most people probably don't need to hear that naomi novik's temeraire series, an alternate history in which the napoleonic wars are fought with dragons, features Dragon Tribulations, but i was not ready for it and had to fawn over the cats in the wee hours this morning to self-soothe. if the rest of the books are anywhere near as entertaining as the first i will be well pleased; if they are not i will rewarch master and commander and imagine russell crowe as a dragon and be well pleased.
in contemporary fantasy, i'm about to start the follow-up to cadwell turnbull's magnificent no gods, no monsters, and i genuinely can't remember if i've posted about it before; a hazard of writing this stuff out when i'm still more than half-asleep on the train, but one does what one can with what one has. he explores identity, othering, allyship, and intersectionality by working through the idea that "monsters" (anyone who uses magic, from seers and witches to shapeshifters) have always lived among nonmagical humans, various secret societies have tried to protext/exploit/exterminate them, and now everyone knows about them—sort of, as their revelation is suppressed and lots of people don't want to wrap their heads around what it would mean if, say, the cops gunned down a werewolf. several of the principal characters work together at a cooperative bookstore; the title's a riff on "no gods, no monsters," the old anarchist chant. there's a scene of extreme violence near the end (speaking of trigger warnings, my sister pinged me to warn me about that) which comes closer to what i imagine perpetrating or being the victim of a similar act would feel like than anyting i've read before; the whole thing is a magnificent work of empathy, and i kind of want to read it again. (like lincoln in the bardo, its polyphony gets kind of slippery from time to time, especially when characters are time traveling and skittering between multiverses.) but there's no time to reread! there's barely time to read! you'd think joe and i would be barreling through media we'd been neglecting in favor of the 3-4 hours of cable news we were mainlining before the election, but that time seems to have simply disappeared. i'm going on longer walks and spending an extra 15-30 minutes a day at the gym, but that doesn't account for it. i certainly haven't been cleaning, i haven't been writing all that much, and i haven't been napping as frequently, though saturday afternoons are still long-haul adventures. i would love to discover that i've been winking out and fighting crime in another dimension, but aside from some inexplicable thing that's gone down with my left knee and some inconvenient acne, i have no physical evidence of this double life. probably i'm underestimating my fixation on reddit.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
12.21.24 [on the F train]
i've been pingponging between books that carry me down history's lazy river like the life preserver i was instructed to turn upside down and step into like a diaper when i was in a biosphere in mexico this past spring (laura maiklem's mudlark, a wonderful long view) and bleeding-edge ones that make me feel abruptly and specifically like shit (paul lynch's prophet song), and that has been a good-enough way to move through the world. (a panhandler on the train is chatting with a woman a few seats down who just gave him some change: "i feel lucky to be in new york, it could be worse: i could be in a different city, in a different state, in a third world country. i could be in detroit." in ian frazier's paradise bronx i just learned new york is only city to adopt constitutional language obliging it to address inhabitants' right to shelter.) i have not been doing a very good job of catching up on the work that piled up before the election; when i get tired of being in my skin i go running or go up to grand central station to donate platelets, which you can do pretty often, since they give you most of your blood back and i have a lot of platelets (i am unironically proud of this). the first time i got settled in my pleather lab-recliner and the tech could see the needle mark from the last time i was there i was a little embarrassed, but now i don't care. i got an email from the volunteer coordinator at the library saying that the guy who'd been flaking out of his shifts after mine had officially flaked off for good (which i thought we'd talked about and determined long ago, but i respect her system), and so now i'm The Study Room Monitor for all of wednesday afternoons if i want. i told her i would rule with an iron fist and am unironically proud of that, also.
i think the work buildup is under control now, or at least the parts of it that call for acute creativity and can't unspool while i'm on something like autopilot. i had an unsettling afternoon about a month ago when i spent an hour working on research for a design story, tried to save the word file, and was informed by my own laptop that i already had something by that name. turns out i'd spent an afternoon at the library the day after the election doing the same work—taking many if not all of the same notes, even—and completely forgotten about it. when i turned in revisions for a big, earnest science piece earlier this week my editor thanked me for taking my time with it, which read not as a passive-aggressive dig but as actual appreciation for not having to deal with it earlier on his end. my other essay editor has made analogous noises hinting at her own lack of peace. i am not glad for that, i want all of us to be living our best and most effective lives, but since the feeling of being a little less alone is going to be there whether or not i acknowledge it i might as well be grateful.
i think the work buildup is under control now, or at least the parts of it that call for acute creativity and can't unspool while i'm on something like autopilot. i had an unsettling afternoon about a month ago when i spent an hour working on research for a design story, tried to save the word file, and was informed by my own laptop that i already had something by that name. turns out i'd spent an afternoon at the library the day after the election doing the same work—taking many if not all of the same notes, even—and completely forgotten about it. when i turned in revisions for a big, earnest science piece earlier this week my editor thanked me for taking my time with it, which read not as a passive-aggressive dig but as actual appreciation for not having to deal with it earlier on his end. my other essay editor has made analogous noises hinting at her own lack of peace. i am not glad for that, i want all of us to be living our best and most effective lives, but since the feeling of being a little less alone is going to be there whether or not i acknowledge it i might as well be grateful.
05.25.24 [on the F train]
i was thinking as i shuffled down east broadway this morning that maybe apocalypse movies (and horror?) are my versions of Soothing Media à la cozy mysteries, or when someone is murdered in a bucolic oxfordshire village and the townsfolk (and a key outsider??) have to jump into their cardigans and figure it all out over digestive biscuits. that is probably a pseudo-insight i unthinkingly took in from an old new yorker piece about how YA readers love disaster books because adolescence is a disaster anyway, i don't know. there's a silver lining in my near-total inability to get through my magazine stack lately: no more wondering if, "maybe she's born with it/ maybe it's david remnick!" anyway we saw the furiosa prequel last night and i thought it was pretty wonderful. having gotten a taste of eco- and psychological australian devastation on my trip to tasmania a few years ago i get george miller a lot more than i did when fury road—which i might in fact have only mostly seen—came out back in 2015. the end of the world almost always boils down to resource wars unless you're emily st. john mandel, but miller really makes that cabbage feel precious, to say nothing of the gasoline. i loved the first chase scene and how each suddenly-available motorcycle got scavanged mid-pursuit—i mean, obviously, but i bet NASCAR pit crews love the mad max family of products. i personally would favor them for the hair and makeup alone, but throw in attacking paragliders and the fact that gender inequality and sexual violence inform the story in a way that doesn't devolve into mere titillation or shock and well done, australia. also i was yesterday years old when i realized tina turner was singing "all we want is life beyond thunderdome" in "we don't need another hero" (i thought it was "all we want is to be young"? listen, i haven't seen that movie).
on cozy mysteries, i just finished both my name is barbra—which kept going so ferociously that i was half-sure gnomes were sneaking to my bedside and writing more of it each night and read like emily dickinson journaling between bong rips, definitely no ghostwriter there—and the hunter, an actual mystery i failed to realize was a sequel to another tana french book about mysterious death in remote small-town ireland. that's fine re: the hunter, one reads tana french for vibes and emotional pointillism rather than for jaw-dropping reveals, and it'll probably be at least a few years before i remember to go back and read the book that came before it.
barbra was more like broadway pointillism, which increased my understanding of show tunes and how one arranges and phrases them by about 5000% (i have never seen funny girl or gypsy, much less i can get it for you wholesale). i read it because i love memoirs, and because i wanted to dig around in barbra's account of the perfectionism that has made her so notorious, and becuase i wanted to know more about why she cloned her dogs and has a personal ice ream shop in her basement. i can't say i know much more about the dogs or the basement, but it does seem like she gets savaged for working practices that would be fairly unremarkable for male directors. she's pretty shameless about being late all the time, which is unfortunate in the context of what she asks of other people, but i am also late all the time and i don't have a presidential medal of freedom.
on cozy mysteries, i just finished both my name is barbra—which kept going so ferociously that i was half-sure gnomes were sneaking to my bedside and writing more of it each night and read like emily dickinson journaling between bong rips, definitely no ghostwriter there—and the hunter, an actual mystery i failed to realize was a sequel to another tana french book about mysterious death in remote small-town ireland. that's fine re: the hunter, one reads tana french for vibes and emotional pointillism rather than for jaw-dropping reveals, and it'll probably be at least a few years before i remember to go back and read the book that came before it.
barbra was more like broadway pointillism, which increased my understanding of show tunes and how one arranges and phrases them by about 5000% (i have never seen funny girl or gypsy, much less i can get it for you wholesale). i read it because i love memoirs, and because i wanted to dig around in barbra's account of the perfectionism that has made her so notorious, and becuase i wanted to know more about why she cloned her dogs and has a personal ice ream shop in her basement. i can't say i know much more about the dogs or the basement, but it does seem like she gets savaged for working practices that would be fairly unremarkable for male directors. she's pretty shameless about being late all the time, which is unfortunate in the context of what she asks of other people, but i am also late all the time and i don't have a presidential medal of freedom.
02.03.24 [on the J train]
i've had a run of really wonderful reads at the start of this year: turning into a shark, swapping bodies with your spouse, defeating conversion camps, it's all been lovely. speculative fiction makes me itch to write strange things, though not to write fiction—i have tried that a few times and everything about it feels wrong. which is lucky, really, as i then get to enjoy others' stuff with absolutely no skin in the game. on that, though, i had a funky twinge yesterday that is leading me to look into the possibility of writing a nonfiction book? it would not be a collection of essays, nor would it be a memoir; it would have a principal and lots of secondary subjects that are not me, and you would just smell me in the structure and language, or maybe, maybe i would lean a bit into a framework like the one in preparing the ghost, where the author talks about the first photographer of a giant squid and also, semi-related, about his own working out of an ice cream truck in chicago. i will probably spare posterity stories of my slinging health food in orange county, but maybe other glimpses could end up in there? more importantly, the prospective subject spent significant parts of her life close to new york city, so if i decide i really want to dig in on research—a copy of her out-of-print midlife memoir is on its way to me now*—i could make a lot of initial progress without shelling out for plane tickets or making myself vulnerable in, i don't know, residency applications or whatever. i am still not at all sure that writing and especially selling and marketing a book are things i truly want to do, but i know i want to read this memoir to see if i like the idea of spending a lot more time thinking about this woman, and that's something?
the owl pitch i mentioned last month landed, speaking of writing. it landed this past wednesday because my editor missed my email the first time and then had COVID, so the time-sensitive part of the story is spoiled, but i get to spend the rest of the month thinking about owls—for money, and that's the dream, really. yet another bird pitch flew out of me about a week ago, and before that another about a world war two pilot and candy, and if all of them hit, february is going to be a bit of a shit show—but perhaps it's time for me to develop the ability to juggle passion projects instead of packing them in the tissue of better-paid busy work. the ceramic flamingo i ordered after embracing a flamingo in the bahamas last fall was bubble-wrapped just beautifully, and it still arrived on our doorstep with a broken neck.
the owl pitch i mentioned last month landed, speaking of writing. it landed this past wednesday because my editor missed my email the first time and then had COVID, so the time-sensitive part of the story is spoiled, but i get to spend the rest of the month thinking about owls—for money, and that's the dream, really. yet another bird pitch flew out of me about a week ago, and before that another about a world war two pilot and candy, and if all of them hit, february is going to be a bit of a shit show—but perhaps it's time for me to develop the ability to juggle passion projects instead of packing them in the tissue of better-paid busy work. the ceramic flamingo i ordered after embracing a flamingo in the bahamas last fall was bubble-wrapped just beautifully, and it still arrived on our doorstep with a broken neck.
*ETA as i finally get around to uploading this written-on-the-subway post: it was getting weird that the memoir i mentioned hadn't arrived as of today, so i checked my alibris account and realized i hadn't succeeded in buying it. it's finally en route for realsies! since i'm updating, i can also now report that the other bird pitch also hit and i finally got a weird no about the pilot, like, monday, february 20th. i'm a little shocked at the rejection, as that pitch was really good, but juggling three semi-recreational stories this month would have broken me. i am at peace.
11.25.23 [on the J train]
i finished the book i was reading, i finished the book i was reading! that's generally what happens if you keep at it and turn the pages when you should, but this book kept getting longer, as if a malevolent troop of gnomes was scaling my etagère each night to add new chapters. if i hadn't come to the end at last after three hours of reading yesterday i was seriously considering setting out sticky traps. i have been splashing around in horror and horror-adjacent novels since my mycological society's book club read mexican gothic (appropriate for a bunch of mushroom enthusiasts but kind of squelchily confusing in its own right–i would have gone for some lovecraftian uncertainty at the end, e.g. "what i beheld when i followed the tunnel of luminous fungi to the unholy altar overwhelmed my senses so completely that darkness swallowed me whole and i knew no more," but part of the author's whole deal was to poke holes in racist lovecraftian bullshit, so i soupfooted my way through the too-too climax like a realatively good sport). i then read leech, which the cool kids at pegasus books in oakland recommended as i was buying mexican gothic, and that i appreciated much more; turns out i was in the mood for mid-apocalyptic, bipedal parasitism, and the premise was both terribly clever and well-developed. i still don't really understand why the image of dogs' noses kept popping up, but we're all entitled to a mystifying metaphor every now and again, i hope. speaking of, the weird humor piece i finally finished this fall and sent off to the new yorker right before we left for canada was at long last rejected, and then mcsweeney's rejected it with dispiriting alacrity. i was so sure i had a weird gem on my hands! joe, who isn't in the habit of inflating my expectations about writing stuff, was so sure i had a weird gem on my hands! maybe i'll just post it here, and dance like three readers are watching.
our trip to paris was remarkably pleasant–i'd built in a bunch of toothsome stuff, as i mentioned, and figured it would be decent, but i feel like a couple of decades have really done a number on the city's ambient misanthropy, maybe i'm a better tourist now that i've lived in a big city for a long time? maybe all the extra-crotchety boomers that made my family's visit difficult and then ingored me as a solo flâneuse have buggered off to the suburbs? people were great about speaking french with me, and having a smartphone meant that i was able to be generically chatty rather than a supplicant most of the time. our airbnb appeared to be some dude's actual apartment as opposed to some LLC's investment, and the sneakers i had to buy when my chuck taylors fell apart on like our second day didn't give me new-shoe blisters, a no-shit travel miracle. we even found what genuinely seems to be an old isfahan rug at a flea market, and while its mysteriously low price probably means that its previous owner was murdered on it or that it's full at the very least of continental poltergeists, it seems so far that they're the less-is-more sort of phantasms that knocked around that novel the gnomes kept writing. we really needed an extremely big floor covering, so this tradeoff is okay with me.
our trip to paris was remarkably pleasant–i'd built in a bunch of toothsome stuff, as i mentioned, and figured it would be decent, but i feel like a couple of decades have really done a number on the city's ambient misanthropy, maybe i'm a better tourist now that i've lived in a big city for a long time? maybe all the extra-crotchety boomers that made my family's visit difficult and then ingored me as a solo flâneuse have buggered off to the suburbs? people were great about speaking french with me, and having a smartphone meant that i was able to be generically chatty rather than a supplicant most of the time. our airbnb appeared to be some dude's actual apartment as opposed to some LLC's investment, and the sneakers i had to buy when my chuck taylors fell apart on like our second day didn't give me new-shoe blisters, a no-shit travel miracle. we even found what genuinely seems to be an old isfahan rug at a flea market, and while its mysteriously low price probably means that its previous owner was murdered on it or that it's full at the very least of continental poltergeists, it seems so far that they're the less-is-more sort of phantasms that knocked around that novel the gnomes kept writing. we really needed an extremely big floor covering, so this tradeoff is okay with me.
09.02.23 [on the J train]
i made what turned out to be the extremely solid decision to read david copperfield right before* reading barbara kingsolver's demon copperhead, which i managed to hear almost nothing about aside from the whole riffing-on-dickens stuff. i don't know if you know this, but david copperfield is a RIPPING YARN; perhaps dickens was always this way and i just haven't read him in 20 years, maybe he hits a little different when you read him as a crone, maybe that's one of the best novels in the english language or something. but i'll tell you what, it also turns out to be a respectable summer read, immersive as it is, and all of the little adult-dave asides on kid-dave as he saw his mother for the last time and so on–lovely, just lovely. it was excellent to have all of that fresh in my mind when i moved on to barbara kingsolver for comp-lit cud-chewing purposes, even if some of the analogs were a bit superficial, though it turns out i really missed having mister micawber as a major-ish and sympathetic character? (the mccobbs in the contemporary novel are pretty uninteresting, and not at all epistolary). i didn't really respond to opioids as a big plot point, in turn–while i appreciate kingsolver's criticism there and realize that her being moved to make it is a lot of what got her to dance with dickens in the first place, there wasn't much elegance in how it was framed. collapsing the weirdness of the hero's first marriage into the collateral damages of big pharma–demon's first love is infantile because of drugs!–robs that character of the neat little glimmer of sympathy one develops for her at the end, at least for me. rose dartell, in turn, is just boring–and rose dartle was mysterious and a little terrifying in david copperfield!
i've moved from my copperfield/copperhead adventures to paved paradise, a book about parking and americans' disastrous addiction to it, and if i double back and read a victorian city-planning treatise afterward i will surely perish. that said, it's taken care of at least some of the insomnia that's been swiss-cheesing summer nights for me; after 20 minutes of [very astute observations about] parking, half an hour tops, i am fit only for oblivion.
[postscript as i finally input this train-post three months later: that parking book was pretty fantastic, and i think it radicalized me? or radicalized me about something else, i mean. i hope these out-of-sequence updates aren't too annoying, and i'll get better about transcribing them in a timely manner in the new year, baby, believe me this time.]
i've moved from my copperfield/copperhead adventures to paved paradise, a book about parking and americans' disastrous addiction to it, and if i double back and read a victorian city-planning treatise afterward i will surely perish. that said, it's taken care of at least some of the insomnia that's been swiss-cheesing summer nights for me; after 20 minutes of [very astute observations about] parking, half an hour tops, i am fit only for oblivion.
[postscript as i finally input this train-post three months later: that parking book was pretty fantastic, and i think it radicalized me? or radicalized me about something else, i mean. i hope these out-of-sequence updates aren't too annoying, and i'll get better about transcribing them in a timely manner in the new year, baby, believe me this time.]
*technically i took a break and read idra novey's excellent take what you need when it popped up among my library hold requests right in the middle; it's also about the rust belt, and maybe better than demon copperhead, but that is a story for another time.
02.08.23
i forgot to tell you about the only winter course that matters, stanford's english 239:
the only interview that matters, in turn, is the hollywood reporter's harrison ford cover story. it unfolds as TED talks would if i had my way, and on a day that has otherwise been overwhelmingly fucking awful it has brought me peace.
In this course, we will read the three culminating novels of Henry James's 'major phase': The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. These are among the greatest and most profound novels in English. Many people also find them boring or unreadable. Unquestionably, their prose is difficult, with sentences so complex, wandering, and ambiguous, that the sense may be hard to construe. While very little action occurs, topics illuminated include love, money, sex-gender-sexuality, and evil. These three novels, taken seriously, have unusual powers to illuminate your future life, but also perhaps to mislead or ruin it. All are microscopic studies of social interaction, psychology, and selves. Recommended for very advanced and searching students and readers. Please enroll only if you find difficult prose manageable and rewarding, and you anticipate that these particular novels may speak to you at this stage of your life.two of my dearest friends and i took a...memorable henry james class at stanford. one of us might have been a teen polymath who composed music while taking breezy notes; another might have celebrated the end of the term by writing a mass email about their and henry james's long-awaited breakup. i think we all still refer to the grad student who'd switch languages in the middle of statement-questions as the white worm. all course descriptions should roll like this.
the only interview that matters, in turn, is the hollywood reporter's harrison ford cover story. it unfolds as TED talks would if i had my way, and on a day that has otherwise been overwhelmingly fucking awful it has brought me peace.
When asked what he’d want written on his tombstone, Ford replies: “I wouldn’t want it to be ‘Harrison Ford, blah-blah-blah, actor.’ I’d settle for ‘Was Useful.’ ” I point out that’s a particularly reductive way to sum up a life, and Ford shoots back: “Well, there’s not a lot of space on a tombstone.”
[...]
You’ve also rescued several people with your helicopter. How do stranded hikers react when they’re rescued by Harrison Ford?
Well, one time we picked up this woman who was hypothermic on the mountain. She barfed in my cowboy hat but didn’t know who I was until the next day. I stopped doing it because we would be lucky enough to find somebody and then they’d be on Good Morning America talking about “a hero pilot.” It’s nothing fucking like that. It’s a team effort. It’s lame to think about it that way.
[...]
[Shrinking co-creator Bill] Lawrence made it sound like you have a boyish and youthful side that’s very different, and suggested it’s more the real you than what people tend to see.
Do you fish?
No. I mean, not since I was a kid.
There’s this thing called “match the hatch.” It’s when there’s a natural bug in the air the fish are eating and you use an artificial fly that’s the same color. I have a protective coloration. I try to blend in. That’s what I do. When I’m getting dressed, if people are going to be wearing a suit, I wear a suit. If people are wearing blue jeans, I’m wearing blue jeans. I’m comfortable in all kinds of company. If they’re serious, I’m serious. They’re not serious, I’m not serious. And if they’re too fucking serious, I’m not serious. (Laughs.) I don’t know why people have an expectation of me. I come in all colors. I don’t know who’s going to show up. But it’s usually me and it looks familiar.
One of your majors in college was philosophy. Has any of that stayed with you?
Yeah. There’s a Protestant theologian named Paul Tillich who wrote that if you have trouble with the word “God,” take whatever is central and most meaningful to your life and call that God. My mother was Jewish, my father was Catholic, and I was raised Democrat — my moral purpose was being a Democrat with the big D. But it didn’t apply to a political point of view so much as it applied to nature. I didn’t have any religious construct, but I think nature and God are the same thing. The mysterious origin of life — science tells us how it happened, prophecy tells us another story. I found that everything in nature — the complexity, the biodiversity, the symbiotic relationships — is the same thing other people attribute to God. … Now aren’t you glad you asked that question? You want to get back to the funny shit?
I am glad I asked. I haven’t heard you say that before.
I’ve been saving it just for you, man.
01.31.23 [on the F train]
i am going to try submitting something to the new yorker! i think it has a decent shot of being appreciated if i execute the idea well, which is kind of terrifying; now i have to write the hell out of it. i haven't worked on humor for, oh, a decade, when i would buzz mcsweeney's with a list every once in a while,* like a comet that wanted you to try the veal and tip your servers. this is a better idea than those were, but i haven't described it to anyone because i'll need to see if the premise works without explanation for early readers once i have a draft finished. (i don't have a draft finished, though i have the intro together, which for me is half the battle. i'm manifesting, just accept that 2023 is the year of woo-woo.)
this prospective ha-ha of mine - it's a daily shout, in theory - requires research, so i've been getting all kinds of exotic alerts from the academic journal aggregators i fired up when i was writing about iceland in the fall. sounds like a barrel of laughs, right? it is odd working regularly and earnestly at something new and unlikely, but i'm enjoying myself.
my other nonstandard project is an essay due in mid-february on, among other things, robot cats. i am to interview the makers of robot cats about what it is that makes them catlike, and i have a strong suspicion that no one at all will answer my queries. no, that's not quite right - i think one particular source will reply in a way that both bums me out in terms of my own mortality and makes me feel even worse about steve's illness than i already do. it's hard to tell how steve is doing, though it seems clear that he has unfinished business on this plane of existence. i am not not interested in interviewing him about it.
my aunt and godmother's brother died recently, and in the back-and-forth after i wrote to offer condolences i sent her one of some good death poems i read in the latest installment of emma straub's newsletter. it seemed like a good idea at the time - the poem made me feel good - but joe thought it wouldn't comfort her. you can read the whole thing here (it's the second one, "in the beautiful rain"); i was going to tell you my favorite part and realized i don't have one, it's all lovely, but the part that felt like it was meant for me is
*i should have quit when i was ahead with that one; they used my second (as i recall) submission in a book, and my batting average wasn't going to go up.
this prospective ha-ha of mine - it's a daily shout, in theory - requires research, so i've been getting all kinds of exotic alerts from the academic journal aggregators i fired up when i was writing about iceland in the fall. sounds like a barrel of laughs, right? it is odd working regularly and earnestly at something new and unlikely, but i'm enjoying myself.
my other nonstandard project is an essay due in mid-february on, among other things, robot cats. i am to interview the makers of robot cats about what it is that makes them catlike, and i have a strong suspicion that no one at all will answer my queries. no, that's not quite right - i think one particular source will reply in a way that both bums me out in terms of my own mortality and makes me feel even worse about steve's illness than i already do. it's hard to tell how steve is doing, though it seems clear that he has unfinished business on this plane of existence. i am not not interested in interviewing him about it.
my aunt and godmother's brother died recently, and in the back-and-forth after i wrote to offer condolences i sent her one of some good death poems i read in the latest installment of emma straub's newsletter. it seemed like a good idea at the time - the poem made me feel good - but joe thought it wouldn't comfort her. you can read the whole thing here (it's the second one, "in the beautiful rain"); i was going to tell you my favorite part and realized i don't have one, it's all lovely, but the part that felt like it was meant for me is
“Though grudging at first,i'm just about to finish straub's this time tomorrow and discovered last night that its heroine and i have the same birthday, which feels like something she (emma straub, that is) would find amusing; it's a Plot Point. maybe i have an unrealistic sense of what authors want to know about the people reading their books? i once sent patricia lockwood a photo of my purple toe after falling down the stairs in our friends' casita in the dominican republic because i was socked in with thoughts of her boss memoir, and i think it was well-received, but that might not be the best example. a few years after that i sent her a princess di beanie baby that went on to make an appearance on a mid-pandemic virtual book tour; patricia, i hope you never feel like you have to give the authorities a heads up about me.
he fell like the rain,
with his eyes wide open,
willing to change.”
*i should have quit when i was ahead with that one; they used my second (as i recall) submission in a book, and my batting average wasn't going to go up.
01.07.23 [on the J train]
if i had taken communications classes in college instead of lurching into and through my current career like an ewok in an imperial walker i would maybe know what to call the unpleasant shiver of self-awareness one experiences when one is revealed to be representative of a particular demographic (pardon the word salad here, i've only been awake and caffeinated for a bit) - you know, like when you're showering at a youth hostel in amsterdam and the guy in the stall next to you turns out to know your ex-boyfriend and also be a regular at the indie coffee shop you favor a few suburbs up the freeway back home in southern california. the unheimlich of realizing you're a type? this is not quite like when your phone correctly predicts what you're about to search for, but there is a flip side of this, a bourgeois relief when you realize strangers (or artificial intelligences, i guess) already know what you want.
this is all a very inelegant ay of saying i was starting to type WHAT POWERS DOES A GHOUL HAVE and my phone leapt to search results about the speaker of the house, which is in fact the other repulsive and luckless being i have been thinking a lot about this week. on the first or second day of unsuccessful kevin mccarthy coronation i was out for a walk and got an "it's hakeem jeffries" text that i initially thought was from joe - holy shit, i thought, six republicans grew consciences and formed a coalition of the comparatively sane with the democrats! - but it was actually a fundraising bot à la all the "nancy pelosis" that u up?'ed me this fall. i had kind of wanted to get a pool together to take bets on how many votes kev and company would shamble through but i couldn't decide what the prize for the most accurate guesser would be (the buy-ins would go to some charity, i hadn't decided which yet. the aclu?) but i live in fear of getting punished for misrepresenting contest rules, an aversion i developed when i got stuck managing back-of-the-book fine print as a magazine editor that might be with me for good. anyway, congratulations, SPINO, i hope your portrait is a corker.
on ghouls, i just finished bones & all the book, and was reminded in the acknowledgements that the author wrote her "eaters" (it is the story of young people who eat people) as ghouls rather than cannibals, a distinction in her mind that involved their being supernatural beings and not twentieth-century donner partiers or something. this comes up both in the piece that interested me in the book in the first place and in a lithub piece that makes an admirable effort to tease apart the difference between ghouls and cannibals (and the former in camille deangelis's 2015 book vs. the latter in luca guadagnino's 2022 movie with david kajganich's screenplay, which for my money deserves an oscar nomination for some killer edits). there's a lot to break down there, no pun intended, and even more if you engage with the idea that deangelis wrote her book around the time that she became vegan and intended it to address the ethical problems with eating flesh - and i don't want to be unkind, but i think that theme doesn't land very well for me at all, though i certainly care about the subject - but one big clunker is that the layers of compulsion and need aren't exposed with much clarity. in the book the only supernatural power the eaters seem to have is that they can devour whole people (per the title) very quickly and leave only scraps, whereas in the movie eaters aren't that efficient but can smell each other from, in some cases, a significant distance? which seems at least preternatural if not supernatural? (this is the trouble with writing on a train.) in the book the ghoulish urges read a bit more like kink: the antihero can only eat people he despises and the antiheroine can only eat people who desire her (except for her babysitter, which is apparently a different case because she ate her when she was a very small child). also, ghouls are pretty universally, canonically repugnant, and scavengers, and...necrovores? is that what i mean? mark rylance's character, sully, only eats people who have died, but unless you're a massive dragon, a particularly gifted vivisectionist, or the water snake i caught and fed a tadpole on a camping trip in mendocino when i was a merciless tween naturalist, you kill things in the process of eating them (the only character in the book or the movie who eats only part of someone is one who eats their own hand or hands like an autophagous fast-food mascot). inconsistent rules is one of my pet peeves in stories of the supernatural; my other is when vampires get all forrest gump-y and traipse through history only meeting famous people and writing shakespeare's plays.
anyway: ghouls! the ghouls in the book are on their supernatural road trip in the late '90s during clinton's impeachment trial, and its musical references suffer accordingly (no joy division here; one charater asks another if they like shania twain). the villain has a backstory that makes him considerably less interesting, and the endings don't land very well. deangelis was super gracious about and appreicative of all of the strenous adaptation kajganich did, to her credit, though even that adaptation left me fuzzy on the moral and practical distinctions between ghoulishness and cannibalism, but for my part, after watching like 36 hours of congressional shenanigans this week i can't even tell you if house republicans are ghouls or cannibals, so i respect people who can put themselves out there as a general proposition.
completely unrelated: dr. john wyatt greenlee's english eel-rents of the 10th-17th centuries! "any eel-rent noted as having one eel due represent a place where the record is unclear about the number of eels due (such as the rent due for the mill at wolvey in 1251, which called for the mill to pay 1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there to ivo de dene). in each of these cases, the actual number of eels due almost certainly exceeded one."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 are house republicans ghouls or cannibals?
02 how many eels does it cost to live where you live?
03 should i report on the train itself when i'm writing on the train?
on ghouls, i just finished bones & all the book, and was reminded in the acknowledgements that the author wrote her "eaters" (it is the story of young people who eat people) as ghouls rather than cannibals, a distinction in her mind that involved their being supernatural beings and not twentieth-century donner partiers or something. this comes up both in the piece that interested me in the book in the first place and in a lithub piece that makes an admirable effort to tease apart the difference between ghouls and cannibals (and the former in camille deangelis's 2015 book vs. the latter in luca guadagnino's 2022 movie with david kajganich's screenplay, which for my money deserves an oscar nomination for some killer edits). there's a lot to break down there, no pun intended, and even more if you engage with the idea that deangelis wrote her book around the time that she became vegan and intended it to address the ethical problems with eating flesh - and i don't want to be unkind, but i think that theme doesn't land very well for me at all, though i certainly care about the subject - but one big clunker is that the layers of compulsion and need aren't exposed with much clarity. in the book the only supernatural power the eaters seem to have is that they can devour whole people (per the title) very quickly and leave only scraps, whereas in the movie eaters aren't that efficient but can smell each other from, in some cases, a significant distance? which seems at least preternatural if not supernatural? (this is the trouble with writing on a train.) in the book the ghoulish urges read a bit more like kink: the antihero can only eat people he despises and the antiheroine can only eat people who desire her (except for her babysitter, which is apparently a different case because she ate her when she was a very small child). also, ghouls are pretty universally, canonically repugnant, and scavengers, and...necrovores? is that what i mean? mark rylance's character, sully, only eats people who have died, but unless you're a massive dragon, a particularly gifted vivisectionist, or the water snake i caught and fed a tadpole on a camping trip in mendocino when i was a merciless tween naturalist, you kill things in the process of eating them (the only character in the book or the movie who eats only part of someone is one who eats their own hand or hands like an autophagous fast-food mascot). inconsistent rules is one of my pet peeves in stories of the supernatural; my other is when vampires get all forrest gump-y and traipse through history only meeting famous people and writing shakespeare's plays.
anyway: ghouls! the ghouls in the book are on their supernatural road trip in the late '90s during clinton's impeachment trial, and its musical references suffer accordingly (no joy division here; one charater asks another if they like shania twain). the villain has a backstory that makes him considerably less interesting, and the endings don't land very well. deangelis was super gracious about and appreicative of all of the strenous adaptation kajganich did, to her credit, though even that adaptation left me fuzzy on the moral and practical distinctions between ghoulishness and cannibalism, but for my part, after watching like 36 hours of congressional shenanigans this week i can't even tell you if house republicans are ghouls or cannibals, so i respect people who can put themselves out there as a general proposition.
completely unrelated: dr. john wyatt greenlee's english eel-rents of the 10th-17th centuries! "any eel-rent noted as having one eel due represent a place where the record is unclear about the number of eels due (such as the rent due for the mill at wolvey in 1251, which called for the mill to pay 1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there to ivo de dene). in each of these cases, the actual number of eels due almost certainly exceeded one."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 are house republicans ghouls or cannibals?
02 how many eels does it cost to live where you live?
03 should i report on the train itself when i'm writing on the train?
01.01.23
2023: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
i packed up two pairs of light-up 2023 glasses for my nephews.
i renewed my membership with the new york mycological society.
i took some photographs of my bruised toe, then decided against sending one to friends.
i ordered a second(?) copy of this time tomorrow to pick up at emma straub's bookstore.
i sent a photo of my bruised toe to friends.
i revisited yoko ono's film no. 4.
i took a photograph of my sister's drawing of yoko ono's film no. 4.
i packed up two more pairs of light-up 2023 glasses for my nephews.
i stepped in cat shit.
i packed up two pairs of light-up 2023 glasses for my nephews.
i renewed my membership with the new york mycological society.
i took some photographs of my bruised toe, then decided against sending one to friends.
i ordered a second(?) copy of this time tomorrow to pick up at emma straub's bookstore.
i sent a photo of my bruised toe to friends.
i revisited yoko ono's film no. 4.
i took a photograph of my sister's drawing of yoko ono's film no. 4.
i packed up two more pairs of light-up 2023 glasses for my nephews.
i stepped in cat shit.
12.27.22 [on the B train]
i was going to start emma straub's newest book last night and couldn't find it, which is mildly concerning, as it's a big-ass hardcover that has been waggling its eyebrows at me from my etagere-nightstand for a week. it is not under the bed, or under a pile of folded laundry, or behind groceries, or shelved. is it possible i didn't buy it after all? my TBR pile is tall, and i am very undisciplined about adding to it and reprioritizing what's in it, so anything is possible - but i don't think this is one of those things i dreamed and am now thinking is a memory. am i one of the snails in the gastropodlighting news that resurfaced on social media this week? also unlikely, given my relationship with salt, but then again there's this end-of-the-year relationship with mucus.
speaking of emma straub, 2022 was the year i really made myself comfortable among fellow commenters on a popular lifestyle blog. (given that the majority of my freelance work has almost always been on that beat, i'm not really sure why this came as such a surprise.) though i don't share the community's interest in meg ryan's film fashion, podcasts, or non-underwire bras, it was a delightful shock to realize i do like, say, elizabeth strout (and ended up reading all of her olive kitteridge and lucy barton books in two big gulps this year; joe and i both liked the olive miniseries). i really like being pointed at rare john derian sales and, uh, have invested in an astronaut linocut and an embroidered velvet bat accordingly. but the real draw is that i can’t deny the fact that they like me. right now, they like me! they aren't shy about saying so, and i've grown to feel that i have a little pod of strangers rooting for me on the internets. i think and hope i'm a bright spot for them as they are for me? sometimes self-care is taking compliments?
speaking of emma straub, 2022 was the year i really made myself comfortable among fellow commenters on a popular lifestyle blog. (given that the majority of my freelance work has almost always been on that beat, i'm not really sure why this came as such a surprise.) though i don't share the community's interest in meg ryan's film fashion, podcasts, or non-underwire bras, it was a delightful shock to realize i do like, say, elizabeth strout (and ended up reading all of her olive kitteridge and lucy barton books in two big gulps this year; joe and i both liked the olive miniseries). i really like being pointed at rare john derian sales and, uh, have invested in an astronaut linocut and an embroidered velvet bat accordingly. but the real draw is that i can’t deny the fact that they like me. right now, they like me! they aren't shy about saying so, and i've grown to feel that i have a little pod of strangers rooting for me on the internets. i think and hope i'm a bright spot for them as they are for me? sometimes self-care is taking compliments?
12.25.22
i'm not on a train! i mean, as far as i know i'm not on a train. for all i know i could be an extraterrestrial's in-flight movie, in which case i had better not be an amazon studios project.* now more than ever, fuck those guys.
chouette (book). i wish i could remember where i first heard of this novel. knowing my interests, i probably just perked up when someone said it was the story of a woman who gave birth to an owl-baby? that both is and isn't literal; the narrator's daughter is and is not an owl (i think some review said she seemed most like an eastern screech-owl, but i read a lot about owls and could be remembering that from something else). the maternal urges and feelings she describes are frequently repulsive to me, and once i realized that and started sitting with my discomfort and thinking about how i tend to other [the verb] people who are really into their children, well. claire oshetsky's dust flap bio notes that chouette "draws on her own experiences of motherhood," and i know that she has a child, but it's, ah, safe to say this isn't autofiction. from here, it's a novel about what it is like to be the birthing parent of an uncommon child, and what it is like to disagree fundamentally and strenuously with one's coparent about how to approach an uncommon child, and reading it made me a more compassionate person. i've read a lot of strange books about mothers this year; i prefer this one to rachel yoder's nightbitch, which i also liked, and claire vaye watkins's i love you but i've chosen darkness, which was wild when it fictionalized watkins's experience as the daughter of an especially notorious member of the manson family and also weirdly annoying in its treatment of polyamorous people? i don't feel the need to sit with my annoyance in the same way i recognized and was ashamed of the way i think about parents; i support polyamorous people and wish them all the ease and happiness in the world, i just find the procedures of their love lives boring. i find the procedures of just about everyone's love lives boring! also "joyfriend" is the silliest word in town. chouette is worth reading.
the harbinger (film). i learned of the brooklyn horror film festival's existence just as it started this year and wish i could have seen more, but oh, am i thrilled i got to see this; it's a dream-logic tragedy about the pandemic in new york (and everywhere, really, but especially about new york; it was shot here in 2021, and it got the atmosphere of being here in 2020 just right with all kinds of little touches that were agonizing and therapeutic at the same time?) and mental illness is one of the best things i saw this year. i don't want to say too much about it, but i will say that it was a great relief to see several of the actors and writer/director andy mitton at the q&a afterward, for secret reasons.
katjes (plant-based gummi candy). the day i realized my childhood german friends didn't actually know what they were talking about when they contended that haribo goldbären were made with vegetarian gelatin (not a thing) wasn't one of the worst days of my life, but it wasn't a good one. katjes doesn't use palm oil, either! i spent a lot of time in grocery store candy aisles, for science, when we were in berlin this fall, and am here to say that their rainbow gummies are, like, several orders of magnitude better than veg-friendly haribo. (aside: haribo doesn't use palm oil, and almost all sugar used in the UK is vegan.) anyway, katjes seems to have scored some big stateside distribution deals, and their stuff turns up at duane reade and walgreens every now and again (and at economy candy). exciting and dangerous!
chouette (book). i wish i could remember where i first heard of this novel. knowing my interests, i probably just perked up when someone said it was the story of a woman who gave birth to an owl-baby? that both is and isn't literal; the narrator's daughter is and is not an owl (i think some review said she seemed most like an eastern screech-owl, but i read a lot about owls and could be remembering that from something else). the maternal urges and feelings she describes are frequently repulsive to me, and once i realized that and started sitting with my discomfort and thinking about how i tend to other [the verb] people who are really into their children, well. claire oshetsky's dust flap bio notes that chouette "draws on her own experiences of motherhood," and i know that she has a child, but it's, ah, safe to say this isn't autofiction. from here, it's a novel about what it is like to be the birthing parent of an uncommon child, and what it is like to disagree fundamentally and strenuously with one's coparent about how to approach an uncommon child, and reading it made me a more compassionate person. i've read a lot of strange books about mothers this year; i prefer this one to rachel yoder's nightbitch, which i also liked, and claire vaye watkins's i love you but i've chosen darkness, which was wild when it fictionalized watkins's experience as the daughter of an especially notorious member of the manson family and also weirdly annoying in its treatment of polyamorous people? i don't feel the need to sit with my annoyance in the same way i recognized and was ashamed of the way i think about parents; i support polyamorous people and wish them all the ease and happiness in the world, i just find the procedures of their love lives boring. i find the procedures of just about everyone's love lives boring! also "joyfriend" is the silliest word in town. chouette is worth reading.
the harbinger (film). i learned of the brooklyn horror film festival's existence just as it started this year and wish i could have seen more, but oh, am i thrilled i got to see this; it's a dream-logic tragedy about the pandemic in new york (and everywhere, really, but especially about new york; it was shot here in 2021, and it got the atmosphere of being here in 2020 just right with all kinds of little touches that were agonizing and therapeutic at the same time?) and mental illness is one of the best things i saw this year. i don't want to say too much about it, but i will say that it was a great relief to see several of the actors and writer/director andy mitton at the q&a afterward, for secret reasons.
katjes (plant-based gummi candy). the day i realized my childhood german friends didn't actually know what they were talking about when they contended that haribo goldbären were made with vegetarian gelatin (not a thing) wasn't one of the worst days of my life, but it wasn't a good one. katjes doesn't use palm oil, either! i spent a lot of time in grocery store candy aisles, for science, when we were in berlin this fall, and am here to say that their rainbow gummies are, like, several orders of magnitude better than veg-friendly haribo. (aside: haribo doesn't use palm oil, and almost all sugar used in the UK is vegan.) anyway, katjes seems to have scored some big stateside distribution deals, and their stuff turns up at duane reade and walgreens every now and again (and at economy candy). exciting and dangerous!
*i enjoyed sea of tranquility's handling of the simulation hypothesis, though i didn't enjoy it quite enough to include it in this CONSUMED, apparently. i really enjoyed how a slate writer interviewed emily st. john mandel last week per her twitter request so that she could say that she is not married, have it credibly reported, and then update her time-capsule wikipedia page accordingly. as it happens, earlier this year *i* helped someone update their wikipedia page because they needed information related to the dissolution of their marriage corrected! they have not written any science fiction, as far as i know.
12.23.22 [on the 5 train]
i'm reading an excellent book about eels (mostly anguilla anguilla, european eels), and last night's chapters burrowed into the mysterious longevity they experience (vs. enjoy) when they are taken from the wild and thus aren't prompted to transition from their third life stage of yellow eelhood, or adolescence, to the fourth and final life stage of silver eelhood, or sexual maturity, which is when they grow reproductive organs, their stomachs dissolve into their bodies, and they return to the sargasso sea to breed and die. there was in particular the story of a small swedish eel that a little boy caught and threw in a well in the 19th century that ended up living in twilight down there for what some claim was like 150 years. stories about this brantevik eel, called åle by humans and commemorated when he died in 2014, are often paired with anguilla anguilla stock photos captioned something like "this is not the eel we're talking about; this eel is alive." the very old eel never got very large, and his eyes got much bigger than yellow eels' eyes usually do. the eel book author presents the deathless nonsleep of åle the well-eel as something like a busted vampire's existence in an anne rice novel or only lovers left alive (a 2013 jim jarmusch movie about vampires starring tilda swinton ostensibly so far up my alley that it might straight-up be my alley that i somehow hated so much it's actually a little disturbing to think about it now). how bummed can an eel be, and how should our appreciation of how bummed an eel can be matter, if it matters at all? in my first 13 years, as a person who was at least in theory willing to eat fish, i am almost positive i never had eel - i've never had most seafood, actually - and i'm glad. in other news, did you know that the sargasso sea is just a seaweed-covered extra-mysterious patch of the atlantic ocean that's been squared off with currents? ("sargasso" comes from the seaweed, a brown algae called sargassum.)
on things that aren't pleasurable for me, we ended up at a matisyahu concert at brooklyn bowl last night. the initial plan as of early this week was to go bowling on the lower east side with friends, said friends discovered the concert at brooklyn bowl and suggested we bowl and see the show, and said friends then got sick and bowed out, leading us to realize beneath a giant dreidel-shaped disco ball that we didn't know as much about spiritual reggae-beatboxing as we probably should have before committing to the evening. it was the worst show i've attended since high school friends peer pressured me into seeing jars of clay at the orange county fair! but i survived, which is more than poor åle can say.
on things that aren't pleasurable for me, we ended up at a matisyahu concert at brooklyn bowl last night. the initial plan as of early this week was to go bowling on the lower east side with friends, said friends discovered the concert at brooklyn bowl and suggested we bowl and see the show, and said friends then got sick and bowed out, leading us to realize beneath a giant dreidel-shaped disco ball that we didn't know as much about spiritual reggae-beatboxing as we probably should have before committing to the evening. it was the worst show i've attended since high school friends peer pressured me into seeing jars of clay at the orange county fair! but i survived, which is more than poor åle can say.
01.30.22
the guy tending the left half of the theater's bar hadn't seen drive my car yet, but he was very excited about seeing it: "i hadn't heard anything about it until like a day or two ago and suddenly everyone's talking about it. and it's three hours long!" dances with murakami, i said. the guy who sat down at my left had just gotten out of the early screening: "have you seen christopher nolan's tenet,* where half of the action goes forward and half of it goes backward? we're like that, meeting in the middle, with me just coming from the experience you're about to have. i won't say anything to spoil it for you, but i liked it."
i asked him if he'd read the short story the film is based on, or any murakami; he hadn't. "i hear murakami is like japan's philip roth** and john steinbeck and [some other dude i don't remember]," he said. i agreed that he was a beast. i had read a lot of murakami, i said, and i thought of him more like japan's jane austen: his stories combine and recombine constants in a way i found soothing to revisit. mysterious women, cats, whiskey, vinyl, jazz, pasta, disappearances, writers... he'd heard that this was the first murakami work that'd been made into a film, or maybe just that murakami was famously tricky to adapt. i thought that was exciting, i said, like how pynchon's, what was it, inherent vice was an unexpectedly killer movie (that can song!). "oh my god, PTA," and we just sat in the acronym for a minute until the carpet split at a previously-invisible seam and we plunged into the center of the earth, even though joe was sitting on the other side of me and probably only heard a third of the conversation.
i asked him if he'd read the short story the film is based on, or any murakami; he hadn't. "i hear murakami is like japan's philip roth** and john steinbeck and [some other dude i don't remember]," he said. i agreed that he was a beast. i had read a lot of murakami, i said, and i thought of him more like japan's jane austen: his stories combine and recombine constants in a way i found soothing to revisit. mysterious women, cats, whiskey, vinyl, jazz, pasta, disappearances, writers... he'd heard that this was the first murakami work that'd been made into a film, or maybe just that murakami was famously tricky to adapt. i thought that was exciting, i said, like how pynchon's, what was it, inherent vice was an unexpectedly killer movie (that can song!). "oh my god, PTA," and we just sat in the acronym for a minute until the carpet split at a previously-invisible seam and we plunged into the center of the earth, even though joe was sitting on the other side of me and probably only heard a third of the conversation.
*our friend lesley loves helen dewitt's the last samurai harder than most people love most things in this world and found tenet impenetrable. tenet daunts me.
**he was really into philip roth, "but not when the novel is really just him thinking about himself," which – i didn't follow up on that, but if i had been lewis carroll's caterpillar at that moment i would have exhaled a smoke ring in the shape of john updike and it would have galloped around the bar once and disappeared. i still miss smoking.
01.23.22
the spotify station(?) that had been serving up the monster hits of my junior high's harrowing dances, a coincidence i would have died before revealing to my beloved charity bookstore's dewy manager even though he probably guessed as much,* played boyz ii men's "end of the road," because of course it did, and i let a few tears leak out, quick, under my mask like it never happened. "you look like you know a lot about books," said a customer who wanted something she hadn't read in fantasy or horror, and i sent her home with lovely hardcover copies of toby barlow's sharp teeth and babayaga. they had crowned my beleaguered section at the front of the store, where misshelved YA novels and mass-market thrillers kept trailing in like fuckin kudzu, for two months. i took a last, long whiff of the basement, bought a signed first US edition of the satanic verses (john - best wishes for your retirement. write a book... salman r., may 89) that had kicked around the store for years, and took my leave a final time.
a couple of days later i reunited with old friends from my wednesday-afternoon shift who hadn't been back to volunteer since the pandemic began. we gathered for holiday snacks at V's place, a stunning two-thousand-square-foot loft next to the stella mccartney store. she's lived there since the '70s and filled it with massive now-iconic canvases and furniture she picked up from friends and, like, department stores when you could get a frank gehry wiggle chair for a hundred bucks. "my cats loved them," she said, "and when they scratched them it just made them look even better." V lives in the new york apartment you'd expect a donna tartt or hanya yanagihara character to have. she's even got a singed child mannequin holding a heavy velvet drapery open!
when we were all arranged around V's refreshments, i told the story behind the email to the volunteer coordinator on which i'd cc'ed them. management had told E, the art-book expert who'd been the designated guy to get arrested at DC protests for years, that he wouldn't be rehired. they'd declined to hire a volunteer who said that as a staffer she'd be most excited about developing the community around the store. they'd told the current manager not to worry about selling books, and to do his best to pitch the store as an event space for hire; they'd talked about converting shelves into false panels that could slide back to reveal bars and coat checks. (the donation area disappared a year ago; it was distasteful to have it so close to the front door.) since they weren't interested in the hiring conditions the new union set forth, they brought in temps to replace all the volunteers who'd stopped coming back. the last employee we all knew, the one who'd assured me i was making his job easier, left. and i left. being a scab that also kept a zombie bookstore shambling along was too much, at last, for me.
P, the artist with koons cooties, thought i should write a splashy new york cover article revealing all of the sordid politics behind the store's slow, semi-secret death. a petition, there should also be a petition! A, the retired UN guy who lives on roosevelt island and has fabulous stories of drinking obscure national beverages and falling asleep under trees, nodded when i suggested that getting michiko kakutani interested in an RIP-barry-like piece could move hearts and minds. V made more tea and suggested we reconvene in the new year to figure out how we would save our store. saving a beloved neighborhood bookstore and saving a beloved neighborhood "bookstore" are not the same thing. is knowing the difference useful?
V sent around a times photo of a gorgeous library the other day. i'd love to get together again as well, i said.
a couple of days later i reunited with old friends from my wednesday-afternoon shift who hadn't been back to volunteer since the pandemic began. we gathered for holiday snacks at V's place, a stunning two-thousand-square-foot loft next to the stella mccartney store. she's lived there since the '70s and filled it with massive now-iconic canvases and furniture she picked up from friends and, like, department stores when you could get a frank gehry wiggle chair for a hundred bucks. "my cats loved them," she said, "and when they scratched them it just made them look even better." V lives in the new york apartment you'd expect a donna tartt or hanya yanagihara character to have. she's even got a singed child mannequin holding a heavy velvet drapery open!
when we were all arranged around V's refreshments, i told the story behind the email to the volunteer coordinator on which i'd cc'ed them. management had told E, the art-book expert who'd been the designated guy to get arrested at DC protests for years, that he wouldn't be rehired. they'd declined to hire a volunteer who said that as a staffer she'd be most excited about developing the community around the store. they'd told the current manager not to worry about selling books, and to do his best to pitch the store as an event space for hire; they'd talked about converting shelves into false panels that could slide back to reveal bars and coat checks. (the donation area disappared a year ago; it was distasteful to have it so close to the front door.) since they weren't interested in the hiring conditions the new union set forth, they brought in temps to replace all the volunteers who'd stopped coming back. the last employee we all knew, the one who'd assured me i was making his job easier, left. and i left. being a scab that also kept a zombie bookstore shambling along was too much, at last, for me.
P, the artist with koons cooties, thought i should write a splashy new york cover article revealing all of the sordid politics behind the store's slow, semi-secret death. a petition, there should also be a petition! A, the retired UN guy who lives on roosevelt island and has fabulous stories of drinking obscure national beverages and falling asleep under trees, nodded when i suggested that getting michiko kakutani interested in an RIP-barry-like piece could move hearts and minds. V made more tea and suggested we reconvene in the new year to figure out how we would save our store. saving a beloved neighborhood bookstore and saving a beloved neighborhood "bookstore" are not the same thing. is knowing the difference useful?
V sent around a times photo of a gorgeous library the other day. i'd love to get together again as well, i said.
*the welsh researchers who studied how masking affects facial attractiveness report that the effect isn't about occlusion, but i am unconvinced.
08.07.21
so this comparatively-unknown literary magazine just published this creepy sexual poem named for and about a very well known writer whose bestselling essay collection i read a year or two ago and whose parents, i read last night when i was struggling to fall asleep, were once investigated for human trafficking, as someone discovered last year? (lit twitter and weird twitter and weird lit twitter are all over this, the poem, because it's both unsporting clickbait and because the writing is so bad that it's typically referred to as "the poem," the loose consensus is that one should avoid it if possible, for both reasons).*
when i finally went down around five this morning i dreamed that i went to a new, fancy salon-retail-organic-garden** hybrid place, for i needed a haircut, and my stylist was the writer. i explained to her that i envisioned bangs, but she would have to come up with some way to texturize them because i have a cowlick at my right temple and my hair has always parted like curtains right there. i also wanted a pretty short pixie cut, but skewing femme, please, so go soft at the edges and follow a rounded shape at the back of my head, but otherwise i trusted her to do whatever she thought was right. things started off badly, as she accused me of leaving bleach on for far too long when i prepped for dyeing my hair blue at home (true, i ended up with some little scabs last time after frying myself), and then she kept wandering off. the appointment began in the early afternoon, but by early evening we were under a scraggly live oak in the organic garden and the writer still hadn't gotten to work. i knelt before her as though we were gawain and the green knight*** as she finally, finally, started to razor the back of my neck. "if you had a boob**** that was floating in a vat of fluid, what would you do to make it float higher or lower? that's what you can think about while i do this," she said. one of the dickensian orphans gathered around us piped up: one should add stones to the vat, which would increase the volume of its contents and elevate the boob. that's stupid, i said. i would add a fluid with lower specific gravity than that of the boob-fluid if i wanted the boob to sink, and a fluid with higher specific gravity if i wanted it to rise.
when i finally went down around five this morning i dreamed that i went to a new, fancy salon-retail-organic-garden** hybrid place, for i needed a haircut, and my stylist was the writer. i explained to her that i envisioned bangs, but she would have to come up with some way to texturize them because i have a cowlick at my right temple and my hair has always parted like curtains right there. i also wanted a pretty short pixie cut, but skewing femme, please, so go soft at the edges and follow a rounded shape at the back of my head, but otherwise i trusted her to do whatever she thought was right. things started off badly, as she accused me of leaving bleach on for far too long when i prepped for dyeing my hair blue at home (true, i ended up with some little scabs last time after frying myself), and then she kept wandering off. the appointment began in the early afternoon, but by early evening we were under a scraggly live oak in the organic garden and the writer still hadn't gotten to work. i knelt before her as though we were gawain and the green knight*** as she finally, finally, started to razor the back of my neck. "if you had a boob**** that was floating in a vat of fluid, what would you do to make it float higher or lower? that's what you can think about while i do this," she said. one of the dickensian orphans gathered around us piped up: one should add stones to the vat, which would increase the volume of its contents and elevate the boob. that's stupid, i said. i would add a fluid with lower specific gravity than that of the boob-fluid if i wanted the boob to sink, and a fluid with higher specific gravity if i wanted it to rise.
*i immediately found and read it, and i'm now sorry to have given it a click and to have those lines in my head, but here we are.
**i'm on a nordic-authors kick and halfway through auður ava ólafsdóttir's the greenhouse, which i'm enjoying; her miss iceland is a fascinating look at her country's bro-centric midcentury literary culture.
***we saw that movie yesterday; i thought it was quite grand, particularly alicia vikander's green speech, though the CGI fox wasn't animated very realistically.
****ólafsdóttir's hotel silence, also good, concludes with the recovery of three disembodied breasts. like japanese in translation, icelandic in translation has, i find, a very distinctive/characteristic(?) cadence, and it's soothing.
11.27.20
i have developed my brand successfully enough that a friend sent me a link to a times piece about a rescued swan that was spirited to the bird hospital via bike, subway, ikea bag, and so on by another friend. longtime readers, and that would be all of you, i imagine, might remember my mentioning a favorite from said hospital a while back; that would be her, the teal-plumed virago i've known for most of the years i've headed uptown to my pigeon basement. since i haven't been there since february, i didn't know until reading that piece that she's left the staff to do something else (officially, at least, since she's clearly still muscling birds across town); that's the kind of news you end up acknowledging you're glad to have received at a distance, as you can't say with any confidence what your face might have done if you'd heard it in person.
volunteer friends at my bookstore, in turn, had been making noise about getting together for the past several weeks (the store has been closed since mid-march and shows ominous signs of being closed for good; that's another story), and none of us had contact information for A, a septuagenarian english UN lifer who lives out on roosevelt island and feeds me books like siegfried sassoon's memoirs of a fox-hunting man. no one was sure of his last name, even; why would we need to be sure of each other's last names when we all knew precisely where we'd coincide every week? someone had the vague idea that another former fellow volunteer might have his email address, but i decided that wasn't good enough and started digging around in old gothamist threads on posts about roosevelt island for commenters who sounded like him and shared his name. eventually i found one that began with Bunk! and sounded appropriately tetchy, so i cross-referenced the last name i found there with some neighborhood directories i found at another site, found a couple of phone numbers listed with an address on the island, then called one: alors, there was A's unmistakable accent in my ear! it's so lovely to catch up with you, i sang, i've read so many dreadful books since we saw each other last! (talking about books you've cherished is marvelous, but talking about the rotters is even better.) A and his wife have mostly retreated to their home up in ulster county and he wasn't able to come down for the first confluence of volunteers at a garden near nyu last week, but i did see V, who brought along the just-published german hardcover of her memoir about running a cinema on virgin gorda in the '70s and was very patient when we all insisted she pose at length with it. we'll coincide again soon, though we're going to have to do it at someplace like a museum; while it's temperate to the point of being uncomfortably warm indoors today, the city is conceding the season soon.
volunteer friends at my bookstore, in turn, had been making noise about getting together for the past several weeks (the store has been closed since mid-march and shows ominous signs of being closed for good; that's another story), and none of us had contact information for A, a septuagenarian english UN lifer who lives out on roosevelt island and feeds me books like siegfried sassoon's memoirs of a fox-hunting man. no one was sure of his last name, even; why would we need to be sure of each other's last names when we all knew precisely where we'd coincide every week? someone had the vague idea that another former fellow volunteer might have his email address, but i decided that wasn't good enough and started digging around in old gothamist threads on posts about roosevelt island for commenters who sounded like him and shared his name. eventually i found one that began with Bunk! and sounded appropriately tetchy, so i cross-referenced the last name i found there with some neighborhood directories i found at another site, found a couple of phone numbers listed with an address on the island, then called one: alors, there was A's unmistakable accent in my ear! it's so lovely to catch up with you, i sang, i've read so many dreadful books since we saw each other last! (talking about books you've cherished is marvelous, but talking about the rotters is even better.) A and his wife have mostly retreated to their home up in ulster county and he wasn't able to come down for the first confluence of volunteers at a garden near nyu last week, but i did see V, who brought along the just-published german hardcover of her memoir about running a cinema on virgin gorda in the '70s and was very patient when we all insisted she pose at length with it. we'll coincide again soon, though we're going to have to do it at someplace like a museum; while it's temperate to the point of being uncomfortably warm indoors today, the city is conceding the season soon.
10.21.20
a silly twitter joke inspired me to read dune and: now i've read dune! i don't know that the experience was especially life-changing, but i do have a strong, halloween-adjacent urge to make myself look like a massive worm that the pandemic both enables and complicates. i promise that i'll stop talking about dune and dune-related program activities soon, but in the interim,
- a friend of a friend is translating dune into icelandic for the first time: he made a great point about there being no easy translation for the word "dune" / bc they don't have fucking deserts / it's like "hot hill of sand[.]"
- my best friend in the whole world fed paper towels into his typewriter and wrote me a letter on them while watching and narrating dune when we were undergrads; i hung that letter on my wall in england as an exchange student and wonder still what i might have done to deserve him.
- is dune the purest narrative? the big reveal is, obviously, a worm, and when one finally rolls up the reveal is literally "Then they saw it!"
- please help me actualize this worm costume / agenda.
- a friend of a friend is translating dune into icelandic for the first time: he made a great point about there being no easy translation for the word "dune" / bc they don't have fucking deserts / it's like "hot hill of sand[.]"
- my best friend in the whole world fed paper towels into his typewriter and wrote me a letter on them while watching and narrating dune when we were undergrads; i hung that letter on my wall in england as an exchange student and wonder still what i might have done to deserve him.
- is dune the purest narrative? the big reveal is, obviously, a worm, and when one finally rolls up the reveal is literally "Then they saw it!"
- please help me actualize this worm costume / agenda.
09.04.20
i snuck a photo of a fabulous tagged van as i was scrambling to meet E in a hard-to-reach corner of brooklyn this afternoon, and joe snuck a photo of the moon caught in the williamsburg bridge as i butchered an avocado this evening; balance is satisfying. here they are in my phone, punctuating shots of the cats slinking into the hall to huff the elevator.
i would like to say that i blundered through the navy yard as gracefully as steve and matty intimidated the neighbors' welcome mat, but i've left manhattan just four times since the spring and am no longer accustomed to interiors in which i shouldn't be naked. E and i talked about traveling in the After Times - we met in tasmania in january - and lifted our mouth-drapes at each other re: how very few people would get how our work has changed. it was strange a year ago; now it's unimaginable, from where i'm sitting, though some of our mutual friends continue to happy-talk about meeting in, like, istanbul next year. she's planning to go for an MFA this fall, and i have saurian memories of the essays i pitched before i decided to bank coals and say yes to a season of simple carbs.
i confessed to E that i think i just read a dozen books by women, no breaks for dudes, for the first time since i was a tween. that wasn't especially intentional, but i do notice that my reading list is evolving: prior to this spring i grabbed anything that caught my eye, a not-insubstantial portion of my reads came from my used bookstore volunteer gig, hey, it's all easy and usually cheap. now literary social media is my weekly booster shot; i feel like a baby grad, an ickle neonate in a mortarboard. am i better?
i would like to say that i blundered through the navy yard as gracefully as steve and matty intimidated the neighbors' welcome mat, but i've left manhattan just four times since the spring and am no longer accustomed to interiors in which i shouldn't be naked. E and i talked about traveling in the After Times - we met in tasmania in january - and lifted our mouth-drapes at each other re: how very few people would get how our work has changed. it was strange a year ago; now it's unimaginable, from where i'm sitting, though some of our mutual friends continue to happy-talk about meeting in, like, istanbul next year. she's planning to go for an MFA this fall, and i have saurian memories of the essays i pitched before i decided to bank coals and say yes to a season of simple carbs.
i confessed to E that i think i just read a dozen books by women, no breaks for dudes, for the first time since i was a tween. that wasn't especially intentional, but i do notice that my reading list is evolving: prior to this spring i grabbed anything that caught my eye, a not-insubstantial portion of my reads came from my used bookstore volunteer gig, hey, it's all easy and usually cheap. now literary social media is my weekly booster shot; i feel like a baby grad, an ickle neonate in a mortarboard. am i better?
06.28.20
[Martha] Gellhorn told [John Simpson, the BBC's world-affairs editor] about attending John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration ball. Gellhorn was alone and feeling out of place when she sensed the President and his entourage moving in her direction. “There was Kennedy himself coming towards her with all the hangers-on and the freaks and the creeps,” Simpson said. “And, as he walks up to her, and she said, ‘Oh, fuck. He’s gonna make me Secretary of State.’ ” It wasn’t that. Kennedy had heard that Gellhorn used to live in the White House and might know of a way to sneak out from time to time. “ ‘Darling’—she called him ‘Darling’—‘That’s easy,’ ” Simpson continued, in a broad American accent. Gellhorn told the President about a small gate at the back of the property. “There’s only one guy in charge of it,” she said. “Roosevelt used to just give him money all the time.”
(sam knight, "a memorial for the remarkable martha gellhorn")
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)