the slow and unyielding march of time | episode 26
Hey friends,
Paul has sent out TWO newsletters since my last one! There’s a new Bachelorette! It’s spooky season! Ted Lasso is over! I guess it’s been awhile since I wrote!
I’ve been thinking a lot about true crime recently. I’ve never been very into the subject; I’ve read a couple serial-killer books (one of my exes was REALLY into the subject, and had a whole shelf of books) and I listened to season one of Serial, the podcast that helped make podcasts the dominant medium that they are today, but haven’t listened since. I’d rather watch spoofs of it like American Vandal. To be clear, I am very pro investigating and re-litigating old cases that there are a lot of questions about (the police are not good at their jobs!) but a lot of these podcasts feel like they’re turning a really sickly gaze toward violence, especially violence towards white women.
I recently watched the two seasons of Home Before Dark and read Good Girl, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson, the follow-up to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. Both pieces of media center a child (Home Before Dark’s Hilde is 9 years old, Good Girls’ Pip is 17/18) solving the mystery of a child who disappeared years ago. In Home, Hilde is an aspiring investigative journalist; Pip is doing a school project in the first book and she has her own podcast in the second. While neither of them are actually true crime, they’re following the blueprint that Serial laid out for the world. (Spoilers below, if you are planning on reading/watching either and care about spoilers, but I’ll try to keep it minimal.)
Of course, media about the medium of true crime gives space to be critical of the genre. I think both of these do a good job of filling in some of the humanity of both the subjects and the subjectee, of what might actually happen if you tried to solve a mystery in your community. Hilde’s friends distance themselves when their parents are targeted for retribution. Pip’s dog is kidnapped. They’re both threatened by people with secrets.
Ultimately, Home is a less complicated text. It never feels like Hilde is in any real danger, even though she’s exposing some very rotten corruption. Everyone close to her is happy that she pushed through and solved crime. But despite Hilde being constantly told “This isn’t just a story to us, these are our lives,” we don’t really see the effects it has. Sure, someone’s mom goes to jail (!!!) and some people lose their jobs, and by the end, the town is probably in shambles in some very signicant ways, but the show isn’t very interested in interrogating those effects. Hilde’s entrance into Columbia’s school of journalism (or whatever) is assured. The closing shot is Hilde and her buds biking madly towards a murder that they’ve overheard on the police scanner. Time to solve another crime!
Good Girls, on the other hand, is more interested in the kind of trauma that scrutiny can cause. The mystery of Andie Bell’s disappearance is solved, but has justice been served? Pip is uncomfortable aware that she has left a trail of traumatized people in the wake of her investigation, and notes it frequently. Good Girls also considers the spins that influencer economy could have. Despite turning down sponsorships, when she comes back with a season 2, an article speculates that she’s *made up* the new crime she’s investigating in order to generate interest and profit.
It’s not a great book, but I think increasingly it points to the story not being the neat little package of the podcast. Pip undergoes the skepticism of her peers and some of her friends. She’s threatened verbally and with a gun. She has to sit with a rapist going free, despite having captured a confession (inadmissible in the court) on tape.
And meanwhile, I also read this article about how true crime is rotting our brains. (Side note — I am hypervigilant, and I’ve never ascribed it as part of my PTSD symptoms but … it makes a lot of sense that it would be!) and thought about how, if packaged well, crimes feel like they can made sense of. Humans like patterns, and are great at finding them. There’s the belief that if I can find the right pattern, then I can notice when I’m in this situation. (And thus, in the true crime case, avoid being murdered.) As if humans weren’t *also* great at believing ourselves to be exceptions to the patterns, or at excusing or ignoring ignoring the pattern when it’s smacking us in the face, or calling us names.
I don’t begrudge people who find true crime comforting or interesting or who just plain like it, of course; I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. I just think it’s really interesting to think about what kind of feelings we derive from it, and what stories we’re missing when we consume them.
Debris
Men’s helplessness as a labor issue I found this article so, so interesting. I know a lot of outwardly progressive men reenacting gender inequity in their personal lives; it’s insidious, and hard to combat since they often are just not noticing. The idea that at least part of this is a very successful resistance, that is communicating an entitlement to women’s labor, is something I’ve been thinking deeply about.
I saw Dune! I thought it was beautiful but boring. However, I also thought the book was boring, so if you liked the book, maybe you’ll like the movie.
I have been keeping this tweet image about managing complex change up in my browser tabs. It is remarkably helpful to look at it and have it help manage my feelings.
What I’ve Been Reading:
Tubby and Coos, a cool-looking bookstore in New Orleans posted this thread on Twitter matching up Met Gala outfits with speculative fiction novels and I’ve been slowly working my way through them. They’re good! (Their website is not that good, so I unfortunately can’t link to the books via their site.)
Currently:
Can’t Even: How millennials became the burnout generation by Anne Helen Peterson
Only a chapter in, but Peterson is such an excellent culture writer that I am pretty sure I’m going to love this book. I keep finding myself nodding along to her descriptions of the broad millennial condition, and I appreciate the way she also puts into context the way that boomers, by and large, are reacting the way that they have to my generation and the way we have tried to forge our own paths. I suspect when I finish I will be recommending it to everyone.
Finished:
Good Girls, Bad Blood by Holly Jackson
See above, but also I want to point out that I find the main character relatively unlikable (the same is true with Home Before Dark, actually) and I think I probably need to think about why.
Dial A For Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto
David’s dad sent an email to him saying he couldn’t stop laughing while reading this book, so I was intrigued. It’s sort of a Weekend At Bernie’s meets Crazy Rich Asians, if you can imagine that? It’s very breezy, although no one seems particularly fussed that the main character literally murders someone, which is a bit off-putting. He’s pretty sleazy but … still.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
My mom gave me this (and going through my old chats I see Charlie also recommended it to me — hi Charlie!) and it’s a really interesting, haunting read. It takes place … somewhere … in either the distant future or an alternative world. Details about the world and what is going are pretty vague, as the narrative is filtered through the point of view of Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF), a humanoid doll? robot?? that seems to be designed for children/teens to help stave off loneliness. Klara desperately wants to be adopted by a child that she can love, and when it happens, she loves that child to the best of her abilities, but even though she’s a super-humanly smart, her perception is limited. Also people don’t know whether to treat her like a person or a toaster. It’s fascinating to watch her build up beliefs based on her experiences and off-handed things people say around her.
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
Ellie’s a teen who can raise the dead. It’s nothing special to her, just some knowledge that has been passed down in her Lipan Apache family. Unlike a lot of the books I’ve read this month, this world isn’t very different from ours, just … shaped by magic. When her cousin dies tragically in a car accident, his spirit visits her in a dream, and tells her it was murder, and she wants to be a paranormal investigator anyways, so she sets about to try to solve a murder that seems impossible. As she investigates, she discovers a perfect town that doesn’t want her asking too many questions, and slowly the deep rot of colonialism begins to emerge. This was a great read; highly recommended.
Finna by Nino Cipri
This is a cute little anti-capitalist romp through dimensions! Ava is a minimum-wage worker at Finna, an Ikea knockoff that unfortunately opens a wormhole into the multiverse of Finnas. (Statistically more likely because each Finna is so similar) Ava and her ex, Jules, are the most recent employees and therefore the ones tasked with finding an elderly shopper who has wandered on through when a wormhole opens up. It’s not subtle, but who cares? Neither is capitalism.
Witchmark by C.L. Polk
This book has a pretty complicated world and plot involving magic, the rules around who is allowed to do magic, war, and electricity that I’m not going to try to explain. Also soul stealing! It’s a very well-sculpted world, and there are some major hotties in it that make out! The ending is also shocking/bold, so even though I’ve barely told you anything about it, I’d urge you to check it out if you like magic stuff.
Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust
Despite being a literal princess, Soraya has stayed hidden her whole life; as a baby, she was cursed with a poisonous touch. Few people besides her mother and her brother, the new shah, know that she exists. When they return for his wedding, they bring with them a handsome soldier who discovers her secret, and she starts to explore the question of what she would do to undo her curse. (Spoiler alert: it’s a lot!) I love fairy tales that turn power and gender inside out.
The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
Alice and her mom Ella have always been on the run from bad luck; whenever they stay anywhere for a spell, bad things happen. When her grandmother, a reclusive and glamorous author of a cult-favorite book Tales from the Hinterland, dies, they think they’re finally safe, but soon Ella has been kidnapped and Alice is bereft. As creepy and weird things start happening to her, she realizes that her grandmother’s tales are more than they appear, and she convinces a school mate, a Hinterland superfan, to help her find her grandma’s isolated estate, the Hazel Woods. I adored this book. It was fun and dark and twisty and really well-written.
The Night Country by Melissa Albert
I eagerly dug into this sequel to the Hazel Wood. (Like two months later, lol.) It didn’t disappoint! (Much.) Albert really has a way with a sentence and a description. Sometimes she goes a little overboard, and a sentence later I look back, thinking, “Wait, the moon doesn’t look like a white sailing ship,” but it’s really bursting with the possibility of stories and storytelling. It’s not a happy book, but fairy tales never are.
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
This is another world close to ours, except that five Machines have been discovered across the world that allow people to travel in time. In 2022, we still haven’t quite figured out the all the rules (can’t go forward past your own timeline, for instance, just back) but people are constantly going back for cultural and geopolitical research. Also in this 2022, abortion has always been illegal. Tess, a traveler who has dedicated her life to editing history to fight for changes that include more rights for women, discovers that there are other travelers from the future who are willing to pay a great cost to keep the timeline fixed on a path to the further subjugation of women. Listen, I didn’t understand a lot of the time travel rules, and yes it was also not at all subtle. But who cares! So much female friendship and caring about the rights of others.
Love you all very much. Stay sexy and don’t get murdered. (Or whatever.)
seriously luv u
davida