#6 Scraps scraps scraps
The squirmy dark
I finished Stag Dance! It was weird and great! It’s four stories, three shortish ones and the long eponymous Stag Dance. It’s good at the novella length - I imagine it could have been a longer novel that stood alone but in conversation with the other stories it illustrated body dysphoria in a multifaceted way that made it easier to understand.
There’s a touching pathos in Babe, the ugly, big, masculine lumberjack who wants to be pretty. Especially because all the lumberjacks use slang Peters said she found in a book called Lumberjack Lingo and it's sort of wacky and cute. Skooch, crumb boss, hayburner, whistle punk, clopped, hackmatack, cackleberries...
I first saw cackleberries (eggs, get it?) used in The Dictionary of American Food and Drink which is full of these kinds of slang terms for food that make me think, man, tweets/social media posts are primary source runes. In 150 years, what will meaning can they convey without a dictionary? (God bless Black teens, who make up all the slang I pick up three years after they’ve abandoned it.) And like yes I know this is an inane thought but I also sort of marvel at how meaning can be conveyed through structure and context and tone even if the words themselves aren't known to us.
Related: I'm listening to An Immense World and the author explains that not only are there sounds animals make that we can't hear, there is information encoded in the sounds that we can't understand. Animals really are so much more alien than aliens, you know? Ted Chiang got there first, obviously.
Where would the coconuts go
Browsing Kanopy the other day I started watching Upstart Crow from 2016 because David Mitchell is in it. It's a delight. It's a sitcom starring Shakespeare as real-life situations inspire his plays. David Mitchell is a treasure. Nothing better than a very smart guy who plays a very stupid guy. Also, the neighbor from Friday Night Dinner is Robert Greene and it’s fun to see him doing something different than being a low status creepy panting weirdo.
Ice Cold Picnic
For months, I was seriously considering paying over a hundred dollars for a bathmat. If you’ve seen (and of you have) any of my collages, you can see how a bathmat like this would be useful to soak up the drool that would fall from my lips as I coveted it. A real circle of life.
I went to one of Lisa's swaps that had craft supplies in addition to clothes on this one occasion. I had vaguely been thinking about trying to make something with the Cold Picnic vibe so I was delighted to find a little bag of fleece scraps in bright pink, orange, and white. It's hard to cut organic shapes from a piece of material without them looking planned in a bad way; true scraps are always better.
I cut the bands off an old towel, cut it in half, and did a lot of placing and replacing the scraps before I decided where they’d go. The fleece isn’t absorbent so I wanted to minimize it inside the intuitive foot spots. Then I stitched the fleece in place, sort of like an applique but not quite because the pile of the fabric let me get away with not quite folding it under. The I sewed the two ends together with a hidden running stitch between the bands on the sides of the towel-cum-bathmat.
I love it! It’s not perfect (I may go back and redo the stitching to completely hide it) but now I can spend that $100 on books and ice cream.