I certainly did not intend to go on a long newsletter hiatus, but sometimes life forces hiatuses (hiatiae?) upon you. Without getting too deep into my private personal business, I was already dealing with A Lot Going On, and then a crisis (lowercase-c crisis, not a capital-c Crisis, thankfully) happened, which then triggered A Lot More Going On on top of A Lot Already Going On, and I am now slowly dragging myself out of the mists that inevitably surround you when you fall out of your own life for a bit.

As a result of being wrapped up in my own urgent nonsense for a while, I kind of have no idea what’s happening in the world. There is something both distressing (oh no, I have no idea what’s going on these days!) and nice (whee, I have no idea what terrible things are happening!) about this situation. I’m just leaning into the fact that I’m now, temporarily, one of those clueless dreamy artists who have no idea what’s going on. It’s pretty sweet, not gonna lie.

As a result of my having retreated from things for a bit, today’s newsletter is pretty short on updates. I can't promise when I get the next newsletter out, but it will take me less than three months next time. I hope you all understand.

Henselfest

Ever since Molly of Henselpushers set up shop making Fanny (Mendelssohn) Hensel’s music widely available to students, performers, and listeners, I’ve been unable to shut up about what a big fan I am of her work. (Molly's, that is, but also I am a fan of Fanny Hensel, obviously.)

I get an undue amount of credit for finding, performing, and recording underplayed works by traditionally marginalized composers (and don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty proud of the fact that I’m good at it and have been ahead of the curve compared to mainstream artists), but that work is impossible without the labor of people like Molly who do a lot of the tedious work of going through archives and manuscripts and engraving and publishing just to make sheet music happen.

As if said tedious work wasn’t enough, Molly is launching something even more ambitious that has me over here wondering how she finds time to sleep. In a few months, at the beginning of April 2027 (!), Henselfest, the first festival dedicated solely to the life and music of Fanny Hensel, is happening in Berkeley, California.

The lineup so far is seriously impressive (if you’re not a Fanny fan, just know that some of the biggest names in the Henselverse are involved). I’ve opted to sit out as a performer/presenter this time around, for the sake of my own sanity (a reflection of my current life state and not of Henselfest), but I will be attending as a regular participant, and I hope to see some of you there!

Early bird registration for Henselfest opened this week, and you can register here. If you are unable to attend but want to financially support the project, you can make a tax-deductible donation here. And, if you’re in the Bay Area and are more of a hands-on type, you can sign up to volunteer for the event here or offer to host a Henselfest presenter in your home here.

(I was not asked to plug Henselfest, btw—I just think this is a super cool project and I want everyone to know about it.)

Stuff I’ve Been Listening To

My listening the last few months has been all over the place, but here are a couple of things I've especially loved lately, even though none of them are new to me.

I re-listened to the Amy Beach Piano Concerto and just fell in love with it all over again. It's so good and I don't understand why it isn't played all the time alongside all the big warhorse concerti??? (I know why, you don't actually have to explain it to me.)

I want to hear this piece live so bad. I also want to play it so bad. Someone, please, I will do this concerto for a pittance. (You don't have to tell me I'm a terrible businessperson. I know that already.)

I remember the first time my chamber rep professor in college played Schoenfield's "Cafe Music" for us, and it immediately became something I had to listen to several times a day.

I recently remembered that it exists, and put it on again for the first time in years, and oh man! I still love this freaking piece so much.

A few months ago I saw the new production of Jesus Christ Superstar in London and, while it's not remotely my favorite musical, thought this specific production was great and well worth the ticket.

The entire cast was absolutely superb, but I was left especially stunned by Sam Ryder's rendition of "Gethsemane." His turn as Jesus was, tbh, not as memorable during the rest of the musical, but his performance just of that song was one of the greatest single performances I've ever seen in musical theater. (As I described to people afterwards, he basically had a mental breakdown on stage during "Gethsemane" and it was amazing.)

The memory of that glorious performance is what had me listening to his studio recording of "Gethsemane" on repeat for weeks afterwards, even though the track is a pale imitation that doesn't even remotely come close to what you see on stage. Perhaps that's why I kept listening: I just keep yearning for the magic I know I'm not going to get.

If nothing else, it's a good reminder that no studio track, no matter how good, ever truly captures the experience of live performance. Go to live shows if you can, people!

With Macklemore in the news, I was reminded of how I "discovered" The Heist in my early 20s and how "Make the Money" was basically my anthem for that specific period in my life when I didn't know if it was going to be possible for me to be an artist.

(In case you don't actually know or listen to the track, it's not about making money; it's about knowing who you are as an artist and not letting the world chew you up and destroy your core values.)

I feel weirdly wistful listening to the track now, because it just doesn't hit with the same electric feeling the way it did a decade ago, but I still have the memory of when it did. "Make the money / Don't let the money make you / Change the game / Don't let the game change you" was a message that spoke to my soul when I most needed it. (Another line from the song permanently tattooed on my brain: "If I'd done it for the money I'd have been a fucking lawyer.")

Reads I Enjoyed

Jeremy Markovich: There really is a Chinese restaurant next to nearly every Food Lion (North Carolina Rabbit Hole)

“The main thing that I wanted to validate is this assumption that it doesn't matter where Chinese populations are. There's going to be a Chinese restaurant no matter what. A lot of people think about Chinese food as something really foreign, but it's actually very, very American,” Fung said. “And the other thing I wanted to validate is that the people that these restaurants serve are not Chinese, right? It's white people.” Indeed, Fung said, a Chinese restaurant map is really just a map of where white people live.

I have never been to North Carolina and prior to reading this article I had no idea what Food Lion was, but this was an absolutely fascinating read about American history, class, and demographics.

Jake Edmiston: Confessions of a professional taster: How one woman discovers problems in food factories, one bite at a time (Toronto Star)

In food manufacturing, there are some mysteries that can only be solved by tasting. And there are some people who can taste better than almost anyone. Copeland is one of those people, a sort of independent professional taster. She’s in high demand among major food companies in Canada and the U.S., because she can identify what’s going wrong in their factory, or their supply chain, or their formula, just by trying the product.

I weirdly love learning about highly specific jobs that I never knew existed. This is a prime example!

Nikole Hannah-Jones: In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? (New York Times)

In truth, we felt utterly stuck. Our child was suffering, but all these children were — they were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.

What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?

I knew the consequences of this educational neglect would follow them throughout their lives, as the failures here would be passed on to the next grade and the next. And then our society would blame their academic limitations on the dysfunctional culture and poor choices of their marginalized families, because blaming poor families is more convenient than calling for the dismantling of segregation.

If you're a sentient being on the internet you probably saw this making the rounds already, but I do think it is well worth the read even if you're not, say, a parent of a school-aged child in New York City. The dynamics that Hannah-Jones describes are cruelly present all throughout American society, and she captures the heartbreaking tension when decision-making requires you to choose between your values or your own well-being.

Elizabeth Goodspeed: “What aesthetic is this?” Elizabeth Goodspeed on the push to categorise visual culture (It's Nice That)

Ruby describes the modern naming ecosystem as a site of “taxonomic warfare” – a cutthroat battlefield where multiple actors duke it out to name the same material simultaneously. Aesthetic accounts and cultural strategists constantly jockey to be the first to a name (even posting screenshots, decks, or moodboards as receipts to prove they “called” a movement before it entered wider circulation.) [...] Once a term proves useful, it quickly detaches from its source and begins generating attention for whoever reposts or repackages it most effectively.

Post-AI, aesthetic labels function as retrieval tools; all you need to make the desired image is its name. Under these conditions, the accuracy of the label matters less than its ability to retrieve a recognisable set of visual associations. Historical understanding becomes secondary to whether the prompt “works”. [...] Because AI systems are trained on aggregated online imagery, these flattened associations become further reinforced through repetition; the collective online summary of an aesthetic becomes training data for future cultural production.

I always feel so much relief when an article nails a very specific observation about society that I've been unable to articulate myself, and this is one such example. I've been increasingly bothered by the tendency—driven largely by Tiktok and Instagram, but also spotted via Pinterest and Reddit—of people to consume an "aesthetic" completely out of context with no desire to understand that all aesthetic trends and developments are rooted in history, sociology, class, etc. I will never shut up about the fact that consuming and appreciating any kind of creative art requires critical thinking, and as such I will never stop being mad about this.

Kathryn Baecht: Wake Up, Sailors, Scurvy Is a Hoax (McSweeney's)

Listen, if you want to hide below deck licking limes and then later come above deck to enjoy the sunshine and your lack of jaundice and intact teeth and gums that aren’t leaking putrid black blood, then be my guest. But not even the Captain has the right to make me eat a nutritious and lifesaving fruit if I don’t want to.

Sometimes I look at, ah, certain groups of bright thinkers who have gained traction in society, and I don't know whether to rage or cry. McSweeney's is here to remind us that we can also laugh. (In between the raging and crying, that is.)

Stephanie Reist: Cleaning Up Poop: The Human Labor Behind Waymo (Bay Area Current)

There are so many people at these depots. Half of us don’t really do that much. But we’re hired for our capacity to do labor and not for our labor itself.

Come for the lurid anecdotes about poop, vomit, and pig heads, stay for the insights about the tech industry's attitude towards human labor. As with all the tech innovations du jour, the magic sauce is invisible labor, and Waymo is like every other tech company in that it does not value that labor, nor the human beings who provide it.

Jasmine Vojdani: How 19 More Well-Read People Make Time for Books (Vulture)

You have to make a conscious effort. I force myself to do this. Obviously everything else is more fun at this point, dopamine and TikTok and all of that. I had to force myself to start reading more a couple years ago, and it’s very good for me. I keep the percentage in the bottom corner of my Kindle and that pushes me. I’m like, I’m gonna read till 20 percent even if I’m not in the mood. You can get hooked on that.

[...]

A friend once said, “Reading fixes your life,” and that is what I always think about. It gives you that air around whatever is happening in your own life and that window into something else that I find essential for feeling good.

As someone who simultaneously frets that she doesn't have enough time for reading and is frustrated at other people who don't read at all and claim that they don't have time for reading, I found this fluff piece weirdly soothing. Everyone has completely different reading quirks and habits! Everyone can find time to read! Get off your phones, people!

Elizabeth Mehler: Visit to Boston made Boca Raton resident feel miserable about living in Boca Raton (Boston)

Pinto, who has lived in Boca Raton his entire life, said the trip widened his perspective on the world.

“It really made me think, ‘wow, there is more to life than where you’re born,’” he said.

Finishing this reading roundup on a high note: this article was an utter delight from start to finish. Of course, my delight was girded with sad frustration: how many of us know people who never venture away from home, never explore even though they have the means, because new places (especially—gasp!—cities!) are "scary"?

Hugoposting

Because of the aforementioned hiatus due to A Lot Going On, I completely fell off the Hugoposting wagon, and I'm trying to get back on.

I realized, though, that in my last newsletter, I'd completely forgotten to include the Hugoposts I'd published since the newsletter before, so if you're a person who only tracks my Hugoposts through this newsletter, here you go:

Part II, Book 2

• Chapter 3, “The Cart Scene Reboot”

Part II, Book 3

• Chapter 1, “No Water and a House of Neglected Children”
• Chapter 2, “An Evil Bisexual Icon”
• Chapter 3, “Fixing Horse Abuse with Child Abuse”
• Chapter 4, “Chekhov’s Doll”
• Chapter 5, “Worst Christmas Ever”
• Chapter 6, “Most Obvious Hiding Place Ever”
• Chapter 7, “Everyone Needs Therapy”
• Chapter 8, “Cosette Is So Broken”
• Chapter 9, “Grifters Gonna Grift”
• Chapter 10, “Grifting Too Close to the Sun”
• Chapter 11, “The Prison-Escape Industrial Complex”

Part II, Book 4

• Chapter 1, “A Bad Vibes Neighborhood”
• Chapter 2, “Cosette Gets to Be a Kid Again”
• Chapter 3, “Valjean’s Soul Levels Up”
• Chapter 4, “An Old Lady With No Hobby (or Appreciation of Arms)
• Chapter 5, “It’s a Horror Movie Now”

Part II, Book 5

• Chapter 1, “On the Run Again”
• Chapter 2, “Thank You, Map Nerds”
• Chapter 3, “The Escape Road Less Traveled”
• Chapter 4, “I Would Like Some Diagrams, Please”
• Chapter 5, “DIY Wall Climbing”
• Chapter 6, “Surprise Choir”
• Chapter 7, “I Actually Have No Idea What is Going On Anymore”
• Chapter 8, “Dad-Style Freakout”
• Chapter 9, “So That’s Why You Save People”