Monday Miscellany: The defiance in her eyes

Notes from September 2 - 8

Sep 09, 2024

Good morning from Washington, DC! Every year, Jordan and I trade off planning a short trip to celebrate our wedding anniversary in September. It’s his turn this time, and he selected our nation’s capital. We’re heading out shortly for a day of exploring—maybe a museum? a bookstore? the zoo?—but whatever we decide, there will of course be a stop for coffee first. Here’s to the start of another week! *clinks mug*

Currently reading

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit is an essay collection from 2005 that’s been on my to-read list for forever. I finally bought a copy this year as part of a little birthday book stack which also included:

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

The essays in A Field Guide are all at least tangentially related to the idea of being “lost,” but Solnit does a lot of playing with what that means. She’s a really smart and clever writer and the topics she touches on are wide-ranging—art, travel, personal experiences, friendship, nature, philosophy.

In one of the earlier “The Blue of Distance” sections of the book (all of the even-numbered chapters share this title), she made me cry about a color:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. (27)

I took my time with this collection and that felt correct. As nice as it can be to speed through a novel and get lost in the story, it’s another kind of satisfying to linger with nonfiction, rereading sentences and paragraphs, mulling over ideas. Here’s another quote I sat with for a while, appreciating it for its content but also for the way this writer in 2005 reached forward through time to remind and reassure the me of 2024:

People look into the future and expect that the forces of the present will unfold in a coherent and predictable way, but any examination of the past reveals that the circuitous routes of change are unimaginably strange. (119-120)

Nothing in life, good or bad, is forever; it can all turn on a dime, and it will, in ways we’ll never see coming. How comforting, how scary, how exciting! Buckle in.

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan is a similarly smart and eclectic little book, but in the form of a fictional narrative. The protagonist is an artist in her late twenties who suddenly and inexplicably loses her hearing. As she undergoes various tests and treatments over the course of the book, we are in her head following thoughts that leap from subject to subject, prompted by what she’s experiencing through her physical senses. She, like Rebecca Solnit, ponders art, human nature, wild spaces, relationships, travel, and philosophical questions, and she, too, is quite intelligent. If you stop paying attention for a sentence or two, you might miss an association or reference and wonder how you arrived at the current topic.

The premise of The Hearing Test was especially compelling to me because I myself have an appointment with an audiologist coming up. Hearing loss runs in my family, and after a simple test at my last physical confirmed that it was starting to show up for me, I got a referral for more extensive evaluation. I’m nervous, and I’m very interested in this subject right now.

These two books made a surprisingly perfect accidental pairing in my reading life this week, overlapping in their slow, meandering tone, their heavy use of references (I looked up a lot of places, historical events, and art works), and their topics of consideration. If you’re an all-vibes-no-plot kind of girlie and either of them sounds like your jam, I recommend. Both are also fairly short, so if you’re in the mood for some deep thinking (and frequent googling), they hopefully won’t be too intimidating.

Currently listening

It’s so lovely and flattering to me that you’re reading my newsletter right now, but what you should really be doing is listening to Lighthouse (2024) by Francis of Delirium!! It’s so good!

This album found me at exactly the right time. I saved “Alone Tonight” to my 2024 playlist a while back and have been playing it a bunch lately, but I only last week realized that there are ten additional Francis of Delirium songs that I’ve been unintentionally missing out on. And they are all kind of perfect?? Full of yearning, with an alternately delicate and powerful alto voice over the most satisfying chord progressions, a sound like the sun’s warmth slowly disappearing on an autumn afternoon, the feeling of desperately searching for something that you’ve lost. The entire record: indie rock power ballad gold.

My favorite track is “Something’s Changed,” which has one of the simplest and most effective combinations of lyrics and accompaniment I’ve ever heard. There are no flowery phrases, no impressive musical techniques, just the idea that something is irrevocably different, and the lingering heartache at not being able to go back to how it was before. I can feel this song in my ribcage.

Also have I mentioned that Jana Bahrich, lead singer and songwriter, is but twenty-two or twenty-three years old (wikipedia isn’t exactly sure)?! Her creative talent and emotional maturity are staggering. If this is her debut full-length album, I can only imagine where she’ll go from here. Seriously, don’t sleep on it.

There is so much more I could write about Lighthouse, but I’ll wrap it up and let you go listen. The above video is for the last song on the album, another favorite of mine. So, yeah—go! listen!!

And another thing

My mom and I used to watch Gilmore Girls together when it originally aired on the WB/CW, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve been through the series since then. Well, the time felt right to start from the beginning again, and NO I DID NOT CRY at the pilot, about how I used to identify with Rory but how I’m now six years older than Lorelai, how the passage of time is so weird and bittersweet, and how this show has been a comforting constant in my life for the past almost TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. Absolutely no one cried about any of those things.
Did you hear that Linkin Park is back together and has a new lead singer named EMILY? Their new album, From Zero, will be out November 15. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but here’s the hour-long livestream performance they released a couple of days ago.
Something funny I did this weekend was spend a solid fifteen minutes attempting to retrieve a confused and stubborn new chicken from the middle of a thorny bush and steer her toward the coop where she’s actually supposed to roost at night. I was successful in the end, but barely. There was much cursing, pleading, bush-shaking, poking, chasing, and eventually grabbing (none of which was as dirty as it sounds). That’s her on the left below—can you see the defiance in her eyes?