Hello again,
For the first time in months I’m able to read again, and I’m reading fiction, and it’s such a tremendous pleasure. I want more, more, more. I read an Octavia Butler book I’ve had for a little while first, and then I borrowed Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham on my library app, and Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows from E + S’s shelves. For a while in the pandemic I just read Louise Penny and Tana French and Ruth Ware and Maisie Dobbs and then I ran out of those and felt like I couldn’t stomach anything else, really. I didn’t want to take a risk, I guess. Have you read any good fiction lately? Anything that pulls you in and pushes you along? I’m not in the mood for anything I’ve got to really work to get through. No Bolaño, please. (Sorry to most of the men I’ve dated and been friends with. But I’m not really sorry. Read one woman who isn’t Joan Didion and then come at me.)
Update: You can now comment on posts! So feel free to share your reading recommendations with everyone.
1.
Another good newsletter I got into recently, on a recommendation from another newsletter (I forget the patient zero newsletterer, apologies to whomever it was), is Below the Fold. I love any project that highlights news that’s getting less attention than it ought to. This is a great one, and it’s kept to just a couple subjects per email so it’s not burdensome to get through it. (Sometimes newsletters are SO long and SO dense and like I WANT to care enough but I… don’t.) This Bloomberg story about rising global food prices scared the shit out of me, especially because I read it right when I finished the Octavia Butler book “Parable of the Sower” which depicts a very scary but not that outlandish-sounding dystopia where a thousand dollars can barely cover two weeks’ food and everyone who isn’t a multibillionaire lives in scary compounds at the mercy of addicts who abuse a drug that makes them obsessed with fire. Butler wrote it in 1993, but in a Q&A a few years later was basically like, yeah, I look around and it’s not that hard to write dystopic science fiction. The book starts in the year 2025 or 2026, I think.
Image description: A page from the Q&A at the end of my copy of Parable of the Sower, where Butler talks about what inspired the world she created. “I looked at the growing rich/poor gap, at throwaway labor. at our willingness to build and fill prisons, our reluctance to build and repair schools and libraries, and at our assault on the environment. In particular, I looked at global warming… it’s a much more complex problem than a simple increase in temperature.” She wrote this in 1999! And the book in 1993! How did we just let things get so much worse!!! Some of our elders are… not really worthy of the respect they demand, quite frankly. Octavia is, though. Unfortunately, she’s dead.
I love her sort of tacit description of what it takes to be an activist at the top on the page above. Image description: Another page. The bit I like reads “When Olamina’s birth community is destroyed, she begins to build another. She doesn’t know at first that that’s what she’s doing, and she’s afraid—terrified—of potentially dangerous strangers. But she learns to reach out in spite of her fear… she relinquishes hope for supernatural help. She recognizes a god, but not a knowing, caring, anthropomorphic entity. She believes that our only dependable help must come from ourselves and from one another. She never develops a ‘things will work themselves out somehow’ attitude. She learns to be an activist.”
Image description: Another page, in which Butler says she wants readers to consider “where we seem to be heading—we the United States, even we the human species. Where are we going? What sort of future are we creating? Is it the kind of future you want to live in? If it isn’t, what can we do to create a better future? Individually and in groups, what can we do?”
Below the Fold also linked this stressful (to me) food pyramid from Harvard that’s uniquely uninfluenced by Big Anything and says that bacon and cold cuts are bad and there’s no way I’m eating enough vegetables. (Except for right now actually because Sylvia and Eric are vegetarians and Eric is an exceptional cook and Sylvia is an Ayurveda genius and we’re all going to continue to pray they adopt me as their large adult child.) Relatedly, I desperately want to learn how to be a functional adult who can feed myself and others, but it feels like something where my brain is dyslexic specifically on this issue. If you have any suggestions for how to get over this, I’m all ears. My hunch is I just need to spend like a year with a cookbook maybe?
2.
Celia Dai has one of the most popular (media-themed) newsletters in existence and she recently linked to this Vanity Fair story about the mysterious celeb gossip Instagram account @deuxmoi. I didn’t think I’d care that much about it because I only started following the Insta very recently and celeb gossip isn’t really my jam but MYSTERIES are EXTREMELY my jam and the description of the writer’s friend in this story doing all this very minute internet sleuthing felt extremely… me. (I may or may not have called a friend a few months ago and said, “GUESS what I just learned: my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend dated your ex-husband during the pandemic!!!!!!!!!!” My friend understandably was like “how did you learn this” and i was like “approximately 2 hours on the internet.” I have extremely marketable skills, please hire me so I can stop using them for evil/stupid.) I also really appreciate the explicit discussion of why or why not to name/out someone, and the shying away from the responsibility inherent in that. Anyway @deuxmoi is how I discovered stars are DEFINITELY not experiencing the same pandemic we are (at least, I am personally not going shopping or eating at restaurants or going on a ski vacation) but other than that the Insta is admittedly very fun, even when I don’t know who they’re talking about. I was such a naif in the Gawker days, I would always get so titchy about the gossip, like “but it’s mean!!!!” The pandemic has made me positively ravenous for gossip. Sometimes I call friends who have jobs and pump them for gossip about the workplaces even though I don’t know anyone they’re talking about. “What did Brenda do this week, that bitch??” I just want to feel alive!!!! This is probably part of why I still keep meticulous tabs on my exes’ exes, despite no longer having any connection to them. What else is there to do! Might as well torture myself with how hot the girl who came after me was lol haha upside down smiley emoji skull emoji coffin emoji
3.
One of those stories that makes me wonder “why is government so bad at literally everything” (also, guy with a dope name).
I kinda stiffed you on that last one, huh? Whatever, it’s a good story and you really don’t need more commentary from me than that. Make government less wasteful please!
Love,
Danielle