If it is whatever concept from her books Palmer hopes to catch on, like “robots” and “cyberspace” have done for other authors, it’s a living model called bash” . The word is derived from a Japanese term, ibasho, which means “a place where you can feel like yourself.” A bash’ is any combination of people — adults, children, friends, couples, polygamous — who have decided to live together as a chosen family. Historically, the nuclear family is a very recent invention that, in Palmer’s view, makes it an unstable isotope. She thinks the family of the future will include a much more diverse set of molecular arrangements.
Late last year, during a time when the pandemic seemed to be brewing, Palmer invited me to stay at her real-life bash’house, a ninth-floor apartment on a cottage in Hyde Park’s Hyde Park. Chicago. When her building was built, in the 1920s the apartments were known as “chalets in the sky”—a vision of modern family life cut short by the stock market crash. . An elevator took me straight into the apartment, where Palmer greeted me with a stiff hug. She was tall and slightly stooped, with her waist-length brown hair, her presence both majestic and majestic, like a crying angel standing in front of a cemetery.
The room we were standing in, which Palmer called the library, might have been a wing of a Florentine mansion. It was filled with an inviting golden light that illuminated the thick ridges of Grecian shelves and bust records. At its heart is a complex of screens and servers, a pandemic setting seemingly borrowed from the pages of Palmer’s books, where people do futuristic jobs amid a family mess. A friend typed in her computer there. Down the hall, another person practiced playing the trumpet.
Palmer led me to a neighboring room, where manga, board games, and anime figurines appeared to have been quarantined. She reclined on the rough couch covered with Totoro blankets. She looked over my shoulder at a multi-tiered aquarium and nervously spoke out loud about the recent water change. Her father kept dozens of aquariums, and she knew how difficult it was to manage the balance of species, chemicals, and plants. “I’m playing trees on hard mode,” she said.
Palmer has spent recent weeks mostly in this side-lying position and won’t go far from it for the next 24 hours. She explained that her blood pressure was chronically low, and that she felt dizzy whenever she stood up. She had just applied for a leave of absence from the university. But lying down, her brain worked fine—“as you can see,” she announced to me later, after a few hours talking about Nordic metaphysics.
Palmer spoke in complete paragraphs and at times felt like complete lectures. (She was glad I recorded it, she said at one point, because it would save her the trouble of writing everything down.) Her voice was like the sound of an English horn, her voice was nasal and resonant, a breathy “h” formed when she said “while” or “where.” When she gets excited, expresses this or is arrogantly misread by an old fuzzy chick of some ancient text, it rises to a high, culminating in a round of laughter. suspect.
