Esther's Miscellany
A request: if you knew my mom, or even just met her once, would you mind sharing a story or an impression of her in the comments? (Multiple stories more than acceptable, of course.) The funnier the better, but we’ll take the heartfelt/serious stuff too.
I’ve finished my second whole book on the Kobo and am plowing into my third. Yet for the past few days I’ve been wrestling with how to talk about A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. I had to read a couple outside reviews to nail down my feelings. The positive one points out that it’s a love letter to books and reading, while at the same time exploring the tension between history, literate societies and oral societies. The frustrated one more mirrors my own experience, in that I spent most of the novel irritated by the ponderously layered language and cultural constructs, and by the “boy meets dying girl, dead girl haunts boy, boy falls in love but must set both of them free” plot.
That’s not actually a spoiler, that’s the jacket summary, but I came to this book knowing nothing about it, only that it was supposed to be good and that it featured a non-European fantasy world, which, hurrah! And as I was reading, it occurs to me how much media I consume in which I sort of know what’s coming — you’ve read the book before you watch the movie, or it’s a remake or a mash-up or it’s based on a fairy tale, or you can see the plot coming a mile away. I didn’t have a clue what the book would be about for the first hundred or so (ebook) pages. It gets off to a very slow start with little indication of what the story will become.
The experience of reading the book gave me much more to chew on than the book itself. Let me try and break it down. I found myself dealing with three main threads:
Continue reading “A Stranger in Olondria: I wouldn’t go for a visit.”
It’s been raining in central Ohio for most of the almost-a-day I’ve been here. I’m the first of my siblings to arrive, but soon all four of us, plus others, will be in the house with Dad. This weekend is the stone-setting at my mom’s grave in Athens. We unveil the headstone and signal an end to the year of mourning.
Six months ago, give or take, I wrote Half of the first year, trying to take stock of what it’s like, losing your mother to a hideous, protracted cancer. In some ways I’m getting better (I’m writing fiction again!), and in some ways I’m even more of a mess than I realized.
Pretty soon my family is going to start arriving, and I’ll have no quiet until I’m back in Chicago on Monday afternoon. Let’s not talk about the obscene amount of schoolwork and the outside projects I have to make progress on somehow. But at the moment Gus the basset hound is snoring by the French windows, and my dad is downstairs with classical music thundering through the floorboards, and this is pretty nice.
My advisor wrote, “I don’t know what the appropriate encomium is for a stone-setting ceremony, but I hope the proceedings go well for you and your family.” Me too.
In lieu of more thoughts, let me leave you with an article that’s been on my mind since I found it earlier this week. How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society starts off with all the information about having babies late that just doesn’t apply to me or interest me yet — all those worries about old eggs. (My parents were 41 and 43 when I was born, and people used to warn my mom about old eggs. Whenever I accomplished something noteworthy, my parents would smile and nod at me and say, “Old eggs.”) But then the article changes, and it becomes the piece I was hoping it would be: a discussion of fear, of the social and familial pressures of being new parents in your late thirties and beyond, and, at last, a frank discussion of what having children late means in terms of a parent’s lifespan.
There is a lot that I could say about this, but it’s a very raw time right now, so I’ll just leave this here for another essay.
When a friend asks if you’d like to join her on a trip to a place as steeped in history and interest as Chicago’s Pullman District, you don’t turn her down, especially not on a day as lovely as this past Sunday was. We’re both nerds and we’d both always been curious about Pullman, which was, in short, the original planned corporate community, built for employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company, about a decade after the Great Chicago Fire. The backstory is fascinating — apparently Clarence Darrow and Eugene Debs both got their starts organizing in the Pullman rail strikes of 1894 — but what you can see today is a strange little shell of what was clearly a truly impressive town once upon a time. Continue reading “Come visit historic Pullman, Illinois!”
I don’t actually know whose idea this was. I mean, I know I mentioned watching the sun rise on the rocks when I came to Evanston for geek camp in high school, but with the momentum of the night we were having, it just sort of became this thing we were going to do.
It was raining and humid and disgusting yesterday, but it seemed natural that it was so clear and perfect, once we got there. I didn’t question it, anyway. At that point it was a little after 5, and most if not all of us were coming up on having been awake for 24 straight hours. Someone asked if we were really going to wait here an hour to watch the sun rise, but in the end it wasn’t all that that hard. Continue reading “Good morning, Saturday”
I’m going to be reviewing two experiences here today. One is the debut novel of journalist/essayist/graphic novelist G. Willow Wilson, and the other is reading my first novel on an ereader — in this case, a Kobo Glo. Both have their ups and downs, but I’m finding one more fulfilling than the other. Continue reading “Alif and ereaders: A paired adventure for the 21st century”
One of the best things about journalism school has been realizing how little of Chicago I had seen or even known to seek out before I started learning how to report and find stories. My first quarter was spent tramping up and down Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park, on the city’s northwest side, which is less than two miles from where I live but which I’d only been to for its incredible eating (notably Noon O Kabab, which, if you like Persian food is a must-visit in this town). Even though I’ve lived here since 2002, my Chicago experience had really been limited to enclaves and bubbles like Hyde Park, Lakeview, Wicker Park and bits of Uptown.
Due south of Albany Park, with all the same cross streets, is La Villita, Little Village. I’m working on a feature story about the Chicago Youth Boxing Club, which is an incredible organization full of beyond incredible people. Just south of the church where CYBC lives in the basement is 26th Street. “Oh, you have to see it,” I was told by source after source. “Go eat at Nuevo Leon, it’s the best.”
My interview began at 9, and the gym itself was closed on the weekend, so once the interview was done, it seemed like a good idea to get a feel for the neighborhood. I didn’t know what to expect — I really had no exposure to Little Village beyond what people involved with CYBC had told me, plus one thread in the community gang resistance documentary The Interrupters.
“People only hear about the bad stuff, the gang stuff,” people told me over and over again. “Which means people outside La Villita don’t know what an incredible neighborhood it is and what good people live here.”
Now that I’ve been there a little bit (a very little bit), that’s a damn shame. Because they’re right: Little Village is truly something else. Continue reading “The city and the city (especially Little Village)”
There’s no better setting for an existential crisis than IKEA. This one starts and ends with a TIDAFORS EDSKEN dark gray sofa.
That’s the opening line of my latest post at Oy!Chicago, Those Blue-and-Yellow Box Store Blues. I really like this post! It’s a good foil to a lot of the things I’ve been wrestling with lately, which have largely included how to use the spaces I inhabit. In the Oy! post, it’s about investing in an apartment; here, on Magpie & Whale, it’s about not building the idea of the site up so much in my head that I never say anything here unless it’s Deep and Meaningful and Well Crafted and Illuminating.
That’s… not very representative of what Being Alive and Being a Person entails. So, time for an arbitrary break with perfectionism. I’ve been super enjoying the blogs of my friends lately (Coming to the Edge and Terra Bear are always good reads!), so I hope to bring more of that to Magpie & Whale in the future, near and far.
(I also hope to bring more fiction here too. And maybe things like book reviews and such, because I finally want to create stories and enjoy books again, after a very long time not feeling either of those things. Given that we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of my mom’s death, I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about that in the coming weeks too, but for now, there’s been a palpable feeling lately of being able to come back into the world, and that’s nice. And she would want that too.)
By the way, you may have noticed that M&W has its very own domain now! I’m still pretty stoked about that. I’ve also added a snazzy (and expansive) Journalism section; this site was originally intended to be a launching pad for my identity as a professional writer of fiction (someday!), but until I commit to making RealName.com anything more than a place where I learned how to CSS and WordPress (yes, those are verbs; no, don’t look, it’s horrible to behold), this is going to be a much more interesting and informative place to be.
Okay! That’s been good. How’re you guys? Hi!
Today was my last class of my second quarter of grad school, which means I’m pretty much halfway through my time as an apprentice journalist, as I’m thinking of it. At this very moment I’m just trying to catch up on my sleep debt, which is more profound than I realized. But for those who found interest in the work I’ve been doing this term, here are the back four stories that I filed, rounding out my 11 required.
I have a letter to the Chicago veteran community that I would like to write, but the short version of it is that it has been such a privilege and such a pleasure reporting on such an extraordinary group of people, all of whom are doing such important and amazing work. I thank everyone I’ve spoken with for entrusting me with their stories.
Well, that’s embarrassing — the first piece of spam on Magpie & Whale made it through Akismet, which I then had manually go in and delete, to my shame. It’s been, what, three months since I updated? Many apologies; there’s been a lot going on.
Medill is going well — it’s going very well, in fact. I continue to be wildly, wildly happy, with the program, with the people and with this profession. We’re coming up on the end of the quarter, and it looks like all my final projects are due on June 3, which is inconvenient, as that’s my mom’s would-have-been 70th birthday and I will be in Ohio that weekend. She, of course, would not let me get away with not doing the work, so it’s going to be a busy week.
I have a new side project that I keep banging my head against, trying to make it go from concept to outline to execution. It’s more “what if?” Shakespeare, though it’s more in line with the play (Henry IV Part 1, for the curious) than Innogen is with Cymbeline. (I also have not forgotten Innogen. It pains me that it’s still stalled. There is a break coming up, though, and hopefully that will be fruitful. Thank you everyone for your patience. If George R.R. Martin can [sort of] do it, so can I, goshdarnit.)
In the meantime, if you’re interested in the reporting I’ve been doing as part of the Medill News Service this quarter, here are links to my seven published stories so far; I have four more to go. I’ve been covering veterans and military families, and I’m spending this Memorial Day transcribing interviews conducted at the opening of the new exhibit at the National Veterans Art Museum, so I suppose that’s apropos. Continue reading “The counterpart to the “Hello, world!” post: “I aten’t dead yet.””
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