The weirdest and most unexpected effect this election has had on me is that it rendered me utterly speechless. I mean that both literally and figuratively. I went on a Twitter rant of fury on election night, when it became clear that Donald Trump had won, but I deleted it all later. It was both nonsensical and a little manic. After that...I just, didn't know what to say. I wrote a couple of pieces in the immediate wake, neither of which communicated my feelings completely right and only barely hinted at my utter depression. I turned down other work, and didn't turn on the TV for a month. I've always sought silence when I'm going through a rough time—after a breakup a few years ago, I went camping by myself for 9 days in Acadia National Park—but all through the end of 2016 I didn't even want to hear my own voice through my writing. I started attending a Quaker meeting, and found group meditation on Sundays very soothing. I work from home most of the time and live on the edge of a farm, so I'd spend days without hearing another (human) voice. Obviously, I also live in existential fear of a catastrophic, global warming-related weather event, or, now, nuclear war (Thanks Trump,) or just another economic crash. I worry about people in my community and around the country who are targets of Trump's retrograde policies. But those are outcomes I expected to worry about in a Trump presidency. I didn't expect the results of the election to shut me up.
Even more unusual, I became obsessed with this YouTube Channel, Primitive Technology. It's just a random guy in Australia who taught himself to build things without modern tools. He's near a national park, and just goes into it and builds tools and wattle and daub huts and kilns and bakes clay tiles. Obviously this is a long-held interest of mine—I was an Anthropology major in college and took a class about primitive and pre-industrial technologies. My project for that course was to gather, card and comb, and spin wool, and then use it to knit a scarf. I wanted to complete a project that involved the entire production process—I'd been reading a lot of Marx. I've also been a tiny bit of a survivalist lately. I live on the very end of a road that is, in part, barely maintained gravel, and it doesn't take much to become impassible after a big snow or a long rain. Ted Koppel wrote a book a couple of years ago about how easy it would be to hack our electrical grid, forcing us all to live without electricity for a couple of days, and I lived through the blackout in 2004. It's not stupid, I decided, to keep a survival straw and some spare water and canned food around. I'd also had a deep sense of foreboding long before the election, an unshakeable sense that something terrible is coming, like the vague worry I had about Y2K amplified and without a specific target date.
Samir LOVES YouTube—he watches reviews on pipes and colognes and cars, and he watches videos about maintaining his beard. He's watched every one of The Dead Mall series from Dan Bell. I've never been able to watch these with him, though. I can't stand most of the people who make videos. They NEVER edit themselves, and just go on and on, filling every moment with nonsense chatter, repeating themselves, using meaningless filler phrases. We watched a puppy training video once, and the dog-trainer took five minutes to get to his advice on how to deal the particular problem he was supposed to be helping us solve. But when I found Samir watching Primitive Technology, I sat down with him and watched, mesmerized, as at least three full videos played through. The guy is self-taught, and edits his videos really well—he has to be using a nice quality smart phone and computer, which adds a nice touch of irony. Most important, though, his videos are utterly and completely silent. You hear the crackle of his fires starting, and the pounding of rocks. You hear the wind and, sometimes, the rain, which he works straight through, shirtless and shoeless. He's tiny, but muscular in a deep, natural, way, like humans used to have to be. Every move he makes is in effort of his own survival in the wilderness. It's mesmerizing. Basically, if there is a catastrophic event, everyone needs to try to find him because he knows what he's doing.
I'm still working through my hesitancy to write—I don't think *not* speaking or writing is the right response for a woman to have to the election of Donald Trump—but that explains my long hiatus. If you look for my byline and haven't seen it, that is partly why.
The Big One
I'm writing a book! A reported memoir about growing up as a girl in Arkansas, my childhood best friend, and hope and despair. It's forthcoming from Knopf, date TBA. I could not be more thrilled—and suitably daunted—about this.
The Work
I did write a few things recently: a review of the book Hillbilly Elegy for Democracy, which is a really worthy subscription in these times, and, more recently, a piece about Arkansas's useless and harmful new anti-abortion law.
What I'm Reading
I've been reading a lot of daily news, and I think it's an incredibly important time to subscribe to newspapers and the independent press. Together, Samir and I subscribe to The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books (whose legendary editor just died), and Bloomberg Businessweek (which is really good if you haven't read it.) I'm adding, I think, Mother Jones, The Nation, Harper's, Democracy, and a few more. If you're interested in subscribing to a conservative magazine, The American Conservative has good writing and reporting.
I've been concentrating on reading books, because I'm writing one, and I can't recommend highly enough both Wild and Lab Girl, which were both edited by my editor. I've also been reading about the French Revolution—I guess in case we have one—including Simon Schama's Citizens. I am currently reading a book about what happened to Louis XVI's daughter, who lived through it. It's not a quick or easy read, but it's also a good idea to pick up a copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism, along with The Fire Next Time, The Warmth of Other Suns, The New Jim Crow, the work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and any other writers on the histories we seemed doomed to repeat. I've also read a lot of magazine journalism lately, but for now I'll just recommend this profile of Kirsten Gillibrand.
What I'm Recommending
Celery Root Soup. It's one of my favorites, and celery and celery root are both under-appreciated.
Cute Animal Pic of the Week
I got a puppy. Regular followers of my Instagram and Facebook accounts will be familiar with Banjo's adventures. I have tons of adorable pictures of him, but the cutest has to be this picture that the doggy daycare folks took on his first day. I wish anything made humans as happy as puppies at play are.
