Go Away Sun, Go Away 🫱🏼☀️
No please, no, don't! It's just what the kid said! Sun? Suuuuun?!
Some Nostalgia ✨
The Mood (Game) Changer
There’s an instant mood maker, that I’ve started to think, I wouldn’t be able to live without—the sun and its light. Every time, when the people I know, including my siblings—who live in the extremes of northern and southern hemispheres—share posts about the much needed, anticipated, sun day, I shudder to think about the rest of the cloudy, rainy days that they have to endure, to be so happy about a sunny day.
I was sitting in the other room which doesn’t get direct sunlight, and I come to the other one which does, and suddenly, I don’t feel paroxysms(word for the issue) of clouds and fog in the head, or the fear of the end of the day—which is when the inhuman, attempts to keep the night going by keeping me awake, with the clearest of reasons:
You haven’t worked enough, read enough, written enough, moved enough.
And then I remember that the single most important thing for me to do in life, is to sleep enough and on time. If I do not, my digestion goes for a toss, and that worsens every waking moment and movement the next day. I’ve also started taking sunlight everyday, for at least 15 minutes. From a Vitamin D score of 8 to 50, it has been a long journey of supplements. From now on, I thought, it should be auto driven.
If you haven’t had some ☀️ today, and you have access to it, please shove yourself out of your shade cave and go out and walk for 10 minutes in it, even if you are neck deep, bent over your back, staring at your screen, working. That’s an order which you’ll thank me later for. Here’s a short incident to make you smile or laugh.
Sun Sun Go Away, Come Again Another Day?
I was sitting on a bench outside in the sun, when a kid started running across me yelling
Go Away Sun! Go Away!
His father followed him nonchalantly. He asked me if it was okay to sit down beside me and I gestured at the vacant seat. As he sat, tired, he said to his child,
Son, I just told you, sun is not going to go away by your asking it.
I asked him what was making his son shut the sun. He answered
I told him that it was too hot to play and that we’d come back after the sun had set.
I Just Read
Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
The blurb of the book:
When failed writer June Hayward witnesses her rival Athena Liu die in a freak accident, she sees her opportunity…and takes it.
So what if it means stealing Athena’s final manuscript? So what if it means ‘borrowing’ her identity? And so what if the first lie is only the beginning?
Finally, June has the fame she always deserved. But someone is about to expose her. What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.
My short review? The most unlikely, addictive, dark, spiky but wickedly humorous, unputdownable book. Consider the following landscape:
Rebecca writes in first person narration from the point of view of a character who is unreliable. This makes the plot extremely irritating at times and yet grasping—one moment the voice of the protagonist is immature, the other times self-pitying, outright deranged, and yet other times, panicked, methodical, flighty, desperate, borderline psychotic, sure in the most stressful situations, obsessive, manic—both up and down. And yet the story is a page turner, because she lets the reader in on everything that is happening, in time. Some(good)objective reviews say this was the weakness of the book. I say it was its strength.
The story houses a bunch of different characters, who have their own past traumas, and spilling new ones as they try to navigate them. They have their own complicated love-hate-envious-awe-admiring-capitalistic-neutral-fearful relationships with each other. To show the spectrum of differences of these quickly changing feelings for so many characters, while helping the reader to keep a track of everything in the head, is no small feat.
One of the main showcases of the novel is how social media and petty people on it—who have nothing to lose, but only to gain momentary power, play with people’s lives and cancel them, by commenting whatever they want, without proof or a thought. The book also sets a layered, nuanced, breezy ground for showing social structures and institutions that ignite or assist culture appropriation online and in person.
A publishing house is hell bent to have only one star Asian writer they want to represent, and they reject any other, even if they are good. They’ve chosen this writer because they are educated, articulate, attractive, sell-able, good looking and talented. This Asian writer, in turn, is forced to write only culture appropriate fiction. She, for the major part of her career, might have internalized that there’s no other way to live this dream than to dance on the whims of the publishing industry. So she possibly steals people’s words and arrange them in stories in such a way that their trauma gets streamlined for public consumption. In order to live the dream of a 7 figure advance and the pinnacle of industry stardom, this Asian writer, Athena, stretches herself to the brink of whatever is possible. Similarly a white woman—the protagonist, June Hayward—is brought to bits, because she ends up writing(after stealing its first draft from Athena) a novel about Chinese Labor Corps in World War 1.
On top of this the truth gets twisted, lies are extended to the borders, to become something much more horrific, to serve the interests, compulsions, dreams of the characters. Friendships, rivalries, professional relationships are tested and ruined.
To keep so much happening together, collected, while writing from the point of view of an unreliable protagonist, is extremely difficult to do in a 320 pages novel. Hence the genius.
A Song
From their website: Pendo and Leah Zawose showcase the fluid polyrhythms and rapturous polyphonic singing of the Gogo (aka Wagogo) people of the arid, hilly Dodoma region of central Tanzania. There's the vibrations of the ancestors, coming through on traditional instruments — soaring chizeze fiddle, buzzing illimba thumb piano, ngoma drums that chatter and thunder — and voices that go deep, high and out there. There's the connection to nature, to ceremony and ritual, in their dance-inspired fusion, their blend of the organic, harmonic and modern-day electronic. There are lyrics that tell, in their native kigogo, of the passion for music, the wonders of life. Of pride in environment, in tradition. In their East African roots.
A review and interesting history of the musicians and their album—also titled Maisha
A Suggestion
Subscribe to V.E. Schwab’s monthly newsletter to get an in on the workings, figuring and the life of a full writer and human being. It’s very cathartic and insightful to read. The newsletter is very cleverly called The Visible Life of V.E. Schwab, a play on her book The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, which we cover in the first issue of
. The newsletter is broken down into sectionsA free rolling introduction
Life Lines Beyond Work
Progress Bar: What I’m Working On
Craft Table: Thoughts On Work
Press Junket: News That’s Fit To Print
The Well: And How I’m Filling It
The Road Ahead: Where We Go Next.
The second last one talks about the shows, movies, books she’s watched and read a particular month.
It’s a fun read, even for non readers and writers. A closing excerpt from this month’s issue:
Perhaps you find the new year exhilarating. Perhaps you find it daunting. Whether or not you are the resolution-making type, I want to remind you—and myself—that thresholds are arbitrary. Habits can be made, and broken, and made again. Each and every day is a clean slate, a fresh start. You are allowed to stumble. You are allowed to sit down and catch your breath, so long as you resolve to stand back up.
We can do this, lovelies.
Day by day, and word by word, and step by step.
Until next time 🌻🦥