Glass portraits and bee shamanism: your October Oliviary
Autumn again! The rain! The tea! The sweaters! Who among us is not ready to celebrate warmth and beauty and the general sense of a longed-for harvest — even as we approach the dark, cold, ominous time of year. It’s a season gorgeously poised between life and death, so of course it’s the only time we could choose to hold an election that is setting everyone’s vibes to maximum resonance, both for good and for ill.
If you’re able to vote in this American election please check your registration, and follow up on the status of your ballot at Vote.org to make sure your vote was counted! We’re all depending on one another right now.
In the meantime, here are some of the best non-election things I’ve found lately:
Linkery
- My favorite kind of true crime is theft, cons, and general heistery, the weirder the better — so of course I adored this piece on the complete (often exploitative) bunkum that was European bee shamanism
- Librarian Robin Bradford and Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches went down an absolute rabbit hole of data, and found an agent who seems to have switched from hired ghostwriters to AI ghostwriters and audio narrators in a publishing empire of crap
- A hard, incredible essay from Kiese Laymon in the Bitter Southerner (CN: cancer)
- Beatrice Radden Keefe at Light Breaks explains about ancient Romance funerary portraits on glass. I’m semi-obsessed with glass for bookish reasons (have you pre-ordered a certain sci-fi mystery novella yet?) and this has given me too many ideas.
- Gift link from the NYT: “When Harlem was ‘as gay as it was Black’”
Crafty
I’m in awe of Emily Van Hoff’s sculptural quilts, as we all should be. I’m only a dabbler in quilty things thus far, and seeing these has me all fired up to get back to some of those projects. Bog coats! Reversible quilt jackets! Tiny hummingbird patchwork blocks, quilted onto a shoulder or lapel!
Reading recs
This month’s column was heavy on the ghostly tales:
- Jen deLuca’s Haunted Ever After is a Florida Gothic about a new (haunted) homeowner in Boneyard Key and the (also haunted) café owner she’s starting to fall for. There’s one particular scene in here that takes the old bodice-ripper chestnut where a hero gets growly and possessive and turns it absolutely inside-out in a way I want to write essays about.
- Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore gets you with both thoughtful meditations on grief and loss and ritual, and also the kind of oh shit scenes you can’t wait to gossip about. Read this so we can dish!
- Lyrical lines and a thousand hinted-at stories fill Nghi Vo’s gorgeous masterpiece of a novella [The City in Glass]9 https://torpublishinggroup.com/the-city-in-glass/). The demon Vitrine is not human and her love can be monstrous, frightening, violent — but no less powerful and constant for all that. Pity the poor lovelorn angel cursed to be trapped with her in her ruined city (or don’t, since he’s the one who ruined it).
- Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan ends on a banger of a cliffhanger and I would step on you all with my spikiest shoes if you were lying between me and a copy of book two. Because all’s fair in love and bookmongering.
Until next time — may all your foliage be splendid,
Olivia