got_quiet

It's been a cosy-ish weekend at home, with some gardening, some cooking, and more decluttering.

On Friday, in between bouts of torrential rain (and hailstorms) I managed to get rid of the remainder of Matthias's old books, plus some unwanted gardening equipment. People really will take everything off the street if we put it out on the footpath! There's still stuff to go, but everything feels a lot more manageable now, and we don't have boxes all over the living room floor.

Yesterday was fitness classes, vegetable and fruit from the market (the strawberries at the moment are amazing, and I've just discovered that the discarded strawberry tops can be added to tap water to infuse it in much the same way that I usually do with slices of lime or lemon — it tastes fantastic), momos from the Tibetan stall for lunch, then pottering around at home. Today I spent a lot of time in the garden this morning, mainly repotting seedlings: tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, and some chives. So far the only stuff that's actually ready to eat are the mixed salad greens, which are a variety of shapes and colours, and taste bitter and earthy. We've got unripe strawberries, cherries, apples and pears, but nothing edible at the moment.

Reading this week has involved a great array of books.

I picked up The Draw of the Sea (Wyl Menmuir) on chestnut_pod's recommendation, and I'm glad I did. It's a collection of nature writing, mainly about the Cornish coast (although there are diversions to Svalbard, and other waters), meandering from environmental and social commentary to meditations on surfing and freediving. As suspected, my favourite parts were about the psychological effects of ocean swimming. It paired nicely both with Dee Holloway's fantastic zine Lost Coast (an in depth exploration of the various watery threads connecting Susan Cooper's Greenwitch and the films The Fog and Enys Men), and this new-to-me music (electronic Breton mermaids).

Next was The Bloody Branch (Brigid Lowe), which did for me for the Mabinogi what Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls did as an Iliad retelling: a complex, nuanced reworking of the source material in a way that does it the courtesy of taking its characters' alienating worldviews and frames of reference seriously, while giving the female characters interiority, voice, and agency within the truly awful situations in which they find themselves. Lowe does an incredible job conveying the sheer weirdness of the original medieval Welsh material, which exists in its own strange universe of blurred lines and shifting boundaries — between human and animal, between the otherworld and the waking world above, between earth and sea, and so on. Her Blodeuwedd felt really believably made of flowers, and the horror at that unbounded floral existence being forced into the shape of a human woman is absolutely visceral; likewise her Arianrhod felt half woman, half ocean. It's a brutal, violent book, in which brutal, violent things are done to its female characters, and sometimes the only possible response is endurance, survival, and the ability to tell their own stories, in their own words. I absolutely loved it.

Finally, I devoured the final novel in Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan quartet of books, The Story of the Lost Child, which covers the later adult life of its pair of childhood friends. While the events of the earlier three novels took place in relatively tight timeframes, this one covers more than thirty years — motherhood, relationships (and their ends), careers, the demands of complicated extended families, and the complex mess of the characters' origins in an impoverished, violent neighbourhood of Naples, and the way they're never fully able to escape this. Both the characters — the narrator in particular — make some truly terrible decisions; the consequences of these decisions are so excruciatingly obvious that I was almost reading through my fingers in horror for the hundred pages or so until the characters caught up with me and realised the same thing. While the intense interiority of the other novels remains, the authorial gaze also sweeps outwards, to take in Italian politics and societal changes during the period, and the ever present struggles against corruption and organised crime, and the ways these brush up against the lives of the characters and their families. I'm so glad that I picked up this quartet of books at last: the hype is so incredibly justified.

I'm almost scared to pick up a new book, because the week's previous reading has been so good!

This has been an extremely efficient weekend, on various domestic fronts.

When Matthias's father was visiting a couple of weeks ago, he brought multiple large boxes of Matthias's old stuff — books in English and German, magazines, school exercise books, DVDs, VHS cassettes and CDs — the sort of childhood ephemera that gathers and lingers in the parental home if one is an immigrant who has lived one's entire adult life outside the country of origin. I remember boxing all this stuff up about a decade ago and storing it in the box room at Matthias's parents' place, and there it's remained, even though the house is now owned by Matthias's sister, who lives there with her husband and their three kids. The last boxes of my own equivalent stuff arrived by mail two years ago — mainly my childhood and teenage books — so it was high time to deal with Matthias's belongings.

He's already been through the English-language books, shelved the stuff he wanted to keep, and weeded out the stuff to go (including duplicates of books I already owned). We put the unwanted books out on the street, and people have already taken most of them. Every time I've put books out on the street, everything goes eventually, and I'm pretty certain that will happen in this case as well.

(On top of that, we're transitioning in Ely in June to a new rubbish/recycling regime which means we no longer need the big black bin bags for non-recyclable rubbish. We hardly ever have rubbish to collect, so we tend to accumulate far more of these bags than we could ever possibly need. We periodically put rolls of the bags out in the street for others to take, and on Friday I put out the last handful, along with some clean, unwanted sturdy paper shopping bags — and they all went as well.)

We're a bit hampered with rubbish by the fact that we don't drive or have a car, so I was slightly concerned about all the VHS cassettes (which Matthias didn't want to keep), but we figured out that the recycling centre in Witchford would take them, and that this was an easy half-hour walk through public byways in the fields, so this morning, after breakfast, we each filled a backpack with VHS cassettes, plus some batteries that we also couldn't get rid of anywhere else, and walked them over to the tip. As we were on foot, we didn't have to wait our turn in the huge, backed-up queue of cars waiting for a slot, and were in and out, and back home within a hour of leaving.

We cleared out the big living room cupboard (where I'd shoved a bunch of appliance boxes when we moved in and never looked at them again), and moved them up into the loft. And now I can see Matthias going through the boxes of old newspapers and magazines, so those will be dealt with by the end of the weekend too.

In the garden, we constructed a covered archway over one of the vegetable beds to protect the seeds and seedlings, as we have enormous problems with blackbirds — as soon as we plant anything, they come and dig it up and eat it, and hurl mulch all over the footpath, and I'm sick of it! I also planted out some cucumber, parsley, dill and chard seedlings, planted amaranth, sunflowers and radishes, and scattered a few more packets of wildflower seeds around. After I've finished this post, I'm going to tie the self-seeded sweetpea plants to stakes, and that will be the garden tasks done for now. We're doing well when it comes to herbs and salad greens — and indeed ate home-grown mixed greens and chives in a salad for lunch today.

There's also been a lot of cooking, pickling and fermenting going on: stewed apples with cinnamon, plus cooked strawberries, to go with our breakfasts next week, sauerkraut (with cabbage, cucumber and fennel, plus caraway seeds), a jar of homemade pickles, and another jar of shatta (fermented chili condiment).

That's plus two hours of classes in the gym yesterday, and 1km swimmming on Friday and again this morning, and some decent, lengthy yoga classes at home.

I'd say all that feels pretty decent, and the decluttering in particular is extremely satisfying. I'm really glad we got all that done so efficiently (although in some ways it would have been better to have discarded all the stuff we gave away/recycled/threw away ten years ago in Germany, but given I behaved in a similar way with my own belongings in Australia, I find the extended hanging on to stuff that eventually just gets binned entirely understandable).

As a consequence, I have not had much time for reading or other media, although I did watch Send Help (a comedic thriller in which an overworked and underappreciated corporate office worker ends up stranded on a tropical island with her childish and unappreciative boss, where her hitherto unrecognised side hobby of outdoor survival in extreme landscapes of course comes in incredibly handy, with predictable results) last night. Hopefully next weekend will have a bit more time for proper relaxing, but I'm happy to have been able to devote so much of this weekend to getting all this stuff done so efficiently.

After a challenging and tiring few weeks, the Friday open thread returns, with a prompt inspired by all the love and activity I've seen around 3weeks4dreamwidth. I haven't been able to be very engaged with this at all, as it coincided with a professionally and personally very busy time, but I was reminded again of what a singularly wonderful little corner of the internet we have here, and how happy I am that this is my primary social internet home.

Therefore, this Friday's prompt is: what is special for you about Dreamwidth, and why do you like it?

I could answer with all the usual things, like the fact that makes money solely from user subscriptions, rather than algorithmic feeds, ads, or selling user data, that it has an ethos built on privacy and persistent pseudonymy, that it's text-based and slower-moving, the icon culture inherited from LJ in which icon use becomes a whole visual language, that there are filtered levels of privacy controlled by the user on a post-by-post basis, and so on, but all that's been said by many people, many times.

As well as all of the above, the things that I find particularly special about Dreamwidth (and which solidified its place as my primary internet home many years ago) are:

The perfect balance that we, as a user community, seem to have built up over the years organically, between the personal and the communal — in the sense that posts and comments are built for conversation and discussion by default, and shared into all subscribers' (chronological) feeds by default, but we all have a very clear sense that a person's posts and journal are that person's individual space, where they have freedom in both form and content. While I'm not going to say this kind of thing doesn't exist here on Dreamwidth, I personally never see the kind of outraged 'why is nobody talking about this?' (or 'why is everybody talking about [this frivolous thing] instead of [this outrage]?'), or people berating one another over choices of style or topic (or trying to drive mobs of followers to descend in outrage on other people's posts). Not every post I encounter on Dreamwidth is of interest to me (and I'm sure that's the same for everyone reading this when they think about my own journal) — although I've discovered so many new interests, and read posts by people on topics that I would never have even thought about, but which are made interesting through the way the person writes about them — and that's totally okay, as the assumption is that people will just scroll on by when required. There's no expectation of constant engagement and paranoia around metrics and short attention spans.

This sounds counterintuitive, but I actually like that Dreamwidth is a bit user-unfriendly to people whose primary engagement with the internet is via very user friendly social media platforms with a low barrier to entry. Obviously I want Dreamwidth to continue to exist, so it needs a critical mass of people to use and fund it to remain financially sustainable, but I appreciate that it requires a little bit of effort (type at least a few words into a post, or into a comment), and that passive usage (scrolling, liking, or the equivalent of sharing/reblogging/retweeting with a single click of a button) is basically impossible. In my opinion, this slight barrier to entry (probably combined with the fact that image hosting is complicated) helps keep it a generally pleasant community space, because the kind of rage-baiting virality that targets people's psychological vulnerabilities would be such hard work here.

What about you? What do you appreciate about Dreamwidth? What keeps you here?