Two scenes and 1400 words later, I now remember how exhausting writing fiction can be. The act of getting into the heads of characters that don't actually exist—really getting into their heads—is no easy feat.
So much so that I felt the urge to take a baking break. I hardly ever want to bake.
Cheesecake. Let's see how it turns out.
Having finished the entirely visual PROJECT ROSEWATER, and in need of a serious gear-shift to engage with the literary aspect of PROJECT HOURGLASS, I pulled a couple books off the shelf in an attempt to help lubricate the writerly side of my brain: ثرثرة فوق النيل (“Adrift on the Nile”) by Naguib Mahfouz and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, altering between both every other chapter.
I'm typically a one book at a time kinda guy, so doing this with two books—each in a completely different language at that—is doing something strange to my brain chemistry.
Reading Taha Hussein's “Adeeb” from 1935, I came across a line describing banter as essential to authors as food, water, air, and smoke. Smoke here meaning tobacco. It might just be the first time I've read something that placed tobacco within the same hierarchy of needs as food and water.
The word “Adeeb” is an interesting one. It comes from the root “adab”, meaning literature, and is used to describe someone whose vocation is literature. But it implies more than the word “writer” (that would be “katib”), which by definition is focused on the doing of writing. It also implies more than “author” (that would be “mo'allif”). It's a far more broad term that evokes a sense of all-encompassing immersion in literature that doesn't quite have an English-language equivalent.
Scooped up a big pile of books from Cairo Book Fair (which was just gloriously insane) some months ago and finally getting around to making my way through them. Partly because I have been away from Arabic-language Egyptian literature for a long time now and realized how much I miss it (and boy is it different from most of what is churned out by the anglophone world), but partly also because PROJECT HOURGLASS will be produced in both English and Arabic and a good greasing of my Arabic-language functions is sorely in order.
Returnee Blues #1, 2026 – Mixed Media on paper, 50 cm x 65 cm | 19.6” x 25.6”
Thought I'd finally found a housekeeper to pop in once a week to assist with cleanup. But that was three Fridays ago, and every time she doesn't show up even though the date and time were of her very own choosing. Similar situation with the plumber who first promised to show up two weeks ago. I've set three different appointments with the mirror place, every time they say they'll call me the day of to confirm and never do. Carpenter too been dragging me on for four weeks now.
Not sure why the need to hound someone to do work for you before they do it even after they promise doing it is such a widespread phenomenon in Cairo. I remember only needing to contact a housekeeper back in Houston just once to agree on the day, time, and fees, and she stuck to the same schedule like clockwork for three years before I had to move (Tidyqueen, if anyone in Houston is reading this and looking).
It's such a tedious energy-sucking thing in Cairo, because on any given day I'm expecting someone to show up, I find it extremely difficult to lock in and really get into the zone of whatever project I have on my table; the anticipation of impending distraction lingering in the back of mind all day.
And some of the stuff that needs tending too isn't superfluous. We've got pipes blocked with weeks full of piss and shit at this point.
Now I know why all my homies have moved into compounds; a virtually non-existent development less than 10 years ago. They tell me whenever anything needs fixin', all they have to do is call a number and help is on the way in less than 24 hours. That's enough of a perk to explain the seemingly unquenchable compound craze that has taken over the country in recent years, but I still can't stand that shit. Nothing spells a seething distaste for “the plebs” quite like a gated “community”.
My plan was to dive into PROJECT HOURGLASS by May 1st, but I'm not yet done with PROJECT ROSEWATER or KILLJOY, partly because getting anything built and/or installed in Cairo demands undivided micromanagement.
Kitchen is now a hair away from final-final completion (whenever you think you're done, a new loose thread seems to reveal itself). Renovation on the unit upstairs is finally finished (exceeeept for a minor plumbing thing and some woodwork that needs mending). Today I try to get mirrors installed on a big unfinished wall in the building entrance (the original plan was to create an original mural for it, but I'm learning to take things off my plate when the pile gets too high. and the mirrors will be a good fix).
Other things needed for the studio are: – Closet – Storage Unit for Works on Paper – Shelves and Cabinets for the washroom/storage room – Sofa (in an effort to make my life more difficult, there's a particular design for it I'm looking to get made). – Rocking chair (which will serve as my reading chair—settling into my old age with acceptance). – Side table (to go with said rocking chair—already have the marble slab that will serve as the tabletop, cut out of the kitchen counter to make way for the electric stove top, which means said table will need to be custom-built). – Floor lamp (for the reading/rocking chair) – Additional table on casters (also have a design in mind for it 🙃) – 3 Assorted table lamps – 1 wall-light fixture – Assorted mirrors (to reflect the light around the eerily dark corner of the studio) – 2 floating shelves
And then and only then will I finally feel situated in my new digs. Which puts me at... what? 50 years from now at this rate?
Looks like drawing endless waste and debris is becoming something of an accidental specialty of mine since embarking on THE SOLAR GRID.
The above image is from the concept art for PROJECT ROSEWATER, which I need to wrap up in less than one week. PROJECT REVERSE-EXODUS must also finish around the same time, and a couple days after that I'm due to partake in a public panel discussion in downtown Cairo. This, in addition to all the home renovation stuff. Busy few days.
Should try to squeeze in a break after that before embarking on the 10-month stretch for PROJECT HOURGLASS, during which I'm hoping all the home-reno stuff will be well behind me. 🤞
August will see six academics at the top of their game come together in Dresden for Petrocultures 2026 to discuss THE SOLAR GRID and “its many affordances for thinking through techno-optimism, energy, colonization, etc.” as associate professor Stacey Balkan recently put it in an email. The panel discussion is set to include:
I too will be in Dresden for this meeting of minds, which I am very much looking forward to and immensely humbled by.
Anything you might be seeing on the news about the U.S. government's effect on the operational capacity of TSA (Transportational Security Administration) is an understatement. I just made it through what may just be the longest queue in human history; 7 hours. That is not a 7-hour standstill, but rather a 7-hour moving line. It was a very very long line. It snaked in and out of the terminal, and back in again and all through it and around it, and down in the tunnel underneath it and circled back again, then up... this must be the type of thing purgatory is made of.
Once I'd finally made it through security, I had already missed my flight by a good 3 hours. It was after 10:00pm, and all the restaurants at George Bush Intercontinental Airport had already closed (a completely alien concept at, say, Istanbul International Airport (as an aside, isn't it funny how they like to point to the autocratic nature of certain “Eastern” nations that only ever name their airports after cities, but it's countries of the “West” that almost exclusively name their airports after their political figures? Never mind the wholly unnecessary confusion it brings upon international travelers).
I thought, rather naively, that I'd be able to get on another flight that very same evening or at most next morning, but no, turns out I could only get on the flight heading out a full 24 hours later. No way I was going to leave the terminal after persevering through the 7-hour queue of torment and deal with it all over again the next day, so of course I sent the night on a crappy airport waiting seat (No sleeping pods or convenient terminal hotels, which is shocking to any traveler whose ever flown through Thailand or Istanbul or Mexico City—which most Americans clearly haven't).
Severe failed state feels at George Bush International Airport right now, where in spite of it all, you can still score yourself a bottle of Channel no. 5.
The really crappy part is that all my luggage flew out without me. With a transit in Paris. I have a feeling my bags will be the recipients of their own brand of logistical horrors.
Finished reading Greenblatt's THE SWERVE. It's good, but not as good as it started out. The first half is quite superb, but the second half is far less interesting. Many good historical tidbits in there, but it does suffer from a terribly myopic view of history and scientific development while pretending to possess a grand scope of things. Not so much actually. Still worth the read.
Couple days left in Houston before my return to Cairo. Snatched SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE from my storage unit to reread on the flight (a full decade since I read it), and am abhorred by the sheer quantity of my possessions. Too much of it is stuff I just can't let go of, but I think I can probably—with some effort—do away with half (after having already done away with a lot).
Last day with my kid, “the plan is to do nothing but look at Pokemon cards and eat ice-cream and watch three toons” according to him. Obviously, that's not how things will go down, but it'll wholesome and sweet nonetheless as the world outside grows more insane and stupid and inhumane.
Almost 3:00pm and I've already been awake for 12 hours. My circadian rhythms have been all out of whack since I got here. Spent most of the day reading before paying one of my storage units a visit (and coming to terms with the impossibility of completely clearing it out this time around) before situating myself at my cafe of choice. Lter, I pick my son up from school and take him out to dinner.
Given that it is the 5th, and my newsletter goes out every 10th, I should be drafting it right now, but I kind of have nothing to say. You'd think that between my travels, the workshop I just gave, and war breaking out, now would be just the time to have plenty to say, but I really don't. I'm more in a quietly observational mood right now than anything.
Presently house-sitting for a friend, who just so happens to be safekeeping quite a few of my books. So I took it as an opportunity to read through a few I have yet to finish, and just this morning found myself completing DAILY RITUALS by Mason Currey. Nothing groundbreaking but includes a great many amusing vignettes that I think would be delightful for most creatives to leaf through.
“Mencken's routine was simple: work for twelve or fourteen hours a day, every day, and in the late evening, enjoy a drink and conversation. This was his lifestyle as a young bachelor—when he belonged to a drinking club and often met his fellow members at a saloon after work.”
See, it can be done! To be productive and have an active social life. Twelve-to-fourteen-hour workdays however strike me as overkill and wholly unnecessary (though I am guilty of it myself from time to time). The sweet spot it seems, if one can extract a commonality between the vast majority of creatives surveyed in the book, is probably working in 3-4 hour shifts. Either breaking before carrying on for another shift, or calling it a day at that. And this even applies to some of the most prolific creators.
Georges Simenon, for example, who published 425 books over the course of his career, only wrote from 6:30 A.M. to 9:30 A.M. “Then he would go for a long walk, eat lunch at 12:30, and take a one-hour nap. In the afternoon he spent time with his children and took another walk before dinner, television, and bed at 10:00 P.M.”
This schedule seemed to allow for a pretty active social life beyond the home and family too. “When living in Paris, Simenon frequently slept with four different women in the same day. He estimated that he bedded ten thousand women in his life. (His second wife disagreed, putting the total closer to twelve hundred.)”
Active social life or not, there is no doubt that many of us are way too pampered compared to some of the artists of old. Take Willem de Kooning and Elain Fried for example, who would have a breakfast that “consisted mostly of very strong coffee, cut with milk that they kept in winter on a window ledge; they did not have a refrigerator, an appliance that in the early forties was still a luxury. (So was a private phone, which de Kooning would not have until the early sixties.)”
The heat also automatically went “off after five o'clock because they were commercial buildings.”