Author: sonyablanck

This is a prose poem that I wrote for inclusion in a zine that I’m actually somewhat hesitant to publish, because it examines my feelings on growing up white in the American South and I worry about sounding whiny. But I’m generally happy with this poem, out of all of them.

I always knew we were getting close to Clarksdale when I saw the kudzu vines out the car window. Green, no matter the season; a green wall that stretched for miles down the highway. ‘The vine that ate the South,’ my mother said as we drove through the colonised landscape.

When Gran and Grandpa were both still alive, we stayed in their farmhouse at the edge of town, amongst their magnolias that always seemed to be blooming, their pecan trees lined up and yielding, in autumn, their rich nuts. None of my aunts stayed in Mississippi, only crazy Cousin Jane, who taught me how to taste the notes in Theakston’s Old Peculiar when I was ten. My mom and Jane burnt down a barn once. Mom was six, teaching a five-year-old Jane to smoke.

You could never take Cousin Jane anywhere. At Thanksgiving one year, in Gran’s dining room, picking at macaroni and collard greens, surrounded by family that had fled to other cities, she spoke loudly about a relative who had ‘an unfortunate taste for dark meat.’ My sister and I thought she was talking about turkey. It was our last Thanksgiving in Clarksdale.

As my sister and I grew older, our mother’s old porcelain dolls – pert-lipped belles called Mary-Jane and Martha-Ann – and strolls around the homestead were no longer enough to occupy us. We’d wait in the car during shopping trips to Save-a-Lot; one time we saw a cinema – in Clarksdale! – but Mom wouldn’t take us because it was ‘the black movie theatre’, and that mattered for some inscrutable reason.

Eventually my mother and aunts talked Grandpa into selling the farm that he had inherited from his father, and his father before him, back to John Clark, who though he refused to keep slaves married a plantation belle. (The spirit of the hungry kudzu vine, inescapable, always there.) Gran and Grandpa moved to assisted living, and we moved to the Best Western on State Street, one of many roadside inns off the 49 on the crossroads between Abe’s Barbecue and the 322.

Clarksdale was a collection of old buildings between which we were shuttled in cars. The Blues Museum. Ground Zero. St George’s Episcopal Church. Madidi’s, where elderly whites were seated adjacent to black tourists and served by smiling black waiters, like plantation belles. It made me uncomfortable, and I wondered, as I still do sometimes, how much of Clarksdale I never got to see because of this Venn diagram of white and black that had imprinted itself into the fabric of my mother’s life.

One time she made my sister and I be pages in a debutante ball. The Clarksdale page girls stuck together in a stuck-up clique of magnolia skin and heavy makeup; my sister, the exotically half-Jewish beauty from Texas, got hit on a lot; and I, with my skinny arms and pixie haircut, got sideways Southern looks for headbanging to a Nirvana song at a party. Mom stuck us in stupid green dresses that, after the debutante ball, we rolled down the hotel hall in, sullying them because we never had to wear them ever, ever again.

I took my guitar to Grandpa’s funeral. After the church service at St George’s, my cousin and I sat outside the reception playing, and I thought about Robert Johnson sat at the crossroads strumming his guitar until the tall dark man came and tuned it for him. I wondered who would come for me at the crossroads. Not Papa Legba; not even the Devil; maybe just the spirit, the hungry grasping spirit, of the kudzu vine.

I always thought I’d go back when Gran died, but by the time she passed I lived not in Texas but across the sea, and I couldn’t go to her send-off at St George’s, didn’t see my Southern diaspora family return to mourn their one remaining link to the place, take a final circuit to the Blues Museum, Ground Zero, Madidi’s, and then depart, possibly forever. Will I see Clarksdale again? Do I want to see it again? Or will I always, always feel hungry, grasping, invading a place that isn’t mine?

Shalom, poor and scornful Gen Z readers! It is I, your adoptive older-millennial Jewish mum-of-two-and-counting, come to bestow my hard-won economic wisdom upon you!

I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘Why on Earth would I take career advice from a broke-ass millennial who doesn’t even have a TikTok?’ (…Okay, I don’t actually know what you’re thinking, because I am hopelessly out of touch. Humour me, just like you do your boomer grandparents.)

Well, children. As someone who’s been skiving for pretty much my entire post-2008-crash career despite a relatively decent CV and a not insignificant amount of higher education, I feel I am uniquely qualified (let’s just pretend like I didn’t lapse into job-application-speak there) to offer you advice on this New Economy(TM).

So, first question: what is this New Economy in which we find ourselves?

Great question. The New Economy can be summarised as follows:

• There is no such thing as a stable job anymore, anywhere, ever. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how highly-qualified or skilled, what financial obligations you have. Your job is basically your industry’s version of Deliveroo, and if you don’t like it, you will get sacked and management will find somebody even more miserable and desperate for your shitty job to take your place.
• Oh, you’re an unattached white twentysomething and Daddy knows the CEO? The above doesn’t apply.

The median wage in 2020 for both full- and part-time workers in the UK was around £30,000pa. Now don’t get too excited – that means that half of workers in this country make below £30,000 per year, and while that sum looks like a lot from, say, Lincoln or Newcastle, it won’t get you jack shit in London or Oxford, or for that matter any city where rent eats up well over half your pay packet.

And let me tell you what life’s like when you make over £30,000 per year, from the brief halcyon (not really) days when I made a decent wage. The benefits and/or tax credits you’d come to rely on to make up for the laughable salary you previously earned? All gone, now pay full council tax to your do-nothing council and rent to your absent landlord, please. And those debts you accrued whilst on a nothing wage? All the debt collectors now have their hands out from the minute you poke your head above the £30k parapet, pay up! Oh now you lost your extremely demanding job due to stress burnout, I guess it’s Universal Credit time for you, enjoy that benefit cap in an expensive non-London area!

Am I bitter? Ha-ha! Yes.

So with my hard-won experience in this glorious New Economy in mind, I would like to share with you, Gen-Z reader, the same career advice I will be giving my children when they approach employment age.

1. DO NOT GO TO UNI. NO. NO NO NO.
   • All you are doing is throwing money at a glorified degree mill with absolutely fuck-all guarantee that there’s any kind of decent job at the end of it for you. This applies even up to Masters-level study. And if you’re really so deluded that you think a doctorate is going to streamline you into the good wages, well, I know a looot of postdocs and burnouts who would like a word with you.
   • If you are going to commit the monumental folly of higher education, make sure that a) your parents can foot the bill without the expectation of a worthwhile job at the end of it (‘Expand your mind, honey!’), or b) you have a genuine desire to enter a profession which has a BA as prerequisite, such as – and please pardon the Jewish trope – a doctor or lawyer. And if this sub-bullet point applies to you, then you really don’t need my career advice.
2. You really wanna make money in the New Economy? Learn a trade.
   • If you’re Ashkenazi like me, then your great-grandparents probably emigrated out of the shtetl on the strength of their trade. Mine were tailors and picture-frame-makers when they passed through Ellis Island. Not that tailors and picture-frame-makers would have much luck in the New Economy, but you know who’s making money right now? Plumbers. Electricians. Hairdressers, if you don’t mind the local competition. If you don’t mind working as an apprentice for a bit, you’ll be qualified for a decent job at the end of it – and one where you could probably freelance if you wanted.
   • NB: THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO CODING. Software engineering is going to be a barely-above-minimum-wage job in twenty years, as it proliferates like malware across every damn industry. It doesn’t hurt to know a little code, but DO NOT bank on software engineering as a trade. NO.
3. Oh, you’re a creative like me? There are three options for you to make it in the arts:
   • Have rich parents.
   • Get a dull, menial job that doesn’t eat at too much of your mind. Admin is a great one – fast typing, learning your way around MS Office and copying machines, occasionally bumming cigarettes off the jaded boomers/Gen-Xers who have been trudging round this office for a solid 20 years, lucky bastards.
   • Learn your way around the welfare state. The government can damn well pay you to make your magnum opus. Think about it as a trade-off: the state gives you money, and you don’t commit any major crimes to speak of. Win-win!

And there you have it, authentic Jewish-mum advice for attempting to make money ‘in this economy’ (a phrase I have heard since 2008 and which I fucking hate). I don’t think I’ll ever make any real money again, but you might have a shot. Courage, and bonne chance! I’m going back to sleep.

Let’s make a change from moaning about how demotivated winter makes me! How about we talk about food.

I have always been very food-motivated – before emigrating from America, my favourite holiday was Thanksgiving solely because of the food, and though I enjoyed the opportunity to make fancy food for British Christmas, it wasn’t until I became an observant Jew that I found the holiday replacement I craved. And let’s face it, Shabbat is such a fun holiday to observe when you love food, because it happens every single week!

Since moving to the seaside from a town that’s nowhere near the sea – come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve properly lived by the sea – my perspective on food has shifted dramatically in a relatively short space of time. When I moved here, I was in theory ostrovegan but in practice just vegan because you try getting decent shellfish when you’re nowhere near the ocean. I’d been vegan since 2013, nearly 8 years, and while my morality had mellowed since the first heady days, my perspective was entrenched.

Well, now I have 30 eggs in my fridge. Lol.

In all seriousness, being happy and near the ocean let me step back and re-evaluate my ethical stance, and I came to realise that I didn’t actually object to animal husbandry. What I truly objected to was the commodification and large-scale exploitation of animals in factory farms – not animals in the kinds of symbiotic relationships with human beings which we’ve nurtured for millennia.

In fact, I sometimes felt discomfort around some vegans’ absolutist stances, particularly regarding the food webs of indigenous cultures. Much as I would not, personally, wish to club a seal, who was I to tell an Inuk to desist from hunting one of the few food sources available to him in the Arctic? Would I even go so far as to accost a Maasai warrior for subsisting on cow’s blood, when cows have been culturally revered and reared for thousands of years?

My perspective shifted, to question what it was about the indigenous diet that appealed to me, and I came to the conclusion that what I actually sought was to encourage right relation with animals – healthy, symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationships that can be traced and accounted for.

With that in mind, I found a local honey supplier who spring harvests, and I found a nearby free-range smallholding which delivers 30(!) eggs per week (or, like, every other week, because I would really have to work to use 30 eggs in a week!). Seeing as I’m by the sea, I have my eye on sustainable fisheries that sell fish caught within 20 miles of my town…but we’re not quite there, yet.

Having said that, learning how to cook eggs again has been a journey in and of itself! So I’ll wait on the cod for now. I’m just happy to have articulated, to myself and now here, my desire for relationality and symbiosis with the animal world. Aligning myself with a more indigenous perspective on food has been immensely satisfying, and has helped grow my sense of place, of belonging somewhere.

I can see the sea outside my bedroom bay window, the best view in the house. Lately I’ve been frustrated that the cold weather prevents me from sea-bathing (although some do it even in winter, the show-offs).

Will I ever get tired of living by the sea? No, in short. The way the light plays on the water, how the sun sometimes bounces off and makes it look like crinkly silver foil, the way that sometimes a pale, cloudy sky contrasts with the brooding dark grey-blue of the sea and you can see the white crests of the waves. The sea can change colour minute to minute, hour to hour, depending on the sky above it – on a cloudy day, of which there are several, shafts of light descend to the water like angelic rays from Heaven, and sometimes when the sun sets the sky over the sea goes golden, and pink, and then a deep red.

The sunny days are, of course, nice as well. I find there are several different textures that a clear blue sky brings out of the sea. With the right light, the waves light up with dazzling sparkles that dance even after you close your eyes.

February gets me restless. When I was younger, it was always the month I would feel at my most crazy. Each year it gets significantly easier – January has, I believe, superseded February for most frustrating month – yet for such a short month, it drags.

It’s mostly the fact that winter has taken the pleasure and fun from the outdoors for about four months now, and as the days begin to lengthen I long to take leisurely strolls to the seaside again, like I did when I first moved here, and get ice cream from a stall, and sit on a bench as a cool sea breeze ruffles me on a warm day. What can I say, summer’s more my bag.

But now, all I can do is wrap up warm, hunch my shoulders and dash to and from the shops, or dispatch willing housemates to brave the icy winds on my behalf. And sit at the bay window in my bedroom, looking wistfully at the sea.

I slept until about half past one in the afternoon today. Yesterday, I slept until noon.

I’m going to go ahead and award myself decent parent points for having baked a carrot cake with the kids, but I’m now contemplating at what point it’s acceptable for me to go back to bed.

You see, I’m having to cut drastically down on coffee, for reasons. I was given two cups of fool’s coffee (ie decaf) today, but they weren’t enough to take away the caffeine withdrawal headache. Fortunately I had paracetamol to hand.

In the room next to mine two children, who were supposed to be hunkering down on homework, were instead shouting at Roblox games. This is by design – their new school sets them an inordinate amount of lockdown homework compared to their previous one, and last week I finally wrote to their teachers informing them, in the kindest possible way, that they can stuff that homework somewhere unmentionable. Response so far has been muted, and amount of homework done limited. But no longer will I breathe down their necks all damn day like some crazed, exhausted dragon, running on caffeine and fumes alone.

Now I’ve written my Wednesday post, and I am going to go back to bed. Stuff it.

Well for a start, I’m literally writing this on the day before Tu B’Shevat, which is one of the lesser-known but very cool Jewish holidays with a rather uncreative name denoting that it falls on the 15th (Tu) of the month of Shevat. It starts at sunset tonight, and is described as a ‘New Year for trees’. This apparently makes more sense in Israel, where mid-Shevat denotes the imminent coming of spring and the budding of trees, but in the UK, which has just been snowed all over, the timing feels like a tantalising jab.

Anyways, for the first time ever, I’ve decided to do a little seder for my family to mark the holiday. The Tu B’Shevat seder was first undertaken by Rav Isaac Luria, a 16th-century Ottoman rabbi who founded the Lurianic school of Kabbalah. Within it, you’re meant to first eat fruit and nuts with an inedible outer shell; then fruits with an inedible stone; and finally fruits that can be eaten whole, with a final fourth course consisting of just smell. I like this, because smell is how HaShem and the spirits are meant to eat, marking a unification with this highest realm.

I like adding new traditions to my routine, returning to a path that my late grandparents left when they renounced Judaism during the interwar period. But I am conscious of the fact that, like an archaeologist, I approach and integrate these traditions from the outside in – it may be my heritage, but it’s also one I have to dig for.

When I first started keeping Shabbat, I used electric candles, turning them on at Friday sunset and off on Saturday night. At the time it felt like I couldn’t do much else – establishing routine during a chaotic period superseded other considerations. As life settled, I switched to real candles; began integrating an ancestor offering, with the kiddush wine and challah portion that would in times past have gone to the kohen; held my first Pesach seder. But at times I still felt cut off from the friends I made at synagogue, alienated through a broken line of observance, an abandoned lineage.

Only recently, I found my grandfather’s family shtetl, in the Kaunas district of Lithuania. Both of my dad’s parents died years before I was born, and I don’t know what they would make of me. I used to think that they renounced Judaism because they were both communist, but I’ve come to the conclusion that they were merely assimilationist, cutting the anchor of Judaism to sail free in a white-passing world. But if you cut the anchor, what happens when you want to moor somewhere?

I’ve met a couple of my ancestors now, in dreams. Invariably, they tell me off for not being Jewish enough, and I never have the quickness of wit in my dreams to point out that unlike them, I haven’t spent my whole life growing up in a shtetl, surrounded by and integrated within those traditions. There again, I wonder if they realise that their way of life has been uprooted and eradicated entirely, again, as periodically happens when you’re Jewish. The shtetl that my great-grandfather left in the early 20th century is still there; only now there’s a memorial there, on the site of a mass grave where all the remaining Jews – over 700 of them – were gunned down, like cattle, by the Nazis.

Anyways I’ve got dinner mostly sorted – fruits and nuts, shelled, stoned, eaten whole; six of the seven species of Israel you’re also supposed to eat on the day (look, there are only so many uses for pearl barley); incense for afters, instead of an etrog (do you know how hard it is to source an etrog in the UK?). And carob molasses, because of the story Honi told about the man who planted a carob tree.

Honi came upon an old man planting a carob tree, and asked him why he was planting it as he would be dead by the time it bore fruit. The old man replied that he had found the trees his grandparents had planted when he was a boy, and he was now planting this carob tree for his grandchildren. Sometimes the meaning of tradition isn’t clear to those practising it at this present time; sometimes its echoes, ripples in the past and future, cannot be felt or seen, but must be intuitively known for actions taken at the present time to have meaning.

I do what I can, though the world changes, and I change with it, and my people change too. We’ll be planting trees in our garden soon, but we may move house before they bear fruit. In our old house we also left a garden – something nice for the next tenants.

I finally looked at Hive again today. This is after opening the file day before yesterday, and jotting down some notes on what I want to do with the rewrite yesterday. I added possibly half a sentence before helping my partner play-test his Troika pocket mod, which was a welcome distraction despite my never having really gotten into roleplaying games.

No, I haven’t brought myself to open the feedback from the sensitivity reading yet. Give me a few days.

Someone on Twitter recently asked whether anyone actually enjoys the writing process, and I feel compelled to state for the record that no, no I am not enjoying this writing process.

There are, granted, moments of levity and fun. When I started writing Dulcia, the novelty of writing a completely unserious, smutty Victorian-era book about Norman vampires propelled me for nearly 10,000 words, until I discovered that at this point in my life, I’m just not horny enough to write it. Hopefully I’ll rediscover the magic at some point.

There are also moments of unfettered inspiration. My poetry-writing is very much like that – I tend to edit them very little, and they come out in one freewheeling idea. But that doesn’t happen routinely, and within a novel inspiration is most often in thrall to character development, narrative, who needs to say or do what at this juncture of the book, how to demonstrate this aspect of your world-building. And it can get tedious.

Finishing my first draft of Hive felt triumphant. Commissioning and receiving feedback felt humbling. And I know that ahead of me lies a long and arduous process of editing and clarifying, rewriting characters, places and entire religions. This is necessary work, as I don’t want to submit a fatally flawed manuscript for publication, particularly when the flaw involves my unconscious and unintentional white gaze. In that sense I suppose it’s good that I’ve finally gotten over my white-woman fee-fees enough to look at the draft again. But still.

And the fact that I’m off my happy-focus herbal tinctures, for the same reason my libido’s fled from Dulcia, is going to make the slog harder.

At this point I also feel compelled to apologise for moaning about my rewrite. But look, you’re reading the weekly blog of a writer, so it’s your own damn fault for even getting this far down the post, okay. And hey, at least I didn’t spend my Wednesday post talking about the inauguration, so enjoy the distraction.

On that note I’m going to distract myself from the rewrite by cooking dinner, so if you still need to read about literally anything other than the inauguration and the reams of analysis which is accompanying it, feel free to scroll to the top and read this post again. 😉

Reluctantly, as someone who only recently managed to wean off a daily diet of news/propaganda (choose the right word, because in the British press particularly they mean the same thing), I have been intruded upon by News this week. And I don’t appreciate it, not just because it is unpleasant News that was both foreseeable and preventable, but also because, much like this past year’s Covid pandemic, it has rendered scared leftists little more than cheerleaders for the muscular arm of the state. So I feel compelled to break it down here, though contributing to the fever pitch surrounding the News is generally ill-advised, especially with something so undeniably partisan as a failed beer hall putsch in my former country.

A week has now passed since the confederacy of dunces invaded the US Capitol building, left unguarded except for its normal presence of Capitol police. And this is my first point of contention: we know why the National Guard didn’t show up – why would the executive branch, still tenuously controlled by the Cheeto Benito, call off its own coup? But. The FBI could have deployed proactively, given the big red flags being waved in front of its face, and chose not to. Why? The whiteness of the crowd is certainly one reason, as we already know what the response would have been to an armed BLM protest, but it is not – cannot be – the only reason.

My second point of contention is that the tech behemoth has only now been mobilised against the far right, and that the actions they are taking to suppress it – which would be decried as corporate fascism were they deployed against the far left – have the full-throated support even of supposed anarchists. Guys, this is hugely problematic for two reasons:

1) It shows that American checks and balances have failed to such an extent that a clearly unstable sitting president was unable to be removed for the entirety of his lamentable term, except once he’d managed to incite a failed coup.

2) The partisan rot goes so deep that leftists are now cheerleading Silicon Valley billionaires for very, very belatedly suppressing a movement that they have not only funded and algorithmically fuelled, but that they have benefitted from within the legislative sphere.

Social networks can never again claim to be mere infrastructure, unable to exercise editorial prerogative over the posts of their users. No, this exposes them as broadcasters – unlicensed, unregulated broadcasters, free to spread propaganda and lies at will, so long as the advertising money keeps coming in. Both solutions to fix this – incorporating them as charities, or imposing broadcasting regulations upon them – also conveniently bring them further under the aegis of state control. Cui bono?

And yes, despite the immensely satisfying schadenfreude of seeing Parler unceremoniously booted from the tech community, I do think that it’s an immense problem that American discourse has degraded to such an extent that it has driven the creation of a far-right walled garden in the first place. Not to mention that a social network which actually did try to be infrastructure rather than crypto-broadcaster is now homeless, and is loosing its fascists on secure messaging software such as Telegram, where they’re not only harder to monitor and reincorporate back into the public discourse, but also providing a convenient excuse to crack down on secure messaging software.

Cui bono, indeed.

Which all makes me wonder how much incentive there was to actually act on intelligence and prevent the putsch. It vividly exposed the right-wing threat, brought the left wing, tech companies, and most of Congress to heel, and set a self-evident agenda to further regulate and control the tech sector.

I remember reading an article on China’s view of the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and though I can’t find the specific article, I remember distinctly that an unnamed Chinese diplomat described Clinton as a ‘smiling tiger’: conciliatory on the outside, but extremely dangerous to drop your guard around. By contrast, Trump was a ‘barking dog’, making a lot of noise but with questionable ability to back it up. I cannot help but think about this characterisation now, with a man very comfortable with the reins of state power about to assume the American presidency.

Trump’s ill-judged coup failed precisely because of his own incompetence, his inability, throughout four years in office, to comfortably pull the levers of power. There again, had he been more competent, imagine how much more damage he could have done to the body politic, and to the victims of his racist policies. So the line goes, and it is hard to disagree with. And yet.

We are about to have a president who is far more competent. Far more comfortable exercising executive power. Far more subtle in his ability to wield it. And therefore, potentially far more dangerous in what he is capable of achieving during his time in office. Indeed, Biden would never need to stage a coup – he would only need to skilfully navigate America’s highly-inequitable electoral map, alongside her patchwork of voter suppression and propaganda dissemination, tools available to any skilled statesman who sits at the presidential helm.

Bear in mind, too, that the office of the presidency has been remoulded immensely over the past twenty years. George W Bush brought in executive orders in the wake of 9/11, and this power was expanded upon by Obama in the face of warnings about its potential abuse which came to fruition under Trump. The sitting president will continue to hold a huge amount of power, especially with both houses of Congress now balanced in his favour.

My point being, that any leftist who thinks that the past four years of overt fascism is the worst that America could possibly get, is in for a very nasty surprise in the near future. The incoming president and his party are now capable of decimating political dissent – on both sides, muscling out opposition with the collaboration of Big Tech, and cracking down hard on holdouts such as Telegram. Things could be, and probably will be, a lot worse.

Beware the smiling tiger.