Do I dare to eat a peach?
When you put stress- in front of a word it becomes a thing you are doing in reaction to outside stimuli and not because your brain sometimes actively works against you. That’s a thing that I’ve said to myself a lot recently. Last week, I stress-walked and stress-cleaned. I took stress-baths in the middle of the day and stress-played Hades nonstop. I stress-read the same fic over and over again and stress-sat in the dark with a blanket wrapped around and over me watching the making of The Mandalorian.
Something which I have been grappling with over the past year, throughout the pandemic and my own process of finally addressing a disability which I had been steadily ignoring for much of my life, is when it’s okay to let your brain win. When the brain is clamoring for something specific which is not work which I had intended to be doing, and as a result I am finding myself unable to be doing that work and am instead just sat at my desk feeling like a failure. At a certain point, I decided that it was okay if I needed to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.
Anyway good news: finished my finals and got vaccinated! And also!! I launched a podcast!
If you’ve ever read one of these newsletters and thought “gee, I wish Door would explain art to me” I have GREAT news for you. I Think About Art will be a series of fairly short episodes (8-15 minutes, probably), each one about a specific art work or art genre. I’ve been having a lot of fun making it, and am thrilled to be putting it out in the world. It’s available anywhere you get your podcasts (and if you don’t see it there, please let me know!), but transcripts and reference lists for each episode are available on the show page.
Dog Thing
I bought this rug in Morocco a couple years ago, and recently Vista has decided it’s the place to be.
mixed media
good reads: The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz: I was hunting for a queer sci-fi romance which wasn’t too heavy and was more about the sci-fi than the romance, and I stumbled across this on a rec list. It was exactly what I wanted. Clara is an AI technician who never stays in one place for long. Sal is robot who has run the same tea shop for centuries. This was world-building with a deft hand, and I appreciated how I could see the way some of the tech grew out of the tech we have now.
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing: I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but I do listen to it, so when this popped up on the Libby app as available, I figured I’d give it a shot. This is a collection of essays–a combination of short biographies of artists and reprintings of articles Laing had written for Frieze. I read this while initially developing the podcast, and it was a master class in how to describe art that the viewer can’t see. Laing refers a few times to “the plague years”–meaning the height of the AIDS epidemic–which was a jolt every time.
good fics: fill pages with scribbled ink by magneticwave. Star Wars Prequels, obi-wan/padmé. I have historically had zero interest in the prequels, but I’ll read anything by magneticwave, devotion which was rewarded here. this is a fully epistolary retelling of the prequels, and it RULES.
Make Your Bed (Lie in It) by glimmerglanger. Star Wars Clone Wars, obi-wan/cody. Don’t know how I ended up here, either! This is an achingly beautiful tale of love in wartime. I cried. I’ve never seen Clone Wars.
good music: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, read by Jeremy Irons. this is a cheat, because I haven’t really been listening to music lately. I had a line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” stuck in my head for days, however, like a musical phrase (“I grow old… I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”), so I sought out an audio version.
good film views: Love and Monsters: I think Dylan O’Brien is a great actor, and it’s wonderful to see him doing more comedic roles again. This is a fun, lovely movie about finding love and family in an apocalypse.
We Can Be Heroes: During the worst of my finals stress, I started watching every film Pedro Pascal has acted in. It was a whole thing. I missed all of the Spy Kids movies, so I wasn’t really aware this was part of that series? And I went in expecting it to be probably Not For Me. I had a BLAST. It’s so fun and earnest and everyone in it seems like they’re having the best time.
Lastly
I’m hoping this final newsletter transition will be seamless, but please let me know if you experience any issues! xoxo