijan providing sometimes-Russian oil to Europe as a way around embargo & retaliatory gas cuts... & you have the world complicit in starving villages.

War is hell.

#Politics
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/life-and-death-behind-the-karabakh-blockade/id1364539980

(Also, for the beautiful @NiveusLepus in particular, when I see some of your lovely gif posts I think of flowers but always this flower. So thank you for being such a beautiful part of your ecosystem. 🐰 🦌 🐾)

I'm almost finished that Patreon post, but - classes first! Review next! Patreon third!

For now, I just want to say that it is really hard sometimes to remember that we are more than what we produce.

*You* are more than what you produce.

You are *enough*.

Just as you are.

And if you don't feel like enough, I hope you too can take the time to reflect on the messengers who have given you to believe otherwise...

Or talk to a flower.
Either/or.

(Flowers never share their judgments with us. 🌼)

Relatedly, I'm taking the next four hours to work on the novel MS, which tackles the formation of nationalism and our struggle to imagine ways to be present with one another outside such scripts for civilization.

Then evening classes, and a book review to send out.

But first, the fiction. 🤞

#AmWriting

Blowback has started publishing Season 4, on Afghanistan. The first half focuses on the Soviet Afghan War (which I refreshed myself on this past year with Svetlana Alexievich's Zinky Boys), & the second on US involvement.

We live with incredible myths shaped around national strife, in part because it is very hard to conceive of national identity *without* the rhetoric of conflict.

Hard. But not impossible. Histories like this one remind us of the need to try. #Podcasts

https://pca.st/episode/66034d59-0b01-4a7b-81b4-d27a7d1e9532

There's too much to write up here, so I'm going to make a Patreon post instead - but the short version is that grief is all-consuming, and when joined with other recent traumas - like the medical & housing traumas César had already experienced last winter - it can lead to bad-decision spirals. For the last 2 days I was handling César's bad-decision grief spiral while trying not to fall into one of my own. Poverty mentality is like drowning: one has to be *very careful* during any rescue attempt.

Firstly, thank you to @raspberrypanda @ATXJane @LnzyHou @desbearado @WordsmithFL @LiseL @dratino @tippitiwichet @kel @LSWellesley @joycereynoldsward @holon42 @daniel @Astro_yyz @ACG2 @misslovelymess @Minholkin and @Esther for your presence with the news I shared on Tuesday. There was... a *lot* dropped on me at once - that was just part the mess - but coming to your presence and kind words has been tremendously grounding. Thank you for affirming how much light there is in hard times, too. 💙

Yesterday was kind of a wash, too, but I'll get into that in a moment.

First, if anyone wants a wee news brief that summarizes what a weird week it's been for the world - between a Fulton County jail booking, India's moon shot, Prigozhin's plane, news out of BRICS about an expanded membership, the Republican debate...

Here's an overview for #OnlySky of how the world's a-changing in some unexpected and uncertain ways:

#News
https://onlysky.media/mclark/sticking-the-landing-indias-moon-shot-prigozhins-plane-xis-absence-and-africas-entrance/

I have had a rough day, and I still have two more pieces to send out tonight - but I see and am so truly thankful for your presence with the heartbreaking news last night.

I'll say more later, but sometimes the work comes first - and sometimes the work is healing, so there's that, at least.

But thank you.

I hope the day has been so good to you all.

Will reply to all your notes once these two last docs are out of my hands. 💙

This week's free-to-read newsletter is a huge one.

I thought I was going to write about a heated debate in Nigerian lit, but the topic grew.

The coup in Niger (north of Nigeria), the complexity of state formation in the shadow of colonialism & amid the press of today's geopolitics, myths of national cohesion that come pressingly to bear on literary conversation as much as in political uprising...

There's a lot here.

I hope there's something thought-provoking for you.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/nigerien-trauma-nigerian-lit-and

Two small, small, small kindnesses:

The impact seems to have knocked him out immediately, even if he was in clinic in coma another two days. Hopefully not feeling pain.

He knew his father was fighting for him every day of his hard little life. He knew he was loved in this cruel, cruel world.

That's all I've got on the kindnesses side.

The world is an indifferent & cruel place.

We serve as the fragile warmth of hope and shelter, for a while.

I teach in 30 minutes but I just found out about the death of a child whose family I'd helped, which is... hard. Very very very hard.

An accident. A fluke motor accident, & coma for two days before calling it... after all the struggle to give the family a better future, & while the littlest is still recovering from a secondary infection's impact on his spine.

Life in an indifferent universe is hard.

All we can do is hold each other in our hearts until our very brief time as witnesses is done.

Is it possible to say
you have lived a full-hearted day
without stopping on the way
even once to greet a tree? 💚

#CoSoNature

Finally getting into La explosión controlada on my ride to the office, and I'm terrifically pleased by the decision to start with reference to an author who inspired this author in turn. I love when people credit others in the chains of discourse that literature and politics always are. Who inspires you for your current thoughts, creative practice, and conversation? #Books #Reading #Colombia

*I know, I know, "if you want to make the universe laugh, tell it your plans". 😉

The rain finally broke my tension headache.

:)

Going to be a good week now, I hope!*

Happy Tuesday, CoSo! 💛

Cookies! Tried a new recipe for thinner, crispier choco-chips. Should be a hit at the office tomorrow. Nice and simple, too.

Good night, you prince(sse)s of Maine, you kings, queens, and queans of New England! 😘 Sleep well and hydrate!

#CoSoBakes

(😅 I first typed CoSoBaked but that's another subgroup entirely.)

Gave Prodigy a try to see what #StarTrek for the Yutes looks like.

The theme song... is pretty awesome?
And the animation reminds me of ReBoot, which was, well, cutting edge for its age. 🙃

But best of all, it's... well written?

Gosh, Disco becomes even more annoying when the kids' show gets richer characterization.

(It's the same with middle-grade vs. YA books, though: the former gets all the fun daring pre-romance plotlines. The latter is self-consciously didactic more often than not.)

Oooo, but I just got a green light to write a meditation on everyday grief framed around the TV series Somebody Somewhere. 🎉

If you haven't seen it, it's a beautiful "quiet" meditation on how grief sits with us in everything we do, wherever life finds us - not something to be "healed", but something that 100% informs how we build identity and community going forward.

I hope you like it, when it's out and up! #CoSoTV

https://youtu.be/K3sqnljyJy0