Majestic dignity and grandeur.
August is an adjective. It's a good one, meaning something grand and fancy and dignified and admirable.
That's always struck me as funny. It's the month best defined by butt sweat and street harassment, but maybe the guy they named it after contained multitudes, too. It's also the month when nothing gets done, when everyone who can afford to leaves town to sit on a beach or in cabin somewhere away from moist hindquarters and the men who vocally admire them.
For myself, I'll be at home all through August. I'll be not thinking about publishing, which is made up of people who are not answering emails or making offers on my next book during this august time. I'll be not thinking about the august bodies that will determine whether I find housing or health insurance when the rich people rejoin our timeline after (snort) Labor Day. I'll be not thinking about the uncertainty of the future on the micro or macro level. I do my best not-thinking in the pool with a chi-chi in my hand.
You want to join me? I'll scoot over. I've got some recommended reading. My kid-locked-in-a-car story, Fifteen Minutes of Grace will be included in the first Sunday Morning Transport anthology. along with works by Yoon-Ha Lee, Max Gladstone, and Annalee Newitz to name a few.
My Freudian horror story The Little God of the Staircase is nominated for the Eugie Foster Award, my first time receiving that particular honor.
I've been writing articles for Black Girl Nerds, including a really fun interview with horror luminary Tananarive Due about what still scares her after all these years. I've also been writing about movies for the Pagan newspaper, Wild Hunt, and was pleased to share with them my feelings about the Barbie movie and its similarities to one of the oldest written stories in human history: the descent of Inanna.
I just finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. If you love a book where a protagonist who is utterly drunk on dumb bitch juice makes the worst possible decision again and again, this is the book for you. I have also been cackling along with the new Samantha Irby book, Quietly Hostile. I hope the age of bloggers comes around again, slouching toward Brooklyn to be reborn. I hope the internet gets weird again and spreads out.
It's not that these platforms that try to be everything—payments processors and web browsers and journalism centers and information monopolies and social hubs for all media and purveyors of high-quality video— it's not that they want to be august (adjective). They don't want to be grand or dignified or majestic. They want to be August (proper noun); an amalgamation of space-time where the rich are always on vacation and the rest of us are slogging through the hottest days ever endured on earth without any authority to make decisions or changes until they all come back with burnished tans after avoiding the Labor of the Day to tell us to get back to work.
I want to read and write on an internet where those people and those platforms are irrelevant. I hope we all get weird and creative again and learn to live like the creatures of the forest floor who suck all the life out of a big fallen tree to make new things out of the old.
Let's be majestic. Let's be August.
Sunburned and storm-damaged,
Meg
That's always struck me as funny. It's the month best defined by butt sweat and street harassment, but maybe the guy they named it after contained multitudes, too. It's also the month when nothing gets done, when everyone who can afford to leaves town to sit on a beach or in cabin somewhere away from moist hindquarters and the men who vocally admire them.
For myself, I'll be at home all through August. I'll be not thinking about publishing, which is made up of people who are not answering emails or making offers on my next book during this august time. I'll be not thinking about the august bodies that will determine whether I find housing or health insurance when the rich people rejoin our timeline after (snort) Labor Day. I'll be not thinking about the uncertainty of the future on the micro or macro level. I do my best not-thinking in the pool with a chi-chi in my hand.
You want to join me? I'll scoot over. I've got some recommended reading. My kid-locked-in-a-car story, Fifteen Minutes of Grace will be included in the first Sunday Morning Transport anthology. along with works by Yoon-Ha Lee, Max Gladstone, and Annalee Newitz to name a few.
My Freudian horror story The Little God of the Staircase is nominated for the Eugie Foster Award, my first time receiving that particular honor.
I've been writing articles for Black Girl Nerds, including a really fun interview with horror luminary Tananarive Due about what still scares her after all these years. I've also been writing about movies for the Pagan newspaper, Wild Hunt, and was pleased to share with them my feelings about the Barbie movie and its similarities to one of the oldest written stories in human history: the descent of Inanna.
I just finished reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. If you love a book where a protagonist who is utterly drunk on dumb bitch juice makes the worst possible decision again and again, this is the book for you. I have also been cackling along with the new Samantha Irby book, Quietly Hostile. I hope the age of bloggers comes around again, slouching toward Brooklyn to be reborn. I hope the internet gets weird again and spreads out.
It's not that these platforms that try to be everything—payments processors and web browsers and journalism centers and information monopolies and social hubs for all media and purveyors of high-quality video— it's not that they want to be august (adjective). They don't want to be grand or dignified or majestic. They want to be August (proper noun); an amalgamation of space-time where the rich are always on vacation and the rest of us are slogging through the hottest days ever endured on earth without any authority to make decisions or changes until they all come back with burnished tans after avoiding the Labor of the Day to tell us to get back to work.
I want to read and write on an internet where those people and those platforms are irrelevant. I hope we all get weird and creative again and learn to live like the creatures of the forest floor who suck all the life out of a big fallen tree to make new things out of the old.
Let's be majestic. Let's be August.
Sunburned and storm-damaged,
Meg
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