> the ramshackle garden of affection
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: eggs, purposeful academic writing, and gardens of affection.
Hello friend,
> Looking for: fall recipes. Send me your apple-centric foods, burn-your-tongue soups, and squash squash squash.
> Two skills I have learned or re-learned this gap year: haircutting and knitting. Both make me realize that I take great pleasure from tasks in which I can see the making of a thing as it happens.
> I spent the summer watching my friend Phoebe craft a beautiful ode to academic writing and wonder—a series of fictional essays called Void Moths. Those essays are now available to read, for free, right here. An excerpt:
Void moths are hybrid creatures passing between the veil of life and death. Their life span is a mere era, yet their behavior suggests a wisdom collected far beyond the span of ten sun-cycles. Along with their capacity for memory beyond life, they are known for another remarkable practice: storytelling through song. A void moth song is undoubtedly one of the most complex and achingly gorgeous expressions of language music, unlike that of any other creature’s songs on June. The closest approximation of its qualities can only be borrowed from a distant R-11 planet that uses the term “iambic pentameter” to describe certain types of language music—words strung together to mimic the rhythm of one’s gallop and heartbeat. Similarly, a void moth paces its song by the beat of its own wings: each word falling at the downstroke that propels the moth upward.
> Reading: Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard, on racism and school closings on Chicago’s South Side. I think my love for the book is analogous to why I love Void Moths—because both want to share academic research with ordinary people, incorporate memoir, and are trying to make real change through research. Which begs the question, what makes a scholar?
> Also reading: “The Ramshackle Garden of Affection,” a series of letters between Noah Davis and Ross Gay on basketball.
You can say that jazz and blues have beautiful rips and tears, and they do. That similes and metaphors and line breaks and cadences and titles often have beautiful rips and tears, and they do. And I guess it’s gorgeous when you move me—twenty-years-younger-than-you me—out of the way and grab the rebound.
> “Der Daily Yoke” by Ed Roberson:
funny that little yoke
sunny side up
in the span of the lake
every morning for breakfast
bubbles up what—
great hen lays this egg
on us.
onus now that’s funny
this burden of respect.
what shining
flight or light are we to prove
our ancestry with the sun—
what throwback are we.
to cook up?
> Sunny side up brought to you by Sarah Lucas.
Cheers,
Tiffany