For a few months straight now, I’ve been finding myself going, “wait, shit, is it [current month] already??? i have to do the newsletter, oh fuck oh fuck etc”

And while I hesitate to say it’s come to feel, as they say, “like homework”… the feeling of demotivation (as mentioned last month in light of all the Bella Chacha stuff) is real. And it’s not only Bella Chacha’s fault! There’s other factors at work.

For one thing, this newsletter has gotten too big for its britches! Or at least slightly more bloated than it would need to be to fit properly into its britches. Looking back at some old installments of the newsletter, you can really tell I was basically just repackaging some tweets I had made the previous month, and man that was way easier lol. This year, I felt called upon to develop things more, or at least get more, for lack of a better word, thematic. January was “Destroying Cars as Art-form” stories for some reason, March was “Weird Doctors”, May was “goin’ old-school”, June was meta-horror, and so on. That, and doing not-really-that-deep dives (li’l shallow dives, we could call them) about this or that author. All of which has been fun but frankly not in the cards for the rest of this year.

So hey let’s get back to basics and simply recommend a short story or two and be done with it until next time when i go “fuck is it october already?”

1. Vajra Chandrasekera, “The Age of Cancer”

Another thing I’m finding makes writing this newsletter more difficult recently is that the specific experience of reading on my phone is one that I dislike more and more with every passing day.

Vajra Chandrasekera, perhaps sensing this sort of readerly malaise but more likely seeking to provoke a different sort of malaise, presents this flash fiction piece which, in his preferred version of the text, is wholly unfeasible for mobile phone reading.

Luckily, Lightspeed included the full text in standard mobile formatting, per their editor’s note, “to make the story as accessible as possible.”

[Confession: I read it on my phone.]

Also luckily, “The Age of Cancer” contains embedded in it the passage from H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine that inspired the piece, just for handy reference. Brilliantly simple concept wedded to masterful wordcraft in this treatment of Wells’s colonialist time-traveler, communicated in the voice and POV of a far-future sapient crab species.

Goddammit, I need to read Chandrasekera’s novels, like, yesterday. Maybe if I had a time machine…

2 and 3. Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, “Foreign Objects” and R.S. Benedict, “Tiddies”

After the bombings stopped, after the Navy left, we returned to our lives before. That dim memory, like a dream upon waking for many of us. In time, our grasp on memories of those uncertain days loosened like a fist learning to unclench, and we returned to fish the same waters where warships shelled the coast. Submerged, old bombs. Their serial numbers fading as the reef absorbed them.

While we're on the subject of colonialism and flash fiction, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez dropped this bomb on folks some time ago and we can still feel the aftershocks. Unexploded ordinance becomes a metaphor for the legacy of US imperialism in Puerto Rico, and its destructive effects on peoples’ lives for generations to come. Powerful stuff from Typebar, who apart from their consistently interesting non-fiction offering have low-key been publishing fantastic fiction as well.

Take “Tiddies”, by R.S. Benedict, for example. Benedict's perhaps best known as author of the oft-cited “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” which is up there in the pantheon of all-timer online essays about pop culture. But Benedict's also a damn fine fiction writer who brings us “Tiddies”, a sci-horror story about, well, tiddies. Right what is says on the tin, but also like that infamous essay an incisive look at the intersection of bodies and desire with not cinema in this case but capital-A Art.

When biosculpting became available to the general public, artists discovered a radical new medium to play with. Visionaries could now create anything they wanted. Most made tits.

I guess what I mean to say is to read and support Typebar, folks!!!

Let's see…what else, what else

So this not a rec per se, but I read Yukio Mishima's novel Thirst for Love over the summer. And while the concepts “beach read” and “Mishima” are not ones I’d necessarily tend to associate with one another, I should say two things: 1) I did technically read parts of it on the literal beach and 2) it’s about a young widow named Etsuko who moves to the country to live with her in-laws (including her late husband’s brother and his wife, and her father-in-law who she is apparently literally and figuratively ‘sleeping with’ but hey don't worry about that, it’s nothing, srsly, don’t worry about it), and she subsequently becomes infatuated with the strong-silent-type country boy handyman Saburo. Now you say, “hey, that sounds like a set up for a Hallmark Channel movie or something” (again, pay no attention to the father-in-law thing), and you’d be right; I mean, the fuckin thing’s called Thirst for Love for god’s sake, and it was indeed adapted into a film, but keep in mind it’s Mishima so imagine the protagonist about 1000% more perverse and death-obsessed than in your average Hallmark fare. This is actually only my second Mishima, and if i’m being honest, and I liked this decidedly less than The Sailor Who Feel from Grace with the Sea, which I thought was fantastic when i read it a couple years back, nor did I like this as much as the two Japanese novels I read last summer (the serendipity of the secondhand bookstore). So like I said not the glowingest rec but there’s some great writing in here, so maybe add a dash of Mishima to your next beach trip if you’re so inclined

NOT-A-STORY REC: jazz music

idk, go listen to some jazz music, it’s good