My shot is scheduled for next week, and I can feel a wild laugh rising in my throat just telling you all that. I know some people have complicated feelings about the idea of returning to even a semblance of the world as it was pre-pandemic. But I am not one of those people. I am experiencing a very uncomplicated joy at the very prospect. And so, in the spirit of Claire Zulkey's post-COVID vaccine schedule and Valeria Luiselli's elegy for the before-times, I would love to know what you have missed and are looking forward to doing once you are fully vaccinated. Or, if you are already vaxxed, what did you rush to do first? What has brought you unexpected joy? Tell me about it. I know this thing is not over yet, but I'm ready to collectively revel.

On meltdown and freakout in the post-pandemic age. What if the pain never ends? "Perhaps some people still see moving home as a regression... but it gave me stability during an unprecedented trauma." On anticipatory grief and bonding over food. Transgender childhood is nothing new. Thandiwe Newton on her career, motherhood, colorism, and claiming her name. "Mispronouncing someone's name, accidentally or on purpose, at the very least demonstrates a selective laziness." The mob that attacked the US capitol was a race riot. What happened when a newspaper decided not to run op-eds on national news, only local. How a secure, affordable roof over one's head became the stuff of fantasy. Gossip has become like Yelp reviews for celebrities. Tracing Will and Jada Pinkett Smith's content empire. Designer Grace Wales Bonner in conversation with novelist Marlon James. Can we fall in love completely without completely losing ourselves? The rise of face filters on social media. How NFTs rapidly went from a way to protect artists to yet another commercial exploit. "Of all the racist, sexist, classist things children are exposed to, decades-old children's books seem pretty low on the list." Su Min, a retiree from Henan Province in central China, is on a six-month roadtrip to find herself. Applause for the activist group that removed a confederate monument and used it as a toilet.

The Particle Célèbre Pie

 

Paying members support my weekly labor, the fellowship program, and licensing fees for the independent artists whose work I feature. All for just $15/year. If you're one of these paying members, thank you! If you're not, consider joining up. 

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Dane Nakama's TikTok-length lectures on art. A comic about entwined sexism and racism toward Asians. Street style videos that are making me excited to get dressed again.

Gymnast Evan Manivong sticks that vaccinated landing.

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This is the first in a series of micro-essays on the meeting of culture and climate by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei. Shanti is one of two inaugural AF WKLY writing fellows, who will each be sharing a short piece of work in this newsletter once a month. One thing I love about Shanti's work is the way she makes connections between topics that might appear, at first glance, to be unrelated. This short piece is a perfect example, and I'm thrilled to publish it today. -Ann

By Shanti Escalante De-Mattei
 

When I was dissociating a lot, back in the day, there was something I treasured about going into that space. Life took on a compelling quality: pregnant with potential and bristling with clarity, even as things could take a turn for the disturbing. Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky urged artists to weave this type of dissociative attention into their work through a literary technique he called "defamiliarization." Shklovsky would say that we perceive life on auto-pilot, and this sense of dull familiarity eats away at our ability to respond and fully experience the personal and well as the political. But by describing the world in unfamiliar terms, we might gain a truer sense of it. 

 

A lot of eco-fiction bothers me, bores me, makes me feel childishly resistant. I can tell the author intends to educate me, and so I turn away. I am one who has to be tricked into eating my vegetables. For this reason, some of the best environmental fiction I’ve come across has been sci-fi, a genre built on exposing the mechanics of society by renaming and redressing them—a perspective shift adjacent to defamiliarization. While Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin produce excellent social commentary on climate change, it is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy that really gets to the heart of the dissociative technique. Through his work I was better able to grasp an aspect of nature that I don’t often come across but undergirds life itself: the sublime, the terrifying, the almost sentient power of evolution, the way nature manipulates matter across time.

When I’m in nature now I take a moment to consider that annihilating perspective, biology sped up and moving through me, far past my time on this Earth. It’s humbling. It realigns me with my values. It wakes me up a bit. But it’s too hard to live life that way, spinning out in a supermarket aisle because the banana in your hand means too much. So I stop paying attention. Until the right book comes along...

Find more of Shanti's work here, and follow her on Twitter.