I’m still slowly working through The Artist’s Way–it seems that my rhythm is to go for three weeks and then completely abandon it in the fourth, swamped by end of the month deadlines, but I am still engaged enough to return to it once my duties are discharged. This month, one of the challenges proposed by this book was to not read for a week. Reading, according to the author, can be addictive for the creatively blocked. So this is what I read in November except for the week before Thanksgiving, when I took a (surprisingly welcome) hiatus from devouring new books.
Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola. I picked this up from my neighborhood Buy Nothing group because I remember my Twitter mutuals (back when I was on Twitter) being absolutely wild for this book and the author’s debut. Romance, as a genre, isn’t really for me; I respect it, I admire it, but I don’t usually enjoy reading it all that much. I enjoyed this, though. The prose is warm and sharp and funny, the chemistry is hot and more believable than most. I was charmed by many of the classic romance elements that usually don’t work for me, and there were a few unexpected twists I appreciated. A fun, juicy read.
The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West. It’s odd to say that this was a comforting read, but it was. Lindy West is extremely funny, and her jokes are aimed in the right direction with the sharp ends pointed toward abuses and excesses of power. (Except, perhaps, when she comes for dresses with pockets. I still found that section very funny, though!) And while these essays were published in a desperate time–2019, as the #MeToo movement continued to reverberate and the 2020 presidential campaign was in high gear–it is both familiar and distant, an era with a very different flavor of desperation than where we are now. Still smart and insightful, but not urgent, if that makes sense. It felt good to laugh about 2019.
When I came off my reading fast, I had a yen for Edith Wharton–partly because I’ve been watching The Buccaneers, a frothy jewel-toned adaptation of her final unfinished novel. I don’t have a copy of The Buccaneers, so I decided to reread The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, featuring Progressive Era marriage mercenary Undine Spragg. I last encountered it during my tumultuous exam reading period and remember it being a sharp, mean-spirited good time–an impression that was probably enhanced by contrast with some of the more subtle selections on my exam reading list. Custom is not subtle. It took a little time for me to warm back up to it; the first book, with an unschooled and unmarried Undine searching for a New York husband, isn’t quite as fun as I remembered. But the real shenanigans start after she marries, when Undine continues her social climb on the backs of her suitors and Wharton allows the side characters to articulate the drama they’re enacting: men use women and treat them as inferior, so what happens when women learn to use men just as callously? Undine is a true unlikeable heroine, but I root for her all the same–there’s a pleasure in watching her reveal the seamy side of social hierarchy and marriage simply because she has not been taught to pretend they are sacred. I was reminded more than once of The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, published just 16 years later in the 1920s–the seeds of the Jazz Age attitude to love and sex are already in the ground here.
The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon. I was excited to pick up this slim essay collection, remembering that I felt moved by the author’s reading at an AWP event. I needed to take it slow, though…. the opening essay is a speculative look at the life and death of a woman who lay undiscovered in her apartment for three years before anyone found her, inspiring the author to question the strength of social and familial bonds in her life and life in general, I guess, which shook me to my core.
Some short poems and stories I liked:
Friday Night by Gwen E. Kirby
What To Do With the Hedges by Bernard Ferguson (it is about my nemesis, phragmites!)
Nothing in That Drawer by Ron Padgett
Honey (I Put Down My Ax) by Rasma Haidri
The Antiparticle Delivery Driver by Rachel Girty
Elsewhere
This is an older story, but it still seethes with fury and helped me understand a little about how sites like Jezebel get run down and shut down by shady companies. Although, Jezebel has since been purchased by Paste Magazine, an odd publication I follow for the occasional gems tucked among the many lists of Top Streaming Whatevers, so its fate remains to be seen.
You know this, but in case you need a lot of good reasons: Liberal women should not marry Republican men
Some interesting tidbits about conservation and sartorial history in this melancholy essay about feathers and fashion.
Minutiae
Philadelphia got a true fall this year, with some gloriously bright foliage and a good number of crisp sunny days as well as cozy rainy ones. I enjoyed a good amount of time outdoors: in my favorite park, putting amaranth beds to sleep for the winter and collecting their bright magenta seeds; in my neighborhood, planting trees for neighbors; in my own yard, repotting and mulching and getting the tender plants inside. Thanksgiving is my least favorite holiday and I despise traveling for a weekend that is never long enough, but I did take advantage of the time off to enjoy an unhurried ramble in the Wissahickon, enjoying the autumnal colors of the plants I saw there in the summer.
Aside from the outdoor adventures and ballet classes preparing for our annual Nutcracker party, it has been a sedentary month of work and grading and then staying up too late to recover from work and grading. I got kind of into the new Scott Pilgrim show, which rectifies the parts of the original plot that don’t age well. My gentleman and I have started a cozy rewatch of the LOTR trilogy and are just out of the mines of Moria. I played the 2021 version of Oregon Trail, which I found deeply engrossing; half my party got dysentery but did not die of it, which is amazing because you don’t unlock the more useful sort of classes (like doctors and carpenters) until you play through once, so I was stuck with a party of egotistical bankers and fussy missionaries. (My one useful character, a charming adventurer, was constantly beset with exhaustion. #mood) Everything old is new again.
I did take a train to the suburbs to spend a day with my writing group, replenishing the creative well all afternoon with lunch and strolling through shops and being softly mobbed by friendly dogs, then letting the writing flow around a table scattered with tarot cards and collaborative poems. I met a wizard on the train there: he saw me working on some Artist’s Way exercises and asked how I liked the book, then shared his own Artist’s Way experience from 20 years ago (he began painting coral reefs). “Everything you need, you have inside now,” he said, and then clapped my shoulder firmly as he exited the train.
Sara Davis 