There’s something about the angle of the sun through windows in spring that suddenly shows you… how fucking dirty your apartment is. My friend Adoree says this is why spring cleaning is A Thing. I don’t know if that’s true, but I love the concept: that as the Earth tips its way into spring, it wakes you up to all the things you neglected in the dark of winter.
Point is, we REALLY need to vacuum, woof.
But before that…
Five Things I’ve Liked Recently That You Might Also Like:
I took myself on a little date to The Art Institute and a terrific little hidden bookstore in downtown Chicago called Exile in Bookville (side note: It’s in the gorgeous Fine Arts Building which, until recently, housed Chicago’s last manual elevator (and by “until recently” I don’t mean there are now MORE manual elevators, that would be amazing. Nope - they destroyed this one - I hate it!)). Anyway, since I was already feeling adventurous, I picked up a book I had never heard of, solely on the written recommendation of a bookseller I did not know. And you know what? Brian by Jeremy Cooper is poignant and funny and sad and hopeful and very difficult to describe other than to say it’s basically just a lonely guy processing the world by watching movies over the span of like 30 years. You’re just going to have to trust me like I trusted that disembodied anonymous bookseller.
While at The Art Institute, I decided to skip the popular Impressionist wing and head straight for the 18th century, feeling for some reason like soaking in violent religious art, recreations of ancient Rome, and haughty portraits of fancy men in ruffled shirts. I came across a weirdly sexy portrait of a young woman whose shoulder parrot was pulling her shirt open with its beak, nearly exposing her breast, and called, coyly, “A Young Lady with a Parrot.” And I was like - hello, you have my attention. Turns out the artist was one Rosalba Carriera - one of the most famous European female artists of the 18th century. She basically made her fortune exploiting tourists in Venice - drawing miniature portraits in pastels that they could easily carry in their luggage - and because she wasn’t competing with male artists who were painting massive and muscular recreations of ancient Rome, no one bothered or harassed her or forced her to get married and she got rich and kept all her money the end. An icon.
All I said on Threads (my first mistake?) was that I hate when people say “genre is a contract with the reader” because while that’s a fine choice for some authors, it is bleak and boring and unnecessary as a rule, and I seem to have hit a nerve:
I guess my first thought is - why would you double down on this? And my second thought is - we as a society have been through a lot recently, anxiety-wise, but I think it is the wrong approach to expect the external world to manage our anxiety for us by always giving us exactly what we expect. Uncertainty is the cost of possibility, and managing anxiety is always and forever an inside job.
That movie Drive-Away Dolls is really fun. More lesbian heist movies please, and by the way how refreshing to have a buffoonish female lead character? More of that too. I have only two beefs (beeves?) with it: One - without spoiling anything, I’m extremely annoyed at their briefcase plot for hinging on an idea *I* was hoping to use one day. And two - as a 1999 lesbian myself, I can tell you that eyebrows were not that lush, and we did not tuck our shirts in, EVER.
Hey so in my last newsletter, I mentioned I was going to start thrifting more in an effort to rediscover my own style. I’m still figuring it all out, but I started taking pictures of my outfits to remember what I’ve tried. Here’s my fave so far - up until now I hadn’t figured out how to wear this muppet-neon sweater, and I still haven’t, but I like where it’s going.
Bonus lewd animal fact:
Don’t tell my deep-sea scientist friends this, but today we’re going to talk about dolphins (deep-sea scientists hate dolphins, did you know? Like with a PASSION.)
Anyway, bottlenose dolphins have a lot of sex. All kinds of sex! (PS gotta love the headline “Dolphin Clitoris Is Full of Surprises”) Like with humans, dolphin sex is a social activity as well as a procreative one. Which means, like with humans, there’s a lot of gay sex. Lady dolphins have clitorises, so they’ll they’ll rub on each other, masturbate each other with their flippers and whatever else happens to be around, and! They have been known to use their snouts as dildoes!Hey! Thanks for reading. Just a quick housekeeping note that future newsletters will have slightly more rank self-promotion as I gear up to release my next book Remember You Will Die (which is available for pre-order and for adding to Goodreads ahem), but you can continue to expect the same random snark and irreverence, and that’s a promise.
I dunno. I think if someone believes your book is a hardboiled mystery, then it should have some hardboiled mystery elements. Except--well, there's Zizek: ""Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging." Which I also believe.
Is rape by a dolphin still rape even though that's normal dolphin behavior? Do dolphins ever say NO to other dolphins? What do dolphins consider unacceptable social behavior?