WeakNotes July 2025 - Week 4 - Grab bag, with pantoums

Jul 28, 2025

Last week sped by, hot and blurry, in the way that makes it hard to determine what you did or didn't do. Here are a few random things from the week.

At H-Mart over the weekend, walking through one of the frozen aisles, we saw a sign that limited customers to a quantity of 5 boxes per flavor of a certain type of ice cream. So of course we grabbed a box - how could you not? - without knowing that we were purchasing some Hong Qi ice cream/yogurt bars that have apparently gone viral (?).

We grabbed lemon and yeah, it was pretty delicious. We probably won't snag 5 per flavor next times but we'll almost certainly buy more than one box, as each only has 3. For a better description than I could ever offer, head to this review by someone named Fro-Yo Girl.

I'm not sure what all I accomplished this week, but I did commit two acts of blowing-up-to-rebuild, which are some of my favorite acts to commit:

• I moved to GrapheneOS on my Pixel 8a. This is a pretty significant step toward de-googling and un-big-teching my life. Wiping the phone during the installation process was intimidating but overall the transition has been pretty easy so far, with only a few minor hiccups. I also began working with an alternative for Google Photos called Immich, which I am self-hosting through Pikapods.
• I also blew up (aka archived) the Obsidian vault I'd been using for the last few years. This had pretty much all my notes in it: work, personal life, everything. But it had grown rather unruly, and I feel like I've learned a lot in the last year or so about how I get the most out of my notebooks. So I made a new vault and am populating it from scratch, with a good measure of intent and pause. As far as old stuff, I'm only moving things over as I need them, and am cleaning them up as I go. One more opportunity for revising anew.

I'll probably share some notes on both of these later.

After a week of working on a new rye culture for bread, I gave it a test drive with two items: 100% Rye Crackers, and Jeffrey Hamelman's Sourdough Rye w/Raisins and Walnuts. The crackers were made with discard but had really good results; feels like a fun base to play with spices, flours, etc. The loaf was leavened with both sourdough and a pinch of yeast. I am literally just toasting now but smells great.

This coming week I'll be making some croissants (or similar), and I'll probably choose a recipe to give the rye starter a go without any assistance from added yeast.

Just as the week moved fast, I also didn't get a ton of non-required reading done. At the start of the week I finished two books in two days - Orbital and Feh - and I wanted a pause before I dove into something new.

Especially because I loved Orbital so much.

I do have Madeline Thien's Book of Records lined up in the queue, but will probably find something short and maybe light before I get started on that. Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing really made an impression on me when it was published. Like Samantha Harvey, she had there a tremendous balance of heady, philosophical, conceptual work with exquisite, sentence-by-sentence writing. I am very eager to read her latest and have intentionally kept my knowledge of its story to a minimum!

In the July issue of Poetry, River Dandelion writes about how he came to write in a pantoum form, along side a two-part poem, "how we survived: 爺爺’s pantoum." The poem tells the story of his grandfather's perilous crossing from China to Hong Kong in the '70s, transforming some of his own language into a poetic record of his journey. Oral history meets verse. I think that's rad.

In its basic form, a pantoum is a cycle of stanzas where lines 2 and 4 from one stanza become lines 1 and 3 in the next. This means the poem is significantly structured around repetition. As you read River Dandelion's poem - much of which takes place in water - there is a sense of ebb and flow, give and take. Lines are given a different cast as they reappear.

⊕ The 'Not too hard to master' series features poets 'writing on form and sharing a prompt.' I've found it to be really useful for exploring different structures and methods in my writing, poetic and otherwise.

That feeling and cadence of "how we survived" stuck with me and, especially as this was featured as part of the "Not Too Hard to Master" essays of the magazine, I thought I'd give it a go. I had a poem I'd been working on but hadn't quite found the right mode for yet. "I'll give it a shot as a pantoum," I thought.

I failed. Pretty miserably, actually.

But I learned a lot in the process. Because every line is destined to repeat itself, the way you approach your subject must be one that benefits from that repetition. If it can't handle it, the repetition will just feel plodding and burdensome. You begin to sense this even as you write, and start trying to think ahead to what new ideas might come next, and what is going to be returning. As a writer, it literally positions you between your past (as the lines you just wrote) and the future, the lines to come, written or not -- some of which are also your past.

It's a bit dizzying.

The great thing about trying out a poetic form like that is that it will stick with you. The form probably isn't right for the poem I've been working on. But I've added something to my range that I can explore when the time is right.

But before I try again, I might read a few more pantoums.