It's a Jumble

I have been listening to sad songs in languages I cannot understand. It started when I stumbled on a Twitter link to  this song . I cannot understand Mandarin; I had not, until recently, ever followed either of the musical artists featured in the video. I am not in exile, far from home and family. And yet I’ve been obsessed with this song of homesickness, listening over and over to the ache in the vocals, the clear longing in every line.* There is a word in Portuguese for longing. Months ago, I stumbled upon  this BBC travel article   describing it:  saudade . Saudade is untranslatable, writer Eric Weiner asserts before translating it thus: Saudade is a longing, an ache for a person or place or experience that once brought great pleasure. It is akin to nostalgia but, unlike nostalgia, one can feel saudade for something that’s never happened, and likely never will. At the heart of saudade lies a yawning sense of absence, of loss. Saudade, writes scholar Aub...

It's been a while since I’ve done one of these. I’d set a rhythm of reviewing short fiction bimonthly and then. . . just lost the rhythm. Life intervened, I would say, although in truth I have not been particularly busy (okay, I’ve been busy panicking over U.S. politics? But that’s not really productive. . .) Anyway. I’m still reading, even if I’m not writing very much. Reading helps. It always helps. Here are some stories that have stood out for me over the past few months. They’re beautiful, moving, and alternately shot through with darkness and light. Maybe some of these will help you, too. Free to read online Zombies in Winter by Naomi Kritzer in Persistent Visions   A zombie story that doesn’t unfold as you’d expect. When the narrator’s friend Tom falls victim to a plague which robs him of personality and mind, the narrator steps in to care for his best friend—even though his friend no longer recognizes him. The narrator cares tenderly for the zombie t...

I stumbled across this piece, "Fuck Winning," by Albert Burneko while skipping about the Internet (as you do) and read it, just read it. Because yes, fuck winning, fuck the tournament system, fuck the ruthless competition/winner-takes-all/Hunger Games that is coming for us all. We don't need to beat down our kids; the world is going to do that soon enough. We don't need to teach them that only "winners" are worthwhile; that life is to be measured in trophies and salaries and prestigious job titles and tangibly shiny medals; isn't the world going to teach them all that without our help? Here is the passage in Burneko's piece that closed my throat:   As I write this, my two young sons are running around a grassy field where I can watch them. They have balloons stuffed under their shirts; they are crashing into each other with their big balloon-bellies and making weird monster noises and giggling so hard they can’t speak; the sun is in the...

On doing great work:  "The real trick to producing great work isn't to find ways to eliminate the edgy, nervous feeling that you might be swimming out of your depth. Instead, it’s to remember that everyone else is feeling it, too. We’re all in deep water. Which is fine: it’s by far the most exciting place to be." -- from "Nobody Knows What the Hell They Are Doing" by Oliver Burkeman at 99U From writer Theodora Goss’s twitter feed**: “I have rewritten this paragraph at least five times. Which is why wordcount is irrelevant, if they’re the wrong words.” “Authors telling other people how to be authors is like parents telling other people how to be parents. Because all kids are the same.” *Note: I don't know how to use Twitter. I don't know how to cite (?) it appropriately? I just sometimes use the Web to eavesdrop on other people's tweets. A lovely essay on a video game and the Asian-American experience      . . . beca...