1 - Not a Story
Happy midwinter to any fellow melancholics!
I started this newsletter as a way to make sense of being and thinking about so many different things, or to put it another way, to make sense of being a person who finds herself not being a narrative. I stumble on this a lot when I apply for grants or fellowships, because it often seems like committees want everything about you to match up: your background, identities, previous work, what you want to work on, what you care about. All the little pieces are not only supposed to make sense; they’re supposed to tell a story.
So here are some pieces of me that probably make some sense when put together (but never too much sense and never a narrative): I’m a writer. I write a lot about the place I grew up in, and I write about how wonderful and strange the body is, and I write about history and how everything that every happened is right here now in some way. I’m an artist only because I love to focus deeply on things like drawing and collage and because I love to see what happens when I put text and visual art together. I also practice a Norwegian decorative painting style called rosemaling, and I have a billion and one thoughts on folk art and futurism. I work as an infectious diseases researcher, primarily focused on structural, environmental, and medical issues surrounding antimicrobial-resistant infections, and for the past two years, I’ve been working on building a research base for diagnosis and treatment of bacterial and fungal co-infections in COVID patients. I walk almost everywhere. I love sci fi and electronic music and short plays and eyeliner and dark beer and coffee and plain cake donuts. I live near the Mississippi in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I’m really good at pinball.
2 - The Voyage of the Howship Lacuna
(cw: description of injury)
A few years ago, I fell on black ice and got a bone bruise. A bone bruise hurts so much that, for two blocks after I fell, I had the face of Jacob Marley’s ghost before he ties up his mandible, and there wasn’t anything I could do to change that. A bone bruise has a really dumb name, because it’s actually the shattering of an inner layer of bone and what I like to think of as a subsequent bone marrow explosion. This was followed by hematoma, which I’d always thought of as a bad bruise, but what is actually so much bruising that there’s no place for the blood to go, and it formed what looked like a line of cat poops along my tibia. Which is really only to say that I find myself constantly surprised by very basic things: I didn’t know that there was an inner layer of bone that was like crystal lattice until it shattered.
This December, I’ve been working on a collage, pressed flowers, found text from a pathophysiology text book, and crown sonnet project on bone remodeling. Bone remodeling occurs quickly after injury, but it’s also always happening. Osteoclast cells resorb bone, leaving holes called Howship Lacunae, osteoblasts stop by and form new bone while also building themselves into the cloister of the lacuna, where they continue to communicate with other cells, though no one really knows what they talk about. And, if that’s not something for flowers, bits of scattered text, and the sweet-hearted and limiting nature of the crown sonnet, then I don’t know what is.
3 - We Insist On All of Our Selves
The summer before last, I was part of the Kasini House and Tulane University Special Collections Art Meets History Pandemic Artist Lab, which brought together an extraordinary group of artists to learn from each other. It was where I first became fascinated by the expressive and research-driven aspects of collage. It was also where I discovered the photos of Samuel Harvey Colvin, Jr., a bacteriologist stationed in Bizerte, Tunisia, during World War II.
And, I don’t know what it was about these photos, especially the photos of ancient ruins (Bizerte was once the ancient city of Utica) next to the photos of modern ruins (notably, the wreckage of the bombed L’église Notre-Dame de France). They kept drifting into my mind, even after I’d decided I wouldn’t do a project on them. I imagined Colvin seeing slide after slide of bacteria, being able to treat infection but not able to stop the war that was causing wounds in the first place. I imagined him walking, looking at these broken cities of the past and present, placing the photos onto glass lantern slides. The images kept touching some sadness I carried about being a person who works with data on suffering and being able to do little except walk and walk and think and look at broken things in the landscape like they were signs or friends.
I’ve been researching and writing more on Colvin and on Bizerte/Utica. It’s been a strangely emotional experience to identify something in a photo and then learn more about its life before and since the photo was taken. I’m trying to accompany the text with art that communicates what these photos mean to me—I think, in some way, I’m trying to use art to find a pathway toward loving them as much as I do. I’ve struggled with every impulse I’ve had to make art that responds to them; everything seems wrong. So I’ve changed tack: I’m making all the wrong things, and hoping that a collection of wrong things is the pathway toward a kind of love. As I work on the images and let them respond to the text, I have the sense that they’re ok with this approach, that they are not one thing or a right thing, that they’ve always insisted on all of their selves.
4 - Some Stuff I’ve Liked Lately
Books
The Snow Collectors - Tina May Hall
A Line to Kill - Anthony Horowitz
The Walworth Beauty - Michèle Roberts
Blind Spot - Teju Cole
If I Had Your Face - Frances Cha
The Uppercase Magazine Art and Science issue
Movies/TV
Sweet Home 스위트홈 (Ok, this is ridiculously gory, so heads up on that. But…the monsters are truly scary-looking, which, for me, a monster-skeptic, is impressive. And it made me think a lot about how a country or even a world is a lot like an apartment building: you have this enormous terrifying event that requires you to band together, and you do, but you also can’t leave behind your petty arguments and annoyances.)
Music
Minimal - Pet Shop Boys
Country Rose - Power Glove
Final Girl - Chvrches
Steam Machine (the Human After All one) - Daft Punk
Podcasts
On the My Modern Met Top Artist podcast, Sophie Gamand talks about rescue dog photography, Navid Baraty talks about his incredible space landscapes created with pancakes, and Rafik Anadol talks about how sci fi and AI in art helps us realize the beauty of our humanity.
On the Create! podcast, Ekaterina Popova speaks with Rosa Leff about paper-cutting and the smushy area between fine art and craft (What I love though about this episode is that they both talk about how they’re drawn to industrial landscapes).
Other stuff
The Museum of Portable Sound
The “Set It Off” exhibition by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste on the ways we perceive and make emotional and cultural associations with sound, especially bass and low frequencies.