girl stuff
I feel like I've been very moody on Tinyletter this summer, so I have to report that basically everything that's happened since the last time I wrote to you has been very, very good. First, I went out to where A is teaching at Deep Springs and swam in a reservoir surrounded by silent desert and, occasionally, small, fluttering birds.
I also wrote many thousands of words on book #4 while I was there. I'm supposed to be revising it but, surprise, it's basically a wholesale re-write. The good news is that I think it's getting somewhere-- this draft feels it's condensing, or setting, maybe, like when I first sent it to my editor it was liquid, and now it's coalescing into something more solid. Which is probably just a fancy way of saying it's developing a plot. Is the metaphor I want something about a skeleton? You can see how I wander when I'm figuring things out.
Anyway, then this last weekend I stayed out too late on Friday, and then again Saturday and again on Sunday. Luckily, I had too much fun to regret any of it.
In particular, I went to see Carly Rae Jepsen with C & E on Saturday. They were perfect concert-going companions: all three of us are serious CRJ heads, and we were happy to lose ourselves in the music and dance like hooligans in our seats. We drank double dirty Shirleys and glimmered with sweat.
There was this moment when Carly was playing Run Away With Me, where she sings: "baby / take me / to the / feeling." I felt my body do this thing, and I thought, oh, I'm moshing. I mean, it's different when you're doing it in a seat versus when you're doing it in a pit, but it was a dance move I'd learned at fourteen that had stayed inside my skin, waiting for this particular kind of stimuli to set it loose. The feeling of a sound or a lyric that moves through you so strongly it's physically convulsive. Moshing is more thrashing than dancing: it's your body arcing under the force of a feeling that's too big for it, trying to express and extrude, to conduct electricity between the storms in your head and the space around you, all of that empty air.
I've been writing about music and gender a little bit this summer. I used to look for that feeling from men screaming, from lyrics like so sick so sick of being tired / and oh so tired of being sick. I didn't know, then, that a girl making pop music could give me that same sensation, and offer the same release. I didn't know that any feeling could be big, could be interesting, could be shattering-- could be painful and joyful at the same time. My body figured it out before my brain did: that all I had ever wanted from those shows was a feeling so strong it could short-circuit thought, could just be happening to me, all over, all at once.
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I wrote about Carly Rae & "small feelings" & melodrama &c. in 2016 for The Hairpin; somewhat shockingly, I still like the piece. I also wrote about seeing Lorde with C and E last summer in this very Tinyletter. I do like a good ritual.
New this week: I wrote about how the Kardashians commodify their female friendships, turning girlfriends into branding opportunities, for Buzzfeed.
IRL news: I'm moderating a panel for Art Women Art Week in September! Come see me chat with some of the best women working in food & beverages and stay for a screening of the extremely classic food flick Chocolat.
& finally, I can't be at this, but you should go: my girl Catie is put together a panel on contemporary queer storytelling as part of Echo Park Rising!