Mere Being - 034 - August - Diane's place, State Fair,

Me— Nat Bennett

You— reading Mere Being

It's hot and this is late because I've been writing a ton lately (and not enough of it has been this newsletter.) It's hard to believe we could be just a month away from the first frost. It's still distinctly summer here but we've entered a new phase of summer. New subseason. The daysa ren't as long, the angle of the shadows is better, the leaves are juuust starting to turn. A little crisping of fall around the edges.

I have beheld the glory that is the Minnesota State Fair.

A lot of processing of Metro Surge happening at and around the State Fair. A lot of looking back on the past year and that experience folks went through together here. I don't know how much the rest of the country is thinking about ICE right now but up here we are still furious, it's still one of the main things driving election results.

Meanwhile, in Appleton they're converting a prison into what they're calling a "detention center." I don't know what else to say about it, other than, "this is happening."

Meanwhile, at the Disney Company, every NFL football team has been assigned an Official Disney Character. They gave the Cardinals Jafar. I'm not kidding. Look:

Meanwhile, over on the Disney store, the reviews for a slightly different version of the shirt

I texted a friend (and Friend of the Newsletter!) about this late at night and the next morning they were like, "That was real? I thought that was a dream."

The first draft of Why I Moved to Minnesota currently stands at 6655 words. I've covered maybe 1/3 of the territory I intended when I got started — got a little side-tracked by another writing project I'll talk about more in a minute. Regardless, I've set a goal to share a draft with paid subscribers to this newsletter by September 18th. Whatever exists on that date is going out to that list.

Here's a sample:

I have a theory that Californians as a people struggle with any food that is fundamentally about technique.

California understands ingredients. Selecting, sourcing, combining. California understands how to put french fries in a burrito and barbecue sauce on a pizza.

When I visit San Francisco I try to make sure it's in the spring, for Blenheim apricot season. Blenheim are a tiny, sweet, intensely flavored apricot variety that doesn't ship well and is mostly only grown in Santa Clara county and San Benito county. Fresh, they are basically only available for a short time in certain supermarkets in the Bay Area. This is the kind of food that California understands.

I'm behind-ish on the essay because almost immediately after I decided I was going to write the essay I started writing a novel. I'm hesitant to jinx it by talking about it too much so what I'll say is that fiction writing is remarkably effective as a treatment for rumination.

Part of what happened was, I was reading a lot of Brandon Sanderson, and he has this way of making writing look fun and— not easy exactly but possible. A Sanderson novel has a sense of the achievable to it that you don't get from something like, I don't know, The Trial.

So I start thinking about fiction and I start thinking about how Sanderson writes and I know he's got this process and I find myself on his website reading about his daily writing habit and specifically this article about his daily word count and time goal, where he writes this:

I write to relax. That's what I do for fun.

And on some level I knew this. This was not new information. But there was something about that particular phrasing that made it finally really crystalize for me that I always feel better after I spend some time writing. And I missed writing fiction.

I didn't have any particular idea of what kind of fiction to write so for a while I thought, "I'll wait until I have a real idea," but that never works so then I re-read Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell (which I very much recommend, especially if, like me, you have already done the NaNoWriMo thing and don't have a problem producing output it just never seems to be, you know, a novel) and just decided I Am Writing A Novel and started a project in Ulysses and told myself, I'm going to write 500 words of something approximately fiction-shaped every day and we'll see what happens

I've also been reading a ton. Finished The Tale of Genji. Read a bunch of T. Kingfisher. All four books in the Saint of Steel series, the two Clocktaur War books, and Swordheart and its sequel.

Really really liked the T. Kingfisher stuff. Paladin's Grace is my favorite, followed by Daggerbound, but I've reread all of them already. I don't know, I like a sad man who is magically compelled to protect people and or has some kind terrible parasomnia.

I'm still like a third of the way through The Pillow Book but instead of going back to finish that I started a re-read of The Lord of the Rings.

Next time you're in the Twin Cities you should eat at Diane's Place. It's a Hmong restaurant owned by a world-class pastry chef. There is, as far as I know, nothing else quite like it in the country. It is as good as the reviews and pictures make it sound. They have a crab rangoon danish that might be the best thing I have ever eaten in my life.

It has a quality that all of my favorite restaurants have where the perfection of a "fine dining establishment" is turned entirely on welcoming coziness. Brunch there feels like a diner or like you're staying at someone's house except, again: Perfect.