Dead Letter Department #137
things i have been thinking about lately, arguably too often
Oliver Sacks’ house being a machine for living, and whether I should, in his honor, eat tinned sardines with greater frequency, especially now that the extra good Fishwife ones with preserved lemons are occasionally available on super sale
Whether Lois McMaster Bujold, if she had started writing today, would have shoved every ounce of psychosexual drama into her books or if perhaps she would have had a thriving if secret second career on AO3 doing fan fiction for a smaller but wildly dedicated audience (see Novak) doing even MORE wild shit, OR alternatively if she would have developed intense one on one writing relationships in one of the many forums for such things. Then again, maybe she did! Perhaps she is doing so, even as we speak, between publishing novellas. Also, whether there will ever be a biography/letters of hers published, because I really am dying for more of a glimpse into her mind
What days of the remaining summer weather will be warm enough for an early morning swim. The barista asked me what I had been up to the other day, which involved swimming, and wanted to know where I went, so I explained the spot to her, because gatekeeping things that can be found on any map is plain silly, and then told her that it was great in the morning if you just didn’t want to be perceived in your bathing suit, and then felt weird about saying that, even though I do think it was an okay thing to say, really. Either she gets it and feels the same way or not, but it’s not like I introduced the concept of not wanting to be seen in your bathing suit to a mind unfamiliar with the concept.
How many Nashville hot chicken strips a week one can person eat, sliced up into a spinach salad, without it becoming a cause for nutritional or perhaps psychological concern. See also: peaches, quantity of, shortness of season, etc.
Roxane Gay’s nemesis—I suspect we will never know, because she is too sensible to blow up her own spot like that, but gosh I do remain curious
M.F.K. Fisher’s world-sickness. This is a phrase she uses repeatedly in her books about returning to France after World War II, observed in others, seen in herself. She never gives a definition, but it becomes clear in context, and I am sure you already know what it means, that you find yourself weighed down under the same affliction too often these days—not a personal sadness, or a personal sickness, and therefore cannot really be met with any sort of personal solutions. World-sickness.
Whether or not it was worth it to plant a sungold tomato start, which with tender care & watering & staking & observation has produced rather less in total weight than what a single box of sungold tomatoes would have cost at the store. On the other hand, there’s nothing quite like a tomato fresh from the garden when you’re coming in the back gate, avoiding the spider who has foolishly built a home on the latch, before any of that perfect sharp tomato leaf smell can vanish. Do any of the tomato leaf scents that have come into vogue actually smell like this, or will they be disappointing in the same way a lilac always is unless it belongs to an actual blossom? Report back, if you know.
If I’m ever going to find a local tattoo artist I like well enough to get my memorial tattoo for S., because for some reason I must get that one next instead of any of the others I think about, and I’m increasingly in need of a little body modification, though I may wait until the weather cools a little.
The criticisms I’ve been reading about Hamilton, which I loved very deeply when it came out & now have increasingly mixed feelings about, and less of a desire to return to in the way it is sometimes pleasant to visit former obsessions, to feel their shape around you again
How extraordinarily fast AI is moving, how much harder it has already gotten to distinguish an image or a voice or a video, the inevitable degradation of our trust in those exact things, along with our already decayed belief in experts, in evidence. What is evidence if anything can be faked?
How exactly to get the wasp nest out of my mom’s car trunk, or rather the edge just before the rubber seal of the trunk. It is a very small wasp nest, but really any nest in such a location can be said to be unfortunately large.
After having read so much L’Engle & Fisher recently, what the current, modern equivalent is for their experience of music might be. They are not exactly contemporaries, separated by ten years and a vast gulf of interest, but it was wildly important to both. L’Engle attributed her decades-long happy marriage to a shared experience of beauty, often centered around classical music, both played and listened to, and Fisher writes stunningly of all the kinds she loved: operas she took her small daughters to when they lived in Aix, street performers in Marseilles, her own little accordion strapped over her back as she boarded a steamer ship back to the States. A shared, language-crossing, culture-crossing, infinitely portable experience, and I’m not sure music is that for us, not anymore, not with how atomized everything has gotten. Or maybe it is in some circumstances, maybe I just need to go to some more shows? Anyway, thinking about that.
Why I am waking up at four or five in the morning routinely now, despite trying to arrange otherwise. It’s not terrible, civil twilight (a new phrase to me) began at 5:06 this morning, so there’s none of the despair of being awake for no reason in the complete darkness, but it is a change. It cannot all possibly be the noisy spotted towhees in the holly tree.
Wildfires. My state is burning. Provinces in Canada are burning. This is summer now; wildfire season. The grass in the front of the house, which used to hold some green nearly all summer, is match-stick crisp on the third of August. The creeks are low, the snowpack on the mountains visibly lower, and I have world-sickness.
The death of magazines. I know they technically still exist, or at least some of them do, but their online presence & social media imprint is palpably more important than their editorial content and the glossy, exciting object which you used to actually be able to hold in your hand, which is the physical thing that I miss now. Do you remember newsstands, fellow olds who may be reading? Rows and rows of magazines, national & international, and although they seemed expensive at the time, you could walk out with a pile to read on the train or the plane. The paper stock is worse now, among other sensory unpleasantness, and all the cool imported ones cost about a thousand dollars, which I rediscovered when I cruised the magazine sections in both of my nearby bookstores last week. I know it’s all online, but I don’t want to look at the same thing only smaller on my phone. I am tired of looking at the world, only smaller & stupider, on my phone.
More soon, and in the meantime may your own civil twilight hours of the morning be beautiful, if they cannot be slept through.