queenlua

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Day 6, eastern paradise whydah

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hey, i read a good book; let me tell you all about it

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sometimes i think about attempting to write a book review for An Actual Publication but then i look over my favorite reviews i've written and they're like. thousands of words too long for any actual publication lol

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the line between vengeful brutal catharsis and gay sex is very thin so be careful out there

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✷ SUNBLIND ✷

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oh hey i liked this guy's last book! & this interview is also interesting

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Gray Catbird on staghorn sumac Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1

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i remember being politely amused when that "On Heteropessimism" essay made the rounds a few years back, because the world of straightness described in the essay—full of drunk straight women slurring that it would be "so much easier" to be gay, ball-and-chain jokes that have been dated since 1942, etc—seemed puzzlingly foreign to me. i didn't expect it to be! seeing as i'm in fact, y'know, a woman who likes men. but the dudes i've liked are historically pretty cool and chill? most het relationships in my social circles seem pretty egalitarian? what on earth is there to be "embarrassed" about; it's literally fine?

but very occasionally i do encounter this heterosexual mirror-dimension via some means or another

(the most memorable instance of this: once i was at a bachelorette party where this one chick went on extended rant about how much she disliked the smell, anatomy, etc of her husband, who she VERY MUCH claimed to like, it's just that EVERYONE dislikes those things about their husbands yaknow!!! and aren't girls just so great and soft and touchable, dreamy sigh. i am not kidding. mysterious bachelorette party woman, i understand you are trapped in an Upper-Middle Class Highland Park Texas Gender Prison, but damn i sure hope you got yourself out of there eventually)

anyway, this is all to say: wow, Curtis Sittenfeld's writing sure is exactly as Gender as i remember from the last time i read her lmao

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The Burner, which represents itself as independent journalism with a lefty twist, seems to have forgotten the journalism part. I got a copy of the memo, which was not linked in the post, and it took about five seconds to realize that at least one of the statements the publication represented, between quotation marks, as quotes from the memo ... is not actually a quote from the memo.

lmao the girls are fiiiighting

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"Well," [Glory] said, "I'm going to get that barn torn down. If I inherit this place, that's the first thing I'm going to do." [. . .] [Jack] went across the hall to the dining room and flipped on the light, and stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips. "I see what you mean." "It looks like something out of The Old Curiosity Shop." "True." But he kept looking around at it, the table and sideboard with their leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet, like some ill-considered, doily-infested species of which they were the last survivors. The wall sconces that were lotus blossoms with lightbulbs where their stamens ought to have been. She thought, Dear Lord, he is missing it all in anticipation. She thought, As long as he is alive in the world, or as long as no one knows otherwise, I will probably have to keep all that sour, fierce, dreary black walnut. That purple rug. And if he dies I will still have to keep it, because I have seen him look at it this way.

—from Home by Marilynne Robinson

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as a contrast to failing-at-nanowrimo abe lincoln:

behold the chad crushing-the-hell-out-of-nanowrimo-on-his-first-try ulysses s. grant, who spent his whole lifetime refusing to write his autobiography b/c that seemed like vanity and self-obsessed ostentation, only to frantically pound his memoirs out later in life, when he falls into financial ruin & gets throat cancer & is like "holy shit ok if i sell this at least i won't be damning my surviving family to penury":

Seldom, if ever, has a literary masterpiece been composed under such horrific circumstances. Whenever he swallowed anything, Grant was stricken with pain and had to resort to opiates that clouded his brain. As a result, he endured extended periods of thirst and hunger as he labored over his manuscript. The torment of the inflamed throat never ceased. When the pain grew too great, his black valet, Harrison Tarrell, sprayed his throat with "cocaine water," temporarily numbing the area, or applied hot compresses to his head. Despite his fear of morphine addiction, Grant could not dispense entirely with such powerful medication. "I suffer pain all the time, except when asleep," he told his doctor" [. . .]

Summoning the last reserves of his strength, through a stupendous act of willpower, Grant toiled four or six hours a day, adding more time on sleepless nights. For family and friends his obsessive labor was wondrous to behold: the soldier so famously reticent that someone quipped he "could be silent in several languages" pumped out 336,000 words of superb prose in a year. By May 1885, just two months before his death, Grant was forced to dictate, and, when his voice failed, he scribbled messages on thin strips of paper [. . .]

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April 27, 2025

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(1) this is absolutely a disrespectful and fandom-googles reading of very serious pulitzer-prize-winning book series Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, but—sigh—okay Jack as portrayed in book 2 absolutely has woobie vibes right. dude puts hand-to-face whenever he is made to feel Vaguely Pathetic and it is making my heartbeat do Funny Things

anyway i just checked ao3 and there is no fanfiction for this book so i guess every other bitch who's read these books is far more respectful than i am contemplating being

(2) kind of random but there's Something To Be Said for the almost-but-not-quite-supernatural understanding these characters have of each other—an awareness of how such-and-such minute gesture would be interpreted badly, or well, by another character, and so they politely refrain, and the other character senses their restraint, and smiles in a way that acknowledges the kindness, but in a plausibly-deniable way that allows them to both save face—

which reminds me of nothing so much as the 4d Mental Chess Sequence that plays out between Honda and Isao in Runaway Horses

(which, when a friend first pointed that out to me, made me go "oh it's kind of like Death Note actually" lmao)

something incredibly compelling about this sort of thing in fiction, even though it's so hard to get it right—if characters start feeling like literal mind readers it will throw you right the hell out, but if i'm convinced they know each other so well that they can communicate so much with just a gesture, a touch—hell yeah that's the good stuff, it whips

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Alexandre Dumas and Marilynne Robinson both out here wielding dramatic irony simultaneously like a scalpel & a hatchet, truly one of the most banger cheap tricks available to storytellers everywhere

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i love drawing birds somuch

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as someone who knows almost nothing about modern catholic bureaucracy/hierarchy but loves court gossip, i v much enjoyed the teaser/glimpse that Know Your Enemy's Pope Francis retrospective offered of such things... brb looking up this viganó guy because WHAT is the story there

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this marilynne robinson book has me so fully immersed in 1950s-US-midwestopia that i'm GASPIN ALOUD and BLUSHIN when it's revealed that (good heavens!!!) one of these characters was NOT PROPERLY MARRIED to the MAN SHE LIVED WITH

and then when i try to explain why i'm FREAKIN OUT to thoroughly-godless-thoroughly-modern-west-coast-free-spirit partner he's just like "..." "..." "...lua you realize we literally did that" YEAH BUT IT'S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT COME ON NOW