to be sorted later #13
in which I forgot to write an intro but we do what we want here!
You ever spend so much time writing one section of a blog post, then realize you didn’t write an introduction, and it’s now 11pm and you’ve also rewatched “Beetlejuice” tonight and your cat is snoring with his head directly next to your laptop and you want to read more than three pages of your book tonight without dropping it on your face as you doze off?
Just me?
Anyway, I really went for it with my intro in the #12 edition, so let’s get right into it for lucky #13 of your favorite Substack column (LOL). Clearly, there’s a lot to sort through, including my grip on reality!
What I’m Sorting Through, Currently …
Watching “Twin Peaks” for the First Time!
Much to my pal Logan’s ongoing disappointment, instead of finally watching “The Sopranos,” I opted for “Twin Peaks” instead, inspired by my brother also watching it and a lifetime of never getting the references. This scene below now lives rent-free inside my brain. I’m already on season 2! My dreams are wilder and weirder than usual, and I fully blame this show (and of course being a human being in 2024).
Reading my September Stack of Books
I’ve had a productive week of racing through library books. First, I read You’re Safe Here, by Substack blogger extraordinaire Leslie Stephens, followed by the much-hyped Liars by Sarah Manguso, and now, I’m reading The Coin by Yasmin Zaher.
You’re Safe Here was a fun Labor Day read: set in 2060 California, in a disturbing and eerily imaginable time where the combined influence of tech and wellness industries have taken over. I’ve been enjoying Leslie Stephens’ blog, Morning Person, and was delighted by the concept behind this women-centered sci-fi story. I finished it and had a sudden urge to rewatch “San Junipero,” one of my all-time favorite hours of television.
My next library loan was Liars, which I was especially intrigued by after reading the NYT’s review: aggrieved wife? potentially unreliable narrator? Or how about “all the levels of storytelling that make up a marriage, that invent or bolster the idea of marriage in the first place”? And then there was Elif Batuman’s review quote: “Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”
I agree! It was consistently painful and occasionally brilliant! I did not love it. I think I would have had about as much fun revisiting my journal from 2011-2012, which is what I’d probably do if I wanted to read a laundry list of a woman’s complaints about a god-awful man with whom she is maddeningly involved in an ongoing romantic relationship. Was I also a potentially unreliable, bitter narrator? Probably, sometimes! Who cares?
My GOD I didn’t want to hear about John, her shits or his (this gets covered many times), any “sessions” (every time they have sex, it’s referred to as a session) or “the child” for one more line!
I took three shits before breakfast and two tranquilizers before the mediation session. John said that he wasn’t to blame for the divorce but that his hand had been forced. He described me as volatile and unsafe for the child to be around.
I will say this: I couldn’t put it down. I was dying to get to the part where they divorce, which of course was coming all along. By the time the narrator’s neighbor finally asks — “Why are you still with him?” — it’s astoundingly late in the story. I was initially furious that I was expected to believe that this woman would even entertain a second date with this clown, let alone marry him, and then I remembered my personal life in 2011 again. Ouch!
Here’s a bit that I particularly enjoyed:
My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.
So next in my apparent trend of reading untrustworthy female narrators, I’m 40 pages into The Coin, about “a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene” (to quote the book jacket) who is living in New York, teaching at a boys’ school and full-out spiraling about dirt. I mean:
I wore a dress by McQueen, my arms and legs were like polished bronze, but underneath my dress everything else was dirty, beginning to rot.
I couldn’t sleep at Sasha’s. All night I thought about my dirty body and the place I could not clean.
I texted my friend Lauren a blurb that reminded me of a conversation we’d just had (about doctors, not dirt) and added, “The narrator of this book is insane. I kinda love her?” I’ve laughed out loud at least three times in 40 pages, which I was not expecting.
Before you ask — yes, I am also still reading War & Peace!
O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful Wild God Is)
Just listen:
“I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time.” — ALL FOURS, Miranda July
previously:
to be sorted later #12
It’s back-to-school time, which means relatively little to me as a childless cat lady spinster auntie supreme. That’s not exactly true, though: for me, a standard visit to Target in mid-August often turns into a happy trip down memory lane of childhood annual back-to-school shopping at the Target in Anderson, Indiana with Mom, Nannie (my great-grandmoth…