Dead Letter Department #74

weather report

A full moon accompanied me the whole long drive back up I-5 Sunday morning, all five hours of it. It started out huge and glowing, with Jupiter trailing away below it in the blackness as I packed the car. By the time I got to Olympia, the stars had drawn back, but the moon held steady, faded itself into the pink sky, and was a phantom in the blue by the time I was finally pulling into the driveway back home.

So many hours are dark now, & it’s only increasing. When I get up it’s almost pitch black, although when I look out my window I can see that the sky itself is that almost luminous cold season blue. I’m trying to keep the season of regrets as short as possible this year, the time in late fall during which I berate myself with varying degrees of seriousness for not making the most of warm weather and long days, swimmable waters, easy evenings reading in the sun. It seems like it will be a terribly long time before any of those things come again.

I always go through a period of thinking the darkness can be addressed with discipline, which is the phase I’m in right now—keeping to a stricter schedule, working more hours, making tight little patterns of the days. It’s always productive at first, sometimes for quite a long time, before it becomes stifling or starts to smell like burnout, & I pendulum into something looser.

In possibly more realistic attempts to grasp onto the season, I’m gradually increasing the time spent with the SAD lamp in the morning, and trying to come up with meals that satisfy in colder weather. Mostly recently, a spinach & arugula & blue cheese salad with little slices of ham fried up to crispness in hot chili oil, making it both warmer & more substantial. I had what seemed like a bad reaction to caffeine the other day (probably a whole different newsletter), so I’ve also been trying out various herbal teas, although I must admit I’m doing it with very bad grace, & acquired an absolutely enormous bag of decaf coffee after running the Costco gauntlet on Monday.

(The mantra I repeat to myself before I go in, half a joke & half not: I will be calm, cool, & collected. I am not in traffic, I am traffic.)

There are good things coming this winter, I know, or have decided to believe, but I can’t even think of enough of them this time to give you a list.

reading room

I finished Donna Tartt’s A Little Friend, which, as a tremendous fan of The Secret History and The Goldfinch, I fully expected to adore. It started incredibly strongly, with one of those shared memory narrators that I always find so interesting, but dropped out of that mode quickly and into a gradually tightening net of three major perspectives instead. I had to make myself sit down & read it, at times, because it felt so heavy & hopeless, and in the end I found myself unsatisfied. One of the narrators disappeared rather suddenly at one point, only to be glimpsed through another’s eyes after that point, leaving her feeling rather like a ghost, and when I think of the story now, a couple weeks after finishing it, I don’t feel any sense of resolution.

Perhaps that’s the point? I’ve written before about when you read Kazuo Ishiguro, there’s this sense of a trap slowly closing around you—even if the story doesn’t resolve in a typical way, or ends up narratively unsatisfying to me personally, I know the trap will be sprung. After finishing A Little Friend, I kept feeling this sense of suspension, like I hadn’t actually managed to trigger the mechanism, & I wonder if that’s a deliberate choice, even if it’s one I don’t understand.

It almost makes me want to go back & re-read The Secret History or The Goldfinch again so I can get that gorgeous Donna Tartt language, which is always incredible, muscular, even, but with a story attached to it. If you got super into A Little Friend, or just have a totally different take on it, write me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & tell me all about it.

for your earholes

If you like a good debunk, & who doesn’t, pairing the New Yorker article about Dan Ariely with the two-part If Books Could Kill episode, Nudge, is a delicious shot & chaser. I adore Michael Hobbes, have followed him from You’re Wrong About to Maintenance Phase to this new project with Peter Shamshiri, which takes long, satisfying dives into what I think of as pop science or psychology or political books, sometimes ones that were extremely formative to me in my younger and possibly more credulous years. There’s nothing like hearing something you took as received knowledge getting so thoroughly picked apart you never feel the same way about it again, taking a whole house of cards of assumptions down with it.

housekeeping

A bunch of you will have just gotten your renewals to the paid tiers of the newsletters—thank you so much for supporting the Dead Letter Department. I literally would not be able to continue writing these odd little letters without you. I have some new ideas in mind for next year, and a couple things in the queue for those of you who have signed up to get handwritten mail.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may your list of seasonal joys to anticipate only increase.