What is a life lived but an array of objects
I think about jewelry an awful lot for someone who mostly doesn’t wear jewelry. Partially this is a decorative arts thing and I DO like to look at the flashy things. The tiaras, the pearl sashes, you know. Jewelry, like all decorative art, communicates information about the culture which created it, and it does so in a particularly flashy way.
I don’t wear much jewelry because I am a fidgeter. Bracelets get smacked into things, pulled off and put back on over and over, and in general make me very aware of my own wrists in a way I don’t enjoy. Necklaces suffer a similar fate, except instead of taking them off and on, I tend to tug on them until they break. I am left with earrings (good!), rings (good if they’re relatively unobtrusive), and brooches (GREAT). I’ve been muddling all of this over, because for the past couple years I’ve been trying to figure out how to present myself to the world in a way that I’m comfortable with and find enjoyable.
On the recent anniversary of Edward Gorey’s death, the Gorey Trust posted images of some of his jewelry.
It struck me because Gorey wore rings like these throughout his life. He’s wearing them in his iconic portrait (which appears on the cover of Mark Dery’s biography of Gorey), he wore them as far back as 1961, and he wore them through the end of his life. They’re not fine things, but Gorey clearly loved them and loved how they looked, to the point that he incorportated them into his personal style for decades.
Every new years, I make a resolution that I’m going to bring brooches back. I love a brooch, and I love that it’s adornment that I don’t have to think about once it’s on me. However, the style conventions which existed during previous brooch moments are no longer with us. Enamel pins are an acceptable substitute for now, but I remain determined to make brooches work for me, even if they’re nothing fine. I would love to look back at the end of my life on decades of photos of myself in the same beloved brooches.
Dog Thing
mixed media
good reads: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark : I have well established myself in other areas of the internet as a P. Djèlí Clark stan, and I automatically buy all of his work, so I’ve had this since last summer but kept forgetting about it on my shelf until a book club I’m part of decided to read it. Naturally, it is stupendously good, Clark’s usual oevre of early 20th Century alt-history mixed with cosmic horror. The more I think about the things Clark is doing in this book, the more I love it.
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells: I assume you don’t need me to tell you to read Murderbot at this point. The new Murderbot novella is a sort-of prequel–it takes place between the first four novellas and the novel–and I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it, but it turns out I feel great. It delves into Murderbot adjusting to being part of a community for the first time, and spent some delightful time with my favourite human character, Ratthi.
good fics: When Duty is Done (series ongoing) by thosenearandfarwars. Star Wars Clone Wars, obi-wan/cody. I haven’t budged from this star wars fic hole I’ve found myself in. This is a canon divergence AU that examines what rebuilding and recovery would look like if Anakin hadn’t become Darth Vader. It gets into bills and diplomacy and goverance? idk man i love it
good music: Pop Music/False B-Sides II by Baths: I’ve been loving the new Baths album, which is ambient and interesting.
good podcast: You’re Wrong About: D.C. Snipers: This is the first thing which You’re Wrong About (which I have been listening to chronologically) has covered which I lived through and was aware of while it was happening, and it’s incredible how skewed my perception of it was. They covered this in 4 parts (the link is to part one), and I highly recommend it.
good film views: One Night in Miami: I’d heard excellent things about this from friends who’d seen the play (the film was adapted by the playwright) and loved the film. It’s the sort of thing where you can see the seed of it, in the sense that the play is just 4 men in a room and that’s still present in the film, but it used the format to give the viewer good context about each of their lives. It’s chock-full of incredible performances, but for my money Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown very quietly took the cake.
good tv: Ted Lasso: I’d heard raves about this one, too, but it didn’t seem worth getting AppleTV for. But then I got a new phone which came with a year of AppleTV and having watching it all I can tell you with confidence: this show is worth getting AppleTV for. A comedy which follows an American football coach to England to coach a British football team (about which he knows nothing), I have never watched something so genuinely warm and lovely, which cares as deeply about its characters and letting them make mistakes and then deal with them as adults. I cried multiple times. Some of the crying was about soccer.
good game: Shadow of the Tomb Raider: I like games about adventures and puzzles, so Tomb Raider games have long been my thing, and it’s been interesting to see how a franchise like this one deals with the real-world consequences of tomb raiding. I think this one did the best job yet at walking that ethical line. I had a very fun time playing it, mostly in the bright light of the afternoon, because tombs are scary.
Lastly
My brilliant friend Akuba has a new poem out in the Sante Fe Writers Project Quarterly issue, and it’s astounding. Gender as horror as gender as love.