it's been such a long time since i participated in the first and second parts of 600 highwaymen's a thousand ways, a triptych of participatory experimental theatre. the first time, in may of 2021, i met a stranger and a bot on a phone call and we were directed through telling a story together; the second time, a month later, i met another stranger through a big piece of plexiglass in an empty theater and we interacted as a stack of cards instructed us. this time i went up to midtown to what i figured until today was the new york public library's stephen a. schwartzman building (the one with patience and fortitude, the lions, and where i went to try to get my first nypl library card almost two decades ago because i didn't know any better); actually it was the stavros niarchos foundation library, the one southeast of the flagship that replaced the branch where i actually did get my library card. i walked up to the seventh floor, hung up my coat and left my tote bag on a table in an event space, took one of sixteen chairs after reading the card it held, and waited for the door to shut.
we were encouraged to remember what happened simply by remembering it, and i want to honor that by, to paraphrase myself when i'm mocking a camera-happy friend, just taking a picture with my feelings. i will say that at one point another participant came up and put his hand on my shoulder because he thought i was the one, of all of us, who most liked to be by myself - his eyes smiled at me above his mask - and i put my hand on his shoulder: he would know that because he was the one. i think we can smell each other.
as we were walking out and waiting for the elevator i asked one of the other participants if she'd done parts one and two of the production; she had, and she'd even done the phone one twice, because she'd wanted to know what it was like to be person A and person B in the exchange. we agreed that we'd found the first parts more intense than this one; i remarked that those had hit like booze at altitude, and she said it was just like that. did the creators have to wait until now to stage this conclusion to the cycle because of the tricksiness of meeting in person during the pandemic? (there was touching today, as i said, and a few of us weren't wearing masks.) i learned when i got home that it was staged in seattle in march of last year, so - no, at least kind of no. i also said i thought that mimicked what the stages of transitioning out of lockdown had felt like; we entered it together, but each of us left it alone, in their own way, the connections all eroded. her name is molly, and she told me she was going downstairs to use the bathroom; i told her my name was lauren and i was going to go play frogger with my husband. that sounded like an excellent thing to do, she said. i have already forgotten the wording of what she told me she was glad to do with me today and i agreed i was glad to have done with her; i walked downtown to st. mark's place after repocketing the copper arcade token i'd passed around the circle, to molly, and when i got there i fed it into a cabinet and it was gone.
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?
01.03.23
CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.
bones and all (film). i have loved mark rylance's weird magic ever since i saw his shakespeare-on-broadway double-header (twelfth night's viola one night, richard iii's richard the next!) almost a decade ago, so i would have itched to see this knowing only that he was part of it; i also love joy division's "atmosphere," which promos and the film itself use beautifully and, c'mon, timmy chardonnay as a star-crossed cannibal in a luca guadagnino movie? so much to delight. the cinematography is gorgeous, and i loved the little nods to fraught road movies like badlands (which wowed us at a lovely theater in philly when we spent a weekend there for a friend's wedding this fall). as in call me by your name, guadagnino's last set-in-the-'80s doomed love story starring timothée chalamet, the needle drops are fantastic throughout (along with joy division, there's new order, george strait, a-ha's "the sun always shines on tv," a track that should propel every movie henceforth and be recut into all archives*). i'm now reading the camille deangelis YA novel adapted for the movie, which the author herself has said is not her favorite work? digging into how the story changed is entertaining, even though i'm dreadful at fiction and would never write or adapt it myself.
guillermo del toro: crafting pinocchio (exhibit). it would never have occurred to me to see if moma was open on new year's day; why on earth would moma be open on new year's day? hats off to my sister for asking the tough questions so that she could introduce her sons to jackson pollack** and friends; we had two o'clock tickets for the museum on the first and it was delightful. it also would not have occurred to me to go up there for a guillermo del toro show, for while seeing his stuff up close is delightful (i quite enjoyed at home with monsters at lacma back in 2016, also with jo and my older nephew when he was puppet-sized), i sort of figured another exhibit would be more of the same - and i didn't love nightmare alley, his last project i'd seen. but! this joint was organized during film production, and it did a bang-up job of highlighting all the painstaking work that goes into stop-motion animation and del toro's characteristic world-building. jo's sons are six and four, and i think a lot of the show went over their heads, but i think it would blow a crafty tween's mind; if i'd seen that stuff when i was a sprout i'd be a tattoo artist or/and a necromancer today. i also loved the big wall of photos and titles at the end of the exhibition highlighting all of the artisans and technicians that worked on the movie; the whole presentation deconstructs and celebrates passion projects in a way that makes visitors want to make complicated stuff and support other makers. bonus points for making pinocchio about fascist italy! it's time to bring (talking about the horrors of) fascism back.
splat midnight jade (hair dye). my hair has been various shades of platinum-to-plantain blonde and medium-to-light blue for the last few years; since it never gets more than an inch or two long, i bleach and dye all of it without messing around with sectioning and root touchups. i'm pretty good at it! this stuff was supposed to turn my hair an unprecedented dark green, which felt like a festive angle from which to approach the winter. in practice it's vivid cobalt that sizzles into darkness at at the edges, and it runs down my temples and cheekbones when it gets wet two full weeks after application and several enthusiastic shampoos, so when i get caught in the rain i'm a cross between a blue morpho and rudy giuliani (but the good news is that i have some information that will blow the 2020 election wide open). this dye is not the right dye for me! tantalizing teal (and its soul-frying powder bleach) remains the chemical headsuit to beat.
*i really, really love a-ha. it still saddens me that that my trombone champ "take on me" endorsement didn't make it into that new york times newsletter i was talking about two weeks ago, but they did this, and: heh.
**her sons were unimpressed with jackson pollack. they couldn't get enough of yoko ono's film no. 4, though.
bones and all (film). i have loved mark rylance's weird magic ever since i saw his shakespeare-on-broadway double-header (twelfth night's viola one night, richard iii's richard the next!) almost a decade ago, so i would have itched to see this knowing only that he was part of it; i also love joy division's "atmosphere," which promos and the film itself use beautifully and, c'mon, timmy chardonnay as a star-crossed cannibal in a luca guadagnino movie? so much to delight. the cinematography is gorgeous, and i loved the little nods to fraught road movies like badlands (which wowed us at a lovely theater in philly when we spent a weekend there for a friend's wedding this fall). as in call me by your name, guadagnino's last set-in-the-'80s doomed love story starring timothée chalamet, the needle drops are fantastic throughout (along with joy division, there's new order, george strait, a-ha's "the sun always shines on tv," a track that should propel every movie henceforth and be recut into all archives*). i'm now reading the camille deangelis YA novel adapted for the movie, which the author herself has said is not her favorite work? digging into how the story changed is entertaining, even though i'm dreadful at fiction and would never write or adapt it myself.
guillermo del toro: crafting pinocchio (exhibit). it would never have occurred to me to see if moma was open on new year's day; why on earth would moma be open on new year's day? hats off to my sister for asking the tough questions so that she could introduce her sons to jackson pollack** and friends; we had two o'clock tickets for the museum on the first and it was delightful. it also would not have occurred to me to go up there for a guillermo del toro show, for while seeing his stuff up close is delightful (i quite enjoyed at home with monsters at lacma back in 2016, also with jo and my older nephew when he was puppet-sized), i sort of figured another exhibit would be more of the same - and i didn't love nightmare alley, his last project i'd seen. but! this joint was organized during film production, and it did a bang-up job of highlighting all the painstaking work that goes into stop-motion animation and del toro's characteristic world-building. jo's sons are six and four, and i think a lot of the show went over their heads, but i think it would blow a crafty tween's mind; if i'd seen that stuff when i was a sprout i'd be a tattoo artist or/and a necromancer today. i also loved the big wall of photos and titles at the end of the exhibition highlighting all of the artisans and technicians that worked on the movie; the whole presentation deconstructs and celebrates passion projects in a way that makes visitors want to make complicated stuff and support other makers. bonus points for making pinocchio about fascist italy! it's time to bring (talking about the horrors of) fascism back.
splat midnight jade (hair dye). my hair has been various shades of platinum-to-plantain blonde and medium-to-light blue for the last few years; since it never gets more than an inch or two long, i bleach and dye all of it without messing around with sectioning and root touchups. i'm pretty good at it! this stuff was supposed to turn my hair an unprecedented dark green, which felt like a festive angle from which to approach the winter. in practice it's vivid cobalt that sizzles into darkness at at the edges, and it runs down my temples and cheekbones when it gets wet two full weeks after application and several enthusiastic shampoos, so when i get caught in the rain i'm a cross between a blue morpho and rudy giuliani (but the good news is that i have some information that will blow the 2020 election wide open). this dye is not the right dye for me! tantalizing teal (and its soul-frying powder bleach) remains the chemical headsuit to beat.
*i really, really love a-ha. it still saddens me that that my trombone champ "take on me" endorsement didn't make it into that new york times newsletter i was talking about two weeks ago, but they did this, and: heh.
**her sons were unimpressed with jackson pollack. they couldn't get enough of yoko ono's film no. 4, though.
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.
12.29.22 [on the 6 train]
it's warmed back up, and we're headed up to the bronx zoo - by 'we' i mean my local family minus joe, who is a good sport about excursions like these and no fool when given an elegant out - to look at lights, i think? my yen to craft enrichment piñatas for tigers up there was the beginning of my many years as a volunteer at the bird hospital; i tweeted about how my DIY skills were unimpressive to zookeepers and a friend who did wildlife rehab out on long island introduced me to my local bird people. i still haven't been back up there to volunteer since the winter before the pandemic, and i still can't tell you if or when i'll go. i know i miss being in a basement full of pigeons, and i know i don't miss sharing space with indifferent high school interns and, let's be honest, newer staffers who don't know what i already know how to do. i also miss the bad old days before best practices started including drawing a curtain around the waterfowl tank so human oglers don't disturb the birds. it is good and right to do that, and to speak as little as possible when handling patients and to discourage especially friendly ones, and it is fantastic that a big batch of tristate-area teens is learning that pigeons aren't voodoo dolls or garbage. i acknowledge this! i also miss slipping into the songbird flyway and having ben the cardinal swoop down to land on my shoulder and sing the song he only ever sang for me, which wouldn't ever happen again anyway; he's lived at the founder's house for years and years now, and he might not still be alive. i gave my beloved nonprofit bookstore a chance to evolve into something good after some unfortunate changes, and while i'll never be allowed to accidentally molest wildlife again, maybe i should give my relationship with the hospital a chance to heal into something different-but-serviceable. you know, like a pigeon's callused stump after its foot self-amputates. but i am a sentimental old goth and i also enjoy not knowing when i've done something for the last time. my dad and i happened to walk past the hospital earlier this week - it didn't dawn on me until it was about to happen - and i felt like i was driving past an ex-boyfriend's house. there were turtles in the window, but none i recognized or could greet by name.
12.28.22
i am once again not on a train, just enjoying the morning before things happen. i should be showering and hustling out the door to acquire a carrot cake, but absentminded, bedheaded processions past one's christmas tree are the royal icing between christmas and new year's, and i respect that. a couple of weeks ago the tree guy up on houston explained to me how the water additive he threw in with our noble fir was safe for pets because it turns into gelatinous little beads in the stand, which is a wild way of telling someone you've never met a companion animal. the cats bark for wet food, a piledriver whacks out matins on the east river, i'll probably play trombone champ "take on me" as i get ready. there are between two and four spiders living inside the average trombone.
ENCOUNTER
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not of sorrow, but in wonder.
(czeslaw milosz, 1936)
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.
12.22.22 [on the D, 6, and L trains]
i had what i hope is a solid jolt of inspiration for rounding out holiday gifts for my little nephews. i always have a lot to unload when i see them, given that i consistently shit the bed on dispatching packages out to california in a timely-for-birthdays-and-holidays manner and only see them once or twice a year, but i always want to overcompensate for the unreliability and above all to make sure everyone feels i've thought of them as often as i've thought of their sibling. not always intuitive when their interests don't dovetail with mine - like, man is it easy to shop for a friend's kid who shares my feelings about bats. anyway, i am a monster, but i found a bunch of holographic animal portraits in chinatown, and i think T will appreciate the illusion of a wolf leaping into his bedroom. (this is a kid who asked his mother for a door for christmas a few years ago.)
i filed my last piece of the year last night and am on my way up to central park in search of owls. there's a northern saw-whet somewhere (that someone managed to photograph mid-pellet), and a great horned owl, and a barred - who won't dislodge barry (RIP) in my affections but might help me heal, or something. it'd be pretty great if i spotted some mushrooms as well, given how long it's been since i've made a meaningful fungal foray. the mighty patch of wine caps up at stuyvesant park that i picked this summer, DNA sequenced at the president of the mycological society's apartment, and presented at one of the society's weekly identification meetings with an explicit "i am interested in eating these. can any of you think of any reason why i shouldn't?" (A: dogs might have peed on them, but otherwise, no) before sautéeing is long-demolished, thanks to the ongoing climate-change resilience project fucking up our bank of the east river. this is all bill de blasio's fault, is what i'm saying. "he" texted me during primary season to ask for my support and i replied that i would sell my organs on the black market to fund his rivals. he dropped out of the congressional race soon afterward; you're welcome.
speaking of jokes i tell myself, a morning newsletter from the new york times last weekend solicited personal, offbeat year's-best nominations, and i got an email yesterday asking me to confirm my name and location for my submission. will the times shitpost to america's inboxes on my behalf this saturday? we'll see.
[...]
no owls - no owls that wanted to reveal themselves to me, anyway. in making my way up to the pinetum i wandered into belvedere castle, where a docent who happened to be a birdwatcher told me the barred owl was in the ramble for a few weeks before the great horned owl came and bullied it from its branch (and eventually decamped as well). i defaulted to meandering around the park in the rain as the light drained out of the clouds, which was as goddamn delightful as it was a decade ago when i would slip out of my midtown office on my lunch break to wallk out my feelings. no mushrooms, either, but i wasn't looking very hard. maybe a couple of ancient dryad's saddles 20 feet up a tree trunk? i could have pulled out my binoculars to be sure - yeah, i brought my fancy binoculars - but i am fundamentally a lazy person. i left the park via bethesda mall and a guy in the terrace arcade was playing "can't help falling in love" on his erhu in the gloaming. way to break my heart again (again), new york city.
i filed my last piece of the year last night and am on my way up to central park in search of owls. there's a northern saw-whet somewhere (that someone managed to photograph mid-pellet), and a great horned owl, and a barred - who won't dislodge barry (RIP) in my affections but might help me heal, or something. it'd be pretty great if i spotted some mushrooms as well, given how long it's been since i've made a meaningful fungal foray. the mighty patch of wine caps up at stuyvesant park that i picked this summer, DNA sequenced at the president of the mycological society's apartment, and presented at one of the society's weekly identification meetings with an explicit "i am interested in eating these. can any of you think of any reason why i shouldn't?" (A: dogs might have peed on them, but otherwise, no) before sautéeing is long-demolished, thanks to the ongoing climate-change resilience project fucking up our bank of the east river. this is all bill de blasio's fault, is what i'm saying. "he" texted me during primary season to ask for my support and i replied that i would sell my organs on the black market to fund his rivals. he dropped out of the congressional race soon afterward; you're welcome.
speaking of jokes i tell myself, a morning newsletter from the new york times last weekend solicited personal, offbeat year's-best nominations, and i got an email yesterday asking me to confirm my name and location for my submission. will the times shitpost to america's inboxes on my behalf this saturday? we'll see.
[...]
no owls - no owls that wanted to reveal themselves to me, anyway. in making my way up to the pinetum i wandered into belvedere castle, where a docent who happened to be a birdwatcher told me the barred owl was in the ramble for a few weeks before the great horned owl came and bullied it from its branch (and eventually decamped as well). i defaulted to meandering around the park in the rain as the light drained out of the clouds, which was as goddamn delightful as it was a decade ago when i would slip out of my midtown office on my lunch break to wallk out my feelings. no mushrooms, either, but i wasn't looking very hard. maybe a couple of ancient dryad's saddles 20 feet up a tree trunk? i could have pulled out my binoculars to be sure - yeah, i brought my fancy binoculars - but i am fundamentally a lazy person. i left the park via bethesda mall and a guy in the terrace arcade was playing "can't help falling in love" on his erhu in the gloaming. way to break my heart again (again), new york city.
12.17.22 [on the J train]
i remember my [abortion clinic escort] shift just before christmas last year as the coldest by far, and i have thus wildly overdressed in a sweater from the reykjavik red cross and some insulated stirrup pants(!) i bought for a press trip in the french alps long ago when the earth was flat. i had actually intended to ski on that trip, and after i mentioned as i got fitted for my equipment that i hadn't been on a slope since adolescence, someone showed up at my room with a supplemental insurance card. fair play, club med; fair play.
so i think what's happening is that i'm going to try blogging in a notebook whenever i ride the subway, a nod to the early days of writing out my posts on the back stairs when we lived in san francisco. less angrily, i hope, or angered for different reasons. we went out to bushwick last night for a son little show and when i met joe at a restaurant beforehand - a place styled to look like its owners' parents' turkish supper club in midcentury wisconsin, as i recall - he said i had a 'scattered and off' vibe (which he eventually attributed to the blogging). so that's something we can expect going forward, maybe. the show itself was at what i would call an archetypally bushwickian venue - hairy light-threaded star clusters hanging around the big old disco ball (joe called them neurons, i called them vogons), a big sign prohibiting body shaming, permanent illuminated signs for the EXIT, the COURTYARD/SMOKING, and FOOD TRUCK. the person who searched my bag noted faux-neutrally that i had a lot of earplugs. "you never know when you might grow another ear," i said. the bathroom attendant had a QR code in case you wanted to venmo him. son little himself was sleepily charismatic, and delighted when the crowd added in "whoa-whoa-whoa"s for the "blue magic" singalong. no one had done that before, he said, but it made sense that new york originated it, he reasoned.
i still haven't convinced my editor to take me up on the iceland travel piece i mentioned back in october, but i did sell and write her the iceland story i nearly reported for her colleagues on the print side more than a year ago, and i suspect it's going to do well. the many icelanders i interviewed have thus far been pleased with my diligence and accuracy, and that is all i really care about, though i certainly wouldn't sneeze at being the magazine's de facto iceland correspondent. one of the translators i pinged who was particularly generous with her expertise has been really warm as a general proposition, and i think maybe we'll be friends? (she seems to spend half the year in iceland and the other half in brooklyn.) that's especially buoying at the moment, for i seem to have lost friends this year.
in the course of an argument joe and i had in the spring, he told me that one of the old pals we'd visited in the dominican republic a few months prior had suggested to him that perhaps i had "the kind of syndrome that makes people rant in the street." i immediately texted said pal and told him how hurt i was that he'd made that suggestion. well i seemed not myself, said he. i explained that there had been a global pandemic, and that i was newly sober, traveling with a partner who was in serious distress, and unexpectedly writing my first piece for an outlet i badly wanted to impress while on vacation, and i guess i'd thought he would see me in the context of all those things, and extend me the empathy i've tried to have for everyone else as we navigate our respective challenges. i was also mortified, because i had worked so hard to be a good guest when we were out there; i couldn't believe i was being pathologized. i tried to explain that there had long been plenty of mental health professionals attending to me and that maybe calling me the manic street preacher of the lower east side was not thoughtful or kind, but he didn't seem very interested in listening to me. when i texted a few months later to say that i care about them and hoped we could figure something out, he and his wife said they want to meet me in person to talk about it; given how pear-shaped things seem to have gone the last time we saw each other, i don't want that. so i am mourning them. i thought they saw me.
is that brutal? what if anything do you owe someone who tells you they think you're something you're not and keeps insisting on it when you disagree and offer a bunch of evidence to the contrary? i don't intend for subway bloggin' to focus on mental health, which i don't enjoy discussing all that much, ironically, but i did just spend two hours getting properly preached out on a street corner, so i feel like i came by it honestly. this morning it wasn't all that cold, but the antis packed up on the early side, and i'm now officially done human-shielding for the year, praise hekate. take care of yourselves, and each other.
so i think what's happening is that i'm going to try blogging in a notebook whenever i ride the subway, a nod to the early days of writing out my posts on the back stairs when we lived in san francisco. less angrily, i hope, or angered for different reasons. we went out to bushwick last night for a son little show and when i met joe at a restaurant beforehand - a place styled to look like its owners' parents' turkish supper club in midcentury wisconsin, as i recall - he said i had a 'scattered and off' vibe (which he eventually attributed to the blogging). so that's something we can expect going forward, maybe. the show itself was at what i would call an archetypally bushwickian venue - hairy light-threaded star clusters hanging around the big old disco ball (joe called them neurons, i called them vogons), a big sign prohibiting body shaming, permanent illuminated signs for the EXIT, the COURTYARD/SMOKING, and FOOD TRUCK. the person who searched my bag noted faux-neutrally that i had a lot of earplugs. "you never know when you might grow another ear," i said. the bathroom attendant had a QR code in case you wanted to venmo him. son little himself was sleepily charismatic, and delighted when the crowd added in "whoa-whoa-whoa"s for the "blue magic" singalong. no one had done that before, he said, but it made sense that new york originated it, he reasoned.
i still haven't convinced my editor to take me up on the iceland travel piece i mentioned back in october, but i did sell and write her the iceland story i nearly reported for her colleagues on the print side more than a year ago, and i suspect it's going to do well. the many icelanders i interviewed have thus far been pleased with my diligence and accuracy, and that is all i really care about, though i certainly wouldn't sneeze at being the magazine's de facto iceland correspondent. one of the translators i pinged who was particularly generous with her expertise has been really warm as a general proposition, and i think maybe we'll be friends? (she seems to spend half the year in iceland and the other half in brooklyn.) that's especially buoying at the moment, for i seem to have lost friends this year.
in the course of an argument joe and i had in the spring, he told me that one of the old pals we'd visited in the dominican republic a few months prior had suggested to him that perhaps i had "the kind of syndrome that makes people rant in the street." i immediately texted said pal and told him how hurt i was that he'd made that suggestion. well i seemed not myself, said he. i explained that there had been a global pandemic, and that i was newly sober, traveling with a partner who was in serious distress, and unexpectedly writing my first piece for an outlet i badly wanted to impress while on vacation, and i guess i'd thought he would see me in the context of all those things, and extend me the empathy i've tried to have for everyone else as we navigate our respective challenges. i was also mortified, because i had worked so hard to be a good guest when we were out there; i couldn't believe i was being pathologized. i tried to explain that there had long been plenty of mental health professionals attending to me and that maybe calling me the manic street preacher of the lower east side was not thoughtful or kind, but he didn't seem very interested in listening to me. when i texted a few months later to say that i care about them and hoped we could figure something out, he and his wife said they want to meet me in person to talk about it; given how pear-shaped things seem to have gone the last time we saw each other, i don't want that. so i am mourning them. i thought they saw me.
is that brutal? what if anything do you owe someone who tells you they think you're something you're not and keeps insisting on it when you disagree and offer a bunch of evidence to the contrary? i don't intend for subway bloggin' to focus on mental health, which i don't enjoy discussing all that much, ironically, but i did just spend two hours getting properly preached out on a street corner, so i feel like i came by it honestly. this morning it wasn't all that cold, but the antis packed up on the early side, and i'm now officially done human-shielding for the year, praise hekate. take care of yourselves, and each other.
12.16.22ii [on the F and L trains]
[a thing i'm trying. is carrying a journal on the subway the new longhand blogging? we'll see.]
i haven't seen footprints on the ceiling of a subway car in years, so i guess showtime and/or demonic possession is out of vogue. i haven't started wearing a mask again yet. do i really believe i'm not endangering anyone or have i lived long enough to become the villain? i was sure of the latter when i heard pixies' "gigantic" while returning a lamé-detailed blouse at the fifth avenue j.crew a week ago.
i read an excellent poem this morning (molly brodak's "in the morning, before anything bad happens") that i found both moving and inaccurate. brodak wrote of birds on the wing that couldn't believe their luck, but in all my years of wildlife rehab support at the bird hospital i never saw the birds we released (or any birds) look fortunate in the air. they looked focused. birds i've seen look like they can't believe their luck when they're swimming, even if they're sinking because they aren't yet waterproof.
when i dream of flying i don't feel fortunate, either. i feel like concentration is just barely keeping me aloft.
delibird, the seasonal pokemon, started spawning in the city this week. it took me a long time to realize its name referenced gifting and not bodegas; if i catch a shiny one i'll name it bodegavian anyway.
i haven't seen footprints on the ceiling of a subway car in years, so i guess showtime and/or demonic possession is out of vogue. i haven't started wearing a mask again yet. do i really believe i'm not endangering anyone or have i lived long enough to become the villain? i was sure of the latter when i heard pixies' "gigantic" while returning a lamé-detailed blouse at the fifth avenue j.crew a week ago.
i read an excellent poem this morning (molly brodak's "in the morning, before anything bad happens") that i found both moving and inaccurate. brodak wrote of birds on the wing that couldn't believe their luck, but in all my years of wildlife rehab support at the bird hospital i never saw the birds we released (or any birds) look fortunate in the air. they looked focused. birds i've seen look like they can't believe their luck when they're swimming, even if they're sinking because they aren't yet waterproof.
when i dream of flying i don't feel fortunate, either. i feel like concentration is just barely keeping me aloft.
delibird, the seasonal pokemon, started spawning in the city this week. it took me a long time to realize its name referenced gifting and not bodegas; if i catch a shiny one i'll name it bodegavian anyway.
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