Is it coincidence that both the authors of the Hunger Games series and the Twilight series are coming out with new spin-off installments of their series? Perhaps. It might be that there were whisperings within the industry about one that prompted the other. Or maybe enough years had passed that people thought it time to reap upon nostalgia. And perhaps it is just coincidence. Its especially an interesting time to tap into the nostalgia reservoirs. Remembering that there was a time when YA novels were actually much talked about in my friend circles, I’ve gone back to listen to some of the soundtracks to the movie adaptations of those series, which manage to pull me back into my teenage years like covers drawn from the bed. I watched a few Booktubers talk about their lackluster experience reading A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and ended up talking with a couple friends about the books we read as teenagers, adding selections to a list our friend who was a high school teacher planned to recommend to his students – and as much warm fuzzies that the genre’s nostalgia gives me, I’m still able to notice how completely removed those experiences are from the present. Although YA books are read and loved by people of all ages, I’ve noticed that I’m unable to enjoy YA in the same way I did as a teenager. And that’s to be expected. Our relationship with reading and books changes over the course of our lives. But I guess it’s a little sad to realize how diminished the feelings and reactions are with a particular genre. How we’ll never quite have that same relationship; and yet, some of those feelings are able to resurface just when you least expect it.
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I blame the heat for slowing down my internet to such an extent that the Weebly page wouldn’t even load last night. Or it could just be that our internet’s not very good. Or it could be Weebly. Or it could be the universe forcing me to give myself a break since I’ve been working on my midterm all this week.
Either way, I’ll simply leave you with a video by Cathy Hay from a few days ago about creativity, since I do infrequently find myself in conversation with people about what is “creativity,” and how we seem to go to great lengths to deny ourselves that term for what we do. Perhaps worth writing more about in the future. Until next time, Rain E Drew In my summer class this past week, we read a very interesting paper titled, “Leaving the Earth: Space Colonies, Disney and EPCOT” by Jerry Mander. Wikipedia tells me that Mander is best known for his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which probably gives the best hint as to his stance on technology in the essay without me even having to summarize it. Nevertheless, the biggest takeaway is what a friend of his, an architect professor at Kansas State University, once argued: that “in these megamalls and theme parks [like Canada’s West Edmonton Mall, Disney World, Seaworld, the EPCOT Center] that we are all being psychologically trained for our future in space. In these places, he adds, ‘we can see the emerging mindscape and landscape… we can actually experience our existence as preprogrammed participants in someone else’s pre-engineered fantasies.’” I don’t believe he means that these malls and theme parks were made with space in mind (except for maybe EPCOT), but that our inhabitance of enclosed spaces secluded from nature is essentially making us used to very controlled, secluded environments, such as those that would be inescapable when on a spaceship or a colony on Mars. It’s a very provocative concept, but one that holds merit. After all, would someone who lives their lives entirely outdoors, directly utilizing everything surrounding them in nature, be able to cope with suddenly losing access to it all and staying confined in tight spaces? Or would someone who’s spent their whole lives inhabiting closed off environments and are used to having a lot of their means fully formed be more suited to long-distance space travel? It’s insidious to think about depending on your perspective and ideological beliefs, but at the same time does not seem to be fully successful. Because while many people in American society at least are very comfortable with staying indoors for long periods of time, living during this current pandemic has shown how most people are not willing to spend all their time indoors. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time, but I think most of us are still of the mindset that having access to the outdoors is greatly desired and that staying indoors indefinitely is actually a punishment. I suppose that anyone who signs up to travel into space willingly gives up that privilege; but that, perhaps, is the true horror of scenarios like one-way tickets to Mars. Those people do exist, of course, but most of us would shy away from it, precisely because it is essentially sentencing yourself to house arrest, but not even in your own home. It’s been making me think precisely because I enjoy writing about the space-part of science fiction and exploring what human life might look like in those environments. Oddly enough (or perhaps not odd at all), when ever I’ve written out settings that take place in completely enclosed spaces, I envision what some of the newly built schools looked like in Las Vegas (completely enclosed, frigidly air-conditioned, labyrinthian and monotoned) or otherwise a hospital – highly sterilized environments. Malls and theme parks in comparison seem quite dirty in comparison, admittedly because of the food and the close proximity of so many people (although it’s past the hay day of many malls). But, much like schools and hospitals, they are highly controlled, highly stylized environments, designed to be uniform. It’s perhaps something worth considering more about in the future.
Hey everyone -- our wifi's being temperamental and it's just been a busy week in general, so I'll be taking this week off. But of course, I don't like leaving everyone completely empty-handed, so here's a video series one of my classmates had recommended this week about a part-time television presenter in Britain (for BBC, I think?), part-time vicar who decided to document himself (for television) trying to live without money. It's from 2010, so a little dated, and of course, his situation can't really be replicated by most people, but I'm on episode 2 and I already find it an interesting examination on how something like that would work. Hope everyone's being safe, and see you next time!
R E Drew It started last summer as a tiny pile of orange dust on the balcony, underneath a tiny sliver of a white bench just wide enough for a drink or a pair of children’s feet. I thought it was pollen at first – a mysterious mountain of pollen, happenstance, like the tiny pile of glitter I once spied beside the washing machine when I was young. Fairy stuff. But then I happened to spy a small black, antennae’d head bob from underneath the bench, releasing grains into the pile with every dip. Not fairies at all – aliens. Pressing my nose to the glass of our French doors, laying on my stomach, I eventually caught site of the alien crawl out from under the bench and fly off. A bee. A very large, fat bee, a body big as my thumb. A bee that was burrowing into our wood grain by grain. It didn’t take long on google before I classified the culprit: xylocopa – the carpenter bee. I’d seen their kind rarely before, and never up close. I did the duty of every renting person and sent an email to the landlord. She replied that she understood the situation. I warned her that my roommate's indoor cat gets curious about the lifestyle of an outdoor cat if the French doors are left open for too long. Days went by, weeks, months – it seemed obvious that nothing would be done, and I simply glared at the engorged bees as they rammed their heads into the bench, hoping to fly into the perfectly round holes they’d chewed out. By the time my face muscles went sore, it was autumn, and the season for carpenter bees was over. But thing about nature is that it comes in cycles. A couple months ago, my ears caught the vibrations of that terrible buzz. And then the terrible site of those bees, bigger than I remembered them being before, and now trying to fly through our windows. They’d returned to the holes of last year, and added a couple more to the mix. When I’d step out onto the cramped balcony space to water Murphy 2 (the venus fly trap – still alive miraculously! And trying to grow more flowers!) I’d hear the hum creep up on me as one would creep up from over the brick railing or pop! suddenly out from under the bench, chasing me back inside with a squeal. And then they began to fight. Or perhaps it was mating. Either way, three or four would hang out on the balcony at a time, squaring each other off, and then ramming into one another. Bee carcass began to litter the ground along the sawdust which piled like dunes. I would sit in the living room and watch them, glaring at them with their bulbous abdomens, shiny as the plastic nose of a stuffed animal, and curse that awful humming. It would be war with the bees. I didn’t want them to die though – that I made clear to our roommate who suggested electric fly swatters. I just wanted them to take their awful buzzing and go away. I just wanted to water my plants in peace. So, I went again to the internet. Spraying the area with water boiled with citrus peels seemed easy enough but not very effective (and smelled awful even to me). I’d read that they have trouble nibbling through steel wool and also don’t like the smell of garlic either, so I took some fine steel wool, rubbed it into garlic powder, and one night stuffed it up the holes. To my greatest horror, not only did a couple of them fall out the next morning, but I watched one of the remaining be pushed out by something already inside the wood. I had to give myself a couple weeks to recover from that one. I also read that they only burrow into unpainted wood. Our bench is white, but they’d just so happened to find the one strip that was for some reason left unpainted. So (still a little disturbed with the idea that things were living in the wood) I had my partner paint the rest of that strip and swept away the mounds of dead bugs and sawdust. It certainly confused them for some reason, but with enough tries, they eventually found their holes. My next solution was duct tape. Why not? Might as well try it, we’ve got two rolls. They ate through the duct tape for breakfast. Alright, what if I tried switching it up and soak the steel wool in vinegar and plugged the holes with that? Turns out, that combination makes a cheap wood stain. But I stuffed it in anyway before it dissolved too much. The bees definitely liked that the least. One who seemed to have claim to one that I did it to tried to get close numerous times, only to fly away. But eventually it came back, and even with that soft acid, tried to bite through. Eventually to, the other one I plugged gently eased the browning steel wool out. In a final act of desperation, I combined tactics and put more vinegar steel wool in, plus a layer of duct tape. That would certainly thwart them for a bit. I sat on the couch and waited. The gnawing bee returned and found the state I’d left for them. They were very displeased to say the least. They checked along the wood a dozen times in search for the opening. And then, with no luck, flew wildly around the balcony, flying several times into the glass in the process. It’s typically frowned upon to transplant human attributes onto other living creatures; but undoubtedly, whether through biology or emotion, the carpenter bee was distressed and anxious. And realizing this, my hatred towards the insects melted away. After all, I’m an anxious fella too, living in a world full of less tangible obstacles. After all, what right did I have to interfere with this insect’s breeding cycle? When they don’t even sting (only the females do as a last-ditch effort)? When the eggs had probably already been laid, and would be gone once again by autumn? I could patch the holes up far more easily then. And until then, just let them be on their way. Within a day, the duct tape peeled away, the steel wool pushed out, and I decided not to do anything about it anymore. My feud with the carpenter bees was over. The choice made all feel a little more right in a chaotic world.
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R. E. DrewAmateur Author
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