the only other option is to lie still and learn nothing
I found I had a lot to say this week. To begin: a love letter to a house.
Years before I was born, my uncle built a house on the North Carolina coast. It wasn't fancy--nothing like the vacation houses full of individual, massive suites which are so popular now. It was a jumble of rooms and bathrooms, and the furniture was mostly the solidly function-over-form This End Up variety. The exterior was dark shingles all the way down, the interior was all pine beadboard. My aunt, who had a sort of effortless Midas touch for interior design, ensured that while it may have been sturdy it was definitely charming. There were valances above every window (the 1980s, natch), a fireplace which we never lit but were nevertheless reassured by. There was a small, two-person table in the main room which could be towed to the end of the dining table for huge family dinners, but in day-to-day use was ideal for card playing, jigsaw-puzzle-doing. My grandmother taught me endless varieties of solitaire at the little table. There were cascading decks attached to one side, atop a screened porch containing a hammock swing and a long picnic table with benches where we'd gather for the messy business of crab-eating at least once a summer. And the best thing of all, the element which ensured its excellence: a tower.
The tower held two built-in benches with long cushions, which bore a close enough resemblance to beds to make it the most coveted sleeping room in the house among the younger generation. Best of all, it was connected to the rest of the house by that most whimsical element: a spiral staircase. The family Basset Hound, Mariah Carey, spent many a summer venturing up those stairs only to become trapped at the top, too frightened to waddle her dense body back down the open stairs and baying in distress until someone came to rescue her. The years when I successfully won the coin toss for the tower, I’d spend as much time as I could up there, propping the windows open for optimal access to sea winds and ocean sounds. I read nearly every Harry Potter book in that tower.
my brother in the living room, regretting his choices
It was surrounded by houses with clever punny names emblazoned on gilt-painted signs, but ours simply bore my aunt and uncle’s last name in black on a smallish plank of wood.
My aunt and uncle have both died, my aunt more recently, and she’d already sold the house by the time she left us. Their son, my cousin, now lives on the coast and builds and rents houses. We stayed in one of his this last week down there. It’s fancier–four bedrooms with en suite baths, a pool table, swimming pool, at least a half dozen televisions. I could take those or leave them, personally, because what it also had was a tower. And those cushioned benches were just as good for sleeping as their predecessors.
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
Next Door, Jacquelin Perry
A Good Book: I’ve been making up for lost time, so there’s a lot! And they’re all really good so unfortunately I gotta tell you about them. I’m gonna break this list apart to save you from a wall of text.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting Becky Chambers’ first novella since I first heard of it, and the result–To Be Taught, If Fortunate–is incredible. She imagines a near future (two generations removed from mine, meaning humans have had time to entirely fuck up the planet, then begin to fix things, and finally to get back to looking outward. I am astounded, as always, by Chambers’ ability to be so hopeful about our future.
I read the rest of K.J. Charles’ Lilywhite Boys series, which includes the second book, Gilded Cage, and a linking novelette, The Rat-Catcher’s Daughter. They’re both m/f romances, both queer, and both great. Gilded Cage is out on October 23rd (I read an ARC, because this newsletter means I’m a REVIEWER!), so you have time to read the preceding books if you haven’t yet. It’s a story about two people who hurt each other badly as idiot youths, and have since then found themselves on two sides of the question of whether it is good and right to steal jewels from people who can afford to lose them. Susan Lazarus is a prickly, angry woman, whose life and experiences fully support her anger (LOVE a narrative which doesn’t punish a woman for her justified anger) and Templeton Lane is the character embodiment of this image:
By FAR the best thing I read while away was Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Sword lesbians and necromancers in space, and if that doesn’t hook you I don’t know what will. The universe that Muir has created is so cool and unique, and she understands that you’ll need some time to wrap your mind around it. The book is very well paced, so by the time you feel like you’ve grasped the rules BAM she hits you with a murder mystery.
I also read: Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell (the sequel to Carry On and a rollicking road trip book), Fair Play by Tove Jansson (yes, she who created Moomin. This is a novella of vignettes about two women who have been together for much of their lives, loosely based on Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä), The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow (about a girl who’s raised the ward of a wealthy man and gradually becomes aware of the existence of interdimensional doors and her own abilities regarding them), and The Perfect Assassin by K. A. Doore (an assassin attempts to track down someone who is murdering assassins in a very cool fantasy world where his city has been built on a series of platforms in the middle of the desert? I loved it).
A Good Album: I have been eagerly awaiting Brittany Howard (of The Alabama Shakes)’s first solo album and it does not disappoint. Hear her perform the whole thing in concert here.
A Good Fic: The Bond by WhatIfImaMermaid. I may have recced this one already, as this was a reread, but I don’t do anything as logical as keeping track of what I’ve already said on this thing, so I apologize. This is a Kirk/Spock fic in which Spock ends up with amnesia, wakes up to a bond between Kirk and himself and makes the logical assumption that it was something they did deliberately. Classic.
A Good Movie: Falling Inn Love. This is a Netflix original equivalent of a Hallmark movie and I liked it so much. It’s much better than it has any right to be. I was surprised too! Naturally it’s about houses.
Lastly
I haven’t had a chance to play the Untitled Goose Game yet, but I don’t need to have played it to know that this piece by Daniel Ortberg, “I Am The Horrible Goose That Lives In The Town,” is a masterpiece of language.
“I wobble my snake-front-body and I waggle my bag-back-body and they meet in the middle to plan a bad idea to upset you. I flap back and forth my business rear for balancing and I snapple-pap my feet all up and down the town for terrible reasons, and you don’t like it. I am the goose and you are the miserable boy with no honk. I invented my body and it was the best idea.”
Honey & Wax Booksellers awards a prize each year to American women aged under 30 who collect books, which I did not know when I was an American woman aged under 30, to my regret. Delightfully, this year the award went to someone I know, in a shared-fandom-circle sort of way, and her collection is of fan-made comics and doujinshi. Emily Forster, or inknose, submitted a fantastic essay about her collection, which I highly recommend.
Two things about Patricia Lockwood; poet, memoirist, and twitter-er. Her most famous tweet, which I cannot believe only dates from March because I feel like “jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!” has been part of my lexicon for decades, inspired this delightful interview with her about her cat Miette. And in a completely unrelated series of events, I saw a quote online that led to me tracking down and devouring a New York Times profile of her from 2014, which is very good. I’ll leave you with the quote.
“’I consistently felt myself to be not male or female,’ she said, ‘but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist. Maybe it’s a byproduct of reading a lot of books, of projecting yourself into different bodies.’“
That’s a-me.
xoxo, door