Kat’s Kable #255

Hello there! This is Kat with another issue of Kat’s Kable. I’m tired, and this week has been pretty exhausting mentally, to be honest. Yet. I wanted to send out the newsletter, and so here we are. Nine nice things for you to read.

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1. A River Reawakened (Orion Magazine) – this is a refreshing and nice story about the restoration of the Elwha river watershed in Washington, USA. I visited this place over the summer of this year and it was quite lovely. The biggest component was to “deconstruct” an old dam.

3. How to Work Hard (essay by Paul Graham) – I think the thing that draws me to Paul Graham’s essays is his simple language.

Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It’s a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you’re best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you’re capable of and how you’re doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you’re consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you’ll be productive in a way few people are.

4. How to write an elegy in the year of dying: Poet-novelist Tishani Doshi on the death of her dog (Scroll) – this is very touching and obviously, sad.

It was the silence of aeroplanes and the triumph of birdsong. In all our isolation, in all the deepening battlelines between inner and outer, we have found ways to keep each other company through sound. Not just to say, Hello, I’m still here, I exist , but also to say, I hear you, I see you, I reach my imaginary arm over to embrace you . The work of survival is the work of mourning, it is also the quiet work of radical joy, a drumbeat, a howl.

5. Ursula Le Guin Q&A (The Guardian) – I’m a simple man. I see an UKLG interview which I haven’t read yet, and I read it immediately. This one is from 2004 and I love it because she seems a bit more snappy and forthright than she usually is. My favorite part:

_Interviewer: Perhaps you feel a bit out of step with your contemporaries?

UKL: Why should a woman of 74 want to be “in step with” anybody? Am I in an army, or something?_

6. Cooking Backwards (Guernica Magazine) – I love reading about food and recipes of old. In this piece, Pamela Petro talks about how she became a kitchen archivist and how she interacts with and recreates family recipes from the past.

Across the years, recipes often involve a game of Telephone. My Grandma Mary, secure in two languages, entitled a recipe she copied out twice—once in black ballpoint, once with her blue fountain pen—“Potato Dumplings with Cottage Cheese (lump style).” My dad wrote it for me on the back of a “Far Side” cartoon and called it, “Gulushka.” Someone on the Internet calls hers, “Haluska.” Someone else calls hers “Shlishkes.” I call mine, “A Mistake.”

7. I Miss it All (Longreads) – “Against the commodification of community.”

And yet, sometimes I worry that, regardless of our ironic self-awareness, we lose a little bit of one another each day. I know I’m being sentimental. I’ll be blunt. Each day, we are losing one another. And by one another, I mean: everything. And by everything, I mean: in a world where it sometimes feels we have to jerry rig into our lives both what we love to do and who we love to do it with, where we have to apologize for the excesses of personality that are not the same as the excesses of production, where we have to somehow — I did not know this was possible, tell me if it’s possible — make time , we lose the possibilities of connection that make up so much of the inherent value of a life.

8. From Reviled to Adored (bioGraphic) – “How one community—and one woman in particular—have found a way to protect the rarest stork in the world simply by learning to appreciate the species and embracing it as one of their own.”

9. Why I’m glad that I’m an ‘overthinker’ (The Guardian) – quite relatable for me personally.

I became a natural observer, able to take the temperature of a room, able to watch people’s micro-movements, listen to their language, their tone. This all became second nature to me. Sometimes, today, my children and husband think I’m a mind reader, but of course I’m not. I’ve just observed what’s been said, what’s gone on, and I’ve overthunk what they might do, or say. So sometimes I answer a question before they ask it and they think I have a superpower.

Kat's Kable #255