"No one cares how many books you've read."

(If you’re curious about the title, it’s because Co-Star the astrology app once gave me this as my daily thought to ponder, and I have remembered it forever because 1. WHATEVER, astrology is fake and 2. what a devastating thing to say to a Leo.)

Careers

This week I had occasion to travel to Wellington for my Careers teaching job. The purpose of the trip was to spend two days cramming information about four tertiary institutions into my brain so as to better inform my students of their options. The effect of the trip was to make me want to immediately return to tertiary study and start seven different degrees at once.

I mean. I mean. I got to see the costume workshops at Toi Whakaari! I got to look at a costume continuity binder for a film in progress! Those of you who have read Bespoke and Bespelled, starring costume designer and stitch-witch Marnie Taylor, may appreciate what that kind of detail meant to me.

I got to see THREE tuatara, including a tuatara who was actually moving, scuttling on her wide-set legs at a pace I found startling, given that I have only ever seen tuatara staying absolutely still.

“Hello, little sphenodon,” I cooed, in the gooiest voice imaginable. She froze, unblinking.

I got to walk through art studios and campus housing, fabrication labs and libraries, computer suites and galleries. I met smart, interesting people and marveled at student work. I was told about the efforts institutions are taking to decolonise their practice, the attempts they are making to recentre indigenous perspectives and provide safety for those who currently cannot be safely who they are in most of the places where they study.

Two Game Design students asked if I was planning to take the course and sounded only a little bit dubious. “No,” I said. “My job is to talk to the people who might. What would you want me to say to them?”

“Tell them it’s good,” they said. “Tell them they should come.”

Curiosity

I am, and always have been, insatiably curious. I always want to know more, understand more, put this thing by that thing connected to the other thing, and see the pattern made.

When I’m reading and I come across a reference I don’t understand, I look it up. I get reviews where people are like, “I didn’t know what this meant” and my automatic reaction is always, “so why didn’t you find out?”

I know, of course, that there are lots of reasons why they didn’t—people don’t want to interrupt reading flow, they don’t want reading time to be internet time, they don’t necessarily know where to find that information, they’re reading a paperback and their phone is on the other side of the room etc etc. These are all good and reasonable reasons1!

But my first reaction is still “but you could find out!” because that’s what I do, every time, because I’m curious.

So I have this job where one of the things I get to do is find out how other people do their jobs, how they qualify, how they learn and practice and develop, and I thought I would like this job, but I didn’t realise how MUCH I would like this job.

People are so interesting! Careers are so interesting! Sign me up for Advanced Millinery!

Decolonisation

Learning is my second favorite thing, but my most absolute favourite thing in the entire world is reading, and because I spent some hours waiting in airports, being in planes, and filling in time between meetings2 I finished three books in two days.

First, I read Lyorn, the latest and presumably antepenultimate Vlad Taltos novel by Steven Brust. This is a series that is only two years younger than I am, so I am not going to summarise the previous sixteen books, other than to say Vlad is an ex-assassin for a criminal organisation who keeps encountering world-shattering, fate-altering events and is finally wondering what that means for him personally and what, if anything, he should be doing in response. In this book, he’s doing a lot of that wondering backstage in a theatre where a musical about putting on a censored play is perilously close to being censored, and it’s all incredibly meta and I liked it a lot3.

Part of Vlad’s problem is that he knows empire is wrong, but he is friends with the Empress and a lot of people who are dedicated to preserving the empire. These are intelligent, loyal, brave people and he likes them a lot. He’s fought and died for them4 and vice versa. But they are insiders, and he is outside, and they can never see what he sees. Moreover, Vlad knows that the current system is unjust and unfair, but it’s been going for two hundred thousand years and it feels inevitable. He finds it really difficult to conceive of an alternative. Due to Some Stuff, it may have been literally impossible for anyone to even conceive of alternatives until very recently5.

As you would expect, in the forty-one years of writing this series, Steven Brust’s interests and concerns have changed, and one of the things that comes up in the book is the place of art when it comes to challenging the status quo. What does it mean to defy the powers-that-be when you also, to some extent, comply with and profit from their systems of power? How can the written or performed word affect history or shift perceptions? What responsibilities do artists have, to their principles, to their colleagues, to their patrons, to their society?

And, fundamentally, what is the right thing to do, and how do you do it, even when it costs you? How do you convince other people to do the right thing, even when it costs them?

The people around him think that art can be very powerful in prompting right action from others, even at the cost of their own comfort, freedom, or lives. Vlad is more skeptical, partly because he’s a skeptical s.o.b., and partly because he doesn’t care for musicals. However, at the end of the book he makes a momentous decision. The art he’s been reading and watching and participating in isn’t the sole reason for that decision—he’s been thinking about the problem for a long time. But I’d claim that the art had some impact on his decision and his ability to make it, and that, I think, is Brust’s argument.

Art isn’t the whole of the thing. It’s not the totality of resistance. But it can be a vital element.

I’ll get back to this in Part Two6, where I’ll discuss the other books I read: Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, and R.F. Kuang’s magnificent Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Revolution.

Also, and not unrelated, I’m switching to Ghost instead of Substack for my newsletter service. Ideally, you won’t notice a thing, but heads-up, just in case!

Book Stuff:

• I’m doing a creative writing workshop with the Teece Museum of Classical Antiquities, open to everyone 12+. Sign up, Ōtautahi folk! I know at least one adult who plans to be there, so don’t let the “young writers” tag turn you off.
• The Love Should Be Fun promo is still running and still v. cute. I can recommend Monica Ross’s Thick as a Brick as a really fun romance author/audiobook narrator romp!
• Persephone in Bloom is currently 99 cents, tell your friends!