the border is to be on the way
I have a fraught relationship with food. I don't enjoy eating, in general. I don't enjoy cooking. I frequently get through each day by mentally calculating what I can eat which will sustain me long enough to get to the next meal. If I could choose to refrain from eating and face no consequences, I would do it in a heartbeat. It's just a hassle of a thing.
It's odd, then, that I have a passionate relationship with consumption. We talk about consumption in terms of media a lot these days. What books, articles, films are we consuming? If Netflix hasn't at least attempted to trademark the word "binge" I would be very surprised--it's a normal way to take in television now. I have always been a binge-reader, reading books in one go or not at all, frequently in place of sleeping. I appreciate the use of eating language to describe interaction with media quite a lot, because it feels much more natural to me than with food.
The truest expression of adoration, in my mind, is the boy who wrote to Maurice Sendak and who, upon receiving a letter in response with a Wild Thing drawn on it, was so overcome that he ate it. I think about that boy all the time. I think about taking the things I love and holding them in my mouth, letting their flavors explode on my tongue, filling my senses as I swallow them down, into myself, and keeping them there forever. If I could, I would forego food and only eat words, images, sounds. Then sensation of cold rain on my face, my dog’s soft nose in my hand. I would eat them, and keep them, and die with them.
I read This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It’s a story about two agents from opposing sides of a war in space and time who begin sending one another forbidden letters. In the beginning, the letters accompany traps sprung–the reward for having been outsmarted by their opponent. Soon enough, they come to be something else entirely, touchstones in a mad existence. The letters themselves are rarely ink on paper. They’re the motion of a bee, or the sound of wind passing through holes carved into bone, or milk swirling in a cup of tea. They are elusive, read and then gone, but locked into the minds and bodies of each recipient, who are something other than human. The book is full of discussions of consumption, from the very literal:
“Eating’s gross, isn’t it? In the abstract, I mean. When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve known lies in a great machine’s heart, it’s hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-covered gums to mash things that grew in the dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart.”
To the entirely metaphorical:
“You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbors do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought.”
It felt like a book written for me specifically. I wish I could eat it.
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
A Good Book: After having it on my radar for ages (and having a physical copy in my house for a year), I finally got around to reading Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz when a hold request I forgot I’d put in popped the audiobook up on my Libby app. So I listened to it. Ari and Dante is a beautiful, meandering, coming of age story about a boy living in El Paso in 1987 who falls in love with his best friend. The prose is achingly gorgeous that a few times I found myself crying while listening at nothing more than a description of a storm. Sáenz treats his characters with such tenderness, loving them and forgiving them. I adored it. The audiobook was read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which I was worried would be distracting for me but he did a fantastic job.
A Good Album: I know I just raved about Black Belt Eagle Scout, but her new album At the Party With My Brown Friends just came out and I have been devouring it. It’s dreamy, and pop-y, and very very queer.
A Good Fic: A Fire and a Conflagration by iodhadh. This fic is extremely on-brand for me, as it’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, which I am still deeply committed to, AND partially epistolary. What begins as a joke turns into Dorian and The Iron Bull writing each other poetry and NOT talking about it. The sheer amount of thought and research that the author put into poetic forms here is astounding. And the poetry is GOOD, y’all.
A Good Game: I finished Dragon Age: Inquisition, again. I loved it again on the second round, and felt I got a much fuller experience of it (for one, I found an area of the map that I’d somehow completely skipped the first time). I’m going to miss having this world to slip away into. I haven’t looked deeply into the status of the next game in the series, for fear of heartbreak (don’t tell me, let me be), but I hope there’s more.
A Good Show: I’ve been watching The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and I love it. I’ve never seen the movie but that hasn’t been a barrier to entry to the show. It’s magnificently crafted, absolutely beautiful.
Lastly
This twitter thread which posits that John Wick is a fairy is pure gold.
This article about Ursula K. Le Guin is extremely good and introduced me to her Carrier Bag Theory, which I love.
“Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity’s foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing.”
xoxo door