Monday Miscellany: The soft little weirdo inside

Notes from October 21 - 27

Oct 29, 2024

Good evening, ghouls and ghosts! I hope your week is off to an okay start. The to-do list I made for myself today was unreasonably long, and even though I was very aware of that when I wrote it, I’m still lightly annoyed at myself for not getting everything done. But listen, something’s better than nothing, especially when that something includes baking pumpkin chocolate chip cookies (and taking said cookies to book trivia to share with friends). Tomorrow’s another day; I’ll cross a few more things off my list then. For now, let’s talk about some books and music I’ve been enjoying lately.

Currently reading

I finished Fang Fiction by Kate Stayman-London this week for Greta Johnsen’s book club and it was a spooky little delight. It’s all about Tess, a comparative literature graduate student in New York City who has left her program for Reasons (about which we find out more as the story goes along) and become the night manager of a boutique hotel. Tess also happens to be a huge fan of a vampire book series called Blood Feud—and when a character from the series suddenly shows up in her real life, she is faced with a challenge that will completely upend everything, ultimately bringing her healing, strength, new love, and reunion with an estranged friend. The author is a Swiftie and a huge fan of Buffy, The Vampire Diaries, Twilight, etc, and these influences are very present in this book! As a somewhat picky occasional romance reader, I appreciated that there was a lot going on besides the love plot lines, and I had fun losing myself in the dual worlds of the story.

In nonfiction news, Tin House recently sent me a copy of The Flitting by Ben Masters, a nature memoir that was released at the beginning of October, and I enjoyed it very much. Ben’s dad has been a naturalist and butterfly enthusiast for as long as Ben can remember, but he’s never really shared that interest (and in fact has resisted it for many years)—until his dad’s cancer returns in 2020 and Ben is forced to face losing him. The book chronicles Ben’s foray into butterflying, a hobby he adopts as a way to connect with his dying father, and also includes a lot of literary criticism (did you know that Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, was a butterflyer?) and deep examination of the father-son relationship.

But we all spend our adult lives translating our parents one way or another, making sense of them in new contexts, asking them to communicate across time, to speak to and for different selves. (51)

This is a poignant read for sure, and an informative one (I was fascinated by the mutually beneficial role of black ants in the silver-studded blue’s hatching process, for example)! It felt perfect for this time of year, since Masters talks a lot about cycles and natural progressions and death.

After The Flitting, I picked up The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken, which is about a daughter’s reckoning with her mother’s death, because I thought it would make an appropriate back-to-back pairing. It’s also quite short (177 pages)! From the beginning, the narrator continually mentions that this is fiction, not memoir, but let’s be real, it’s preeeetty autobiographical. Not a lot happens; the Elizabeth figure (not Elizabeth, seriously, this isn’t a memoir) travels to London and spends her time there introspectively, visiting museums, taking a ride on the London Eye, wandering the streets, eavesdropping on strangers, reminiscing about her mom.

Bereaved. That I’d own up to. Bereaved suggests the shadow of the missing one, while grief insists you’re all alone. In London, I was bereaved and haunted. (6)

One of my favorite things about this little book was all of the quotable bits. I wrote down quite a few of McCracken’s musings on parent-child relationships, pieces of writing advice, and funny observations. Something about the narrator’s voice kept me at a distance throughout, but I could occasionally manage to peek through her careful exterior to the soft little weirdo inside.

There is something wrong with a person who loves ballpoint pens. I believe nothing so deeply as this. (77)

(Rollerballs and gel pens forever, bay-bee.)

Currently listening

Okay, so before some gross allegations against Justin Roiland came out a few years ago, I used to be a big fan of the show Rick & Morty. There was an episode early in season 2 that ended in a particularly emotionally gutting way, and it had this song playing over the credits that I immediately fell in love with—“Do You Feel It?” by Chaos Chaos. To this day I am obsessed with so much about it: a stark Sleigh Bells-esque beat, tight sister harmonies, killer falsetto moments, HAND CLAPS, piano accompaniment (including a few incredibly well-timed bass octaves), and the lyric “where is the love, the kind we dream of, the kind that makes us young?” It’s on my playlist of all-time favorites is what I’m saying.

I recently bought some new headphones (Beats Fit Pro for the curious) and out of the box, the right earbud wouldn’t connect to my phone, laptop, or tablet. So I spent a while troubleshooting, then chatted with an Apple representative, then scheduled an appointment at a local repair shop to drop off the headphones for testing. A replacement right earbud was ordered, but when it arrived back at the shop, for some reason it was missing the little tip that goes in your ear, so I had to wait a few more days for that. Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this story is that when I finally got my headphones back and was able to try them out for the first time, I figured I better choose the correct first song to listen to! That song was not actually “Do You Feel It?,” it was “Look Up” by Stars (a discussion for another day, as I have way too much to say about that one), but because I played it from aforementioned all-time favorite playlist and shuffle was on, “Do You Feel It?” came up next and I immediately felt like OHH, YEAH. I had forgotten about you, Chaos Chaos.

As an Emily does, I bopped over to the band’s Spotify page to see what they’ve been up to lately, and what are the odds, they actually just released a new version of this very song earlier this month—that’s right, “Do You Feel It? (With Strings)”! The vocals are as gorgeous as ever, but without the driving beat of the original, and with the added strings, the overall sound is smoother and more cinematic. I think I slightly prefer the original, but this one is pretty lovely. Also I discovered that TEN YEARS have passed between the two?? What is time?