Lazy day when it shouldn't be, but: ACTUAL WEEKEND, hurrah!
So, today's to-do list includes:
Transcribe last-minute interview acquired yesterday afternoon
Outline and largely write up debut piece for [PLACE], due Monday
Clean ALL THE THINGS so 
theladyscribe doesn't have to stay in a HOLE full of JUNK EVERYWHERE, er, tonight
However, so far today I have:
Gotten home quite late and not a little drunk from a neighborhood I'd never been to before, yay!
(Which means I also went out to a party and didn't once try to talk myself out of it, YAY MEDS)
Slept until 9, which is amazing, considering I've been waking up at dawn against my will all week
Loafed until 10:30, hurrah
Had tea for the first time in a week or so, because it was giving me heart palpitations before (boo meds, but YAY TEA)
Any week in which I get to see
byzantienne is a good one, especially when we have quite literally maybe the best Vietnamese food of my life (who knew tilapia could be so not boring?). I've been working my luxury magazine gig every day, although sometimes it's only for two or three hours, which is almost as much time I spend traveling to get there and back. Either way, though, I'll have spent most of a month going into an office every day by the time it's done, which works wonders for the mood. Another plus, though, is that as a lifestyle magazine, they get sent ARCs and books in the hopes that they'll review them (I don't think they ever do), so... there's a huge stack of books for the taking, and I have, and I've had some really interesting reads lately that I never would have otherwise picked up.
Primates of Park Avenue (Wednesday Martin) is a quote-unquote anthropological study from within the Gossip Girl set of the Upper East Side, and while it's not without its problems (apparently it made Society up there VERY ANGRY, may not have been all that accurate and certainly isn't all that scholarly, and any woman who thinks she's so bohemian just for living in the West Village is not really starting from a place of down-to-earth contrast), it's strange and hilarious in its own way. It sounds like an exhausting life and I have no idea why anyone would want it, but I won't lie, it definitely would be amazing and strange to have even remotely that much money.
The Guineveres (Sarah Domet) won't be out until October, but it's supposedly in the vein of The Virgin Suicides, which I never read, and it turned out to be good for making me think harder about how to approach the relationships and the focus of the Big Band Witches story. It's about four girls, all named Guinevere, who are all sent to live at a convent during a sort of loosely define War; four comatose soldiers are sent to the hospital ward where they're working as punishment, and they each develop these intense relationships with them as their own with each other become more complicated. I don't know how groundbreaking it all is, and I didn't really love the end, but it is a neat look at a four-in-one friendship, and what identity is when you invest so deeply in people outside yourself.
Dog Medicine (Julie Barton) is a short, lyrical depression memoir about a woman who, after a year in New York, has a significant nervous breakdown, comes home to her parents' place in Ohio and then gets a golden retriever puppy who saves her life. It sounds cliche as hell, but one of the writer's mentors is Cheryl Strayed (Dear Sugar), so if you like that sort of close, emotional writing, this one is good for that. I kept reading because so many parts of it were familiar to me (she grew up in a suburb of Columbus; her older brother is abusive, which my sister Anya spoke of every chance she got; she moves to Seattle, where my sister Erika has lived since the late '80s; this all takes place in 1996-97, formative years for me too; I never wanted to live in New York either; I too have ferociously loved and longed for a dog). It depicts a much, much more severe depression than I've ever experienced, but it was also familiar to me -- I think it's a book I'd give to people who don't understand what going through depression is like. Anyway, it's a little like H Is for Hawk, if you read that (which I highly recommend; that book is stunning).
I've also started a book about how people fake their deaths in this day and age, but last night I got distracted by a book of travel writing by a guy named Bob Shacochis, apparently a National Book Award winner and all kinds of other plaudits. The book is called Kingdoms in the Air: Dispatches From the Far Away, and the first/title essay is about traveling through a region in Nepal about ten years after it really opened up to tourism, to see how it's changed. He's still in Kathmandu at the moment, which sounds like a much different city than I was imagining. I'm learning a lot -- it's also very relatable because one of my best friends from high school took a gap year to live in Nepal, which we all though was completely ill-advised because it was during all the Maoist revolts and the assassination of the entire royal family and that sort of thing -- just the same period Shacochis is writing about. (I mean, this friend, who was of the "raised without antibiotics and very cavalier about skirting the rules everyone else had to follow" sort, also casually tried to get out of her State Department-mandated vaccinations, including for bubonic plague, and only relented when she found out she wouldn't be allowed back into the United States if she did, so -- she's always been kind of full of ill-advised life choices, which I say with love and frustration and love.)
Last, and not snatched from the office, I'd long been curious about a book called City of Thieves, a work of fiction by the Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff. I resisted it because ugh, GoT overexposure for miles, and it seemed a little Everything Is Illuminated-y in that it's framed as a true story his grandfather tells him about life in Leningrad one winter during WWII. And yet... when I finally read Everything Is Illuminated, which, fuck wunderkinder like Jonathan Safran Foer, oh my god I loved it so much -- and while these are incredibly different stories and treatments, City of Thieves is... basically a perfect book. The quick version is that a young Jewish teenager and a charismatic deserter from the Russian army are sent on a mission to procure some eggs for a colonel, who won't shoot them both if they succeed. It's also exactly the kind of story I want out of the Big Band Witches -- very small and very personal and very high-stakes in a totally self-contained way, against the backdrop of the world falling apart. Very funny, wonderful characters, excellent plotting -- like, I loved this book and would recommend it to everyone, though, I mean. It's gruesome, in parts. Wartime is not pretty!
I also have a long
magpieandwhale post I've been meaning to write about all the absolutely incredible graphic memoirs and novels I've been reading over the past few months. One that I'd been avoiding and which moved me and made me howl with laughter and cry is The Story of My Tits by Jennifer Hayden, about both her family history of breast cancer and her own growth as a person through how she relates to her breasts. It sounds so dopey, and the drawing style is so cartoony (it almost looks like those Red Bull ads), but oh my god, it's so, so masterful. And that's not even getting into Rutu Modan's The Property, or Nicole Georges' Calling Dr. Laura, or Unterzakhn by Leela Corman. They all make me want to do that -- and frankly, while chatting with
byzantienne this week, I realized later that I have this idea for a children's book that would be a marvelous comic, for kids and adults both, so... that could be a thing to do.
Tomorrow I get to see a big mashup of Shakespeare history plays with
oliviacirce, and I am so stoked. \o/ Happy Saturday, all!
This was originally posted on Dreamwidth, where it has
comments. I would love to hear from you at DW! If you can see this post, you can comment here using OpenID. Thanks!
theladyscribe doesn't have to stay in a HOLE full of JUNK EVERYWHERE, er, tonight
However, so far today I have:
Any week in which I get to see
byzantienne is a good one, especially when we have quite literally maybe the best Vietnamese food of my life (who knew tilapia could be so not boring?). I've been working my luxury magazine gig every day, although sometimes it's only for two or three hours, which is almost as much time I spend traveling to get there and back. Either way, though, I'll have spent most of a month going into an office every day by the time it's done, which works wonders for the mood. Another plus, though, is that as a lifestyle magazine, they get sent ARCs and books in the hopes that they'll review them (I don't think they ever do), so... there's a huge stack of books for the taking, and I have, and I've had some really interesting reads lately that I never would have otherwise picked up.
Primates of Park Avenue (Wednesday Martin) is a quote-unquote anthropological study from within the Gossip Girl set of the Upper East Side, and while it's not without its problems (apparently it made Society up there VERY ANGRY, may not have been all that accurate and certainly isn't all that scholarly, and any woman who thinks she's so bohemian just for living in the West Village is not really starting from a place of down-to-earth contrast), it's strange and hilarious in its own way. It sounds like an exhausting life and I have no idea why anyone would want it, but I won't lie, it definitely would be amazing and strange to have even remotely that much money.
The Guineveres (Sarah Domet) won't be out until October, but it's supposedly in the vein of The Virgin Suicides, which I never read, and it turned out to be good for making me think harder about how to approach the relationships and the focus of the Big Band Witches story. It's about four girls, all named Guinevere, who are all sent to live at a convent during a sort of loosely define War; four comatose soldiers are sent to the hospital ward where they're working as punishment, and they each develop these intense relationships with them as their own with each other become more complicated. I don't know how groundbreaking it all is, and I didn't really love the end, but it is a neat look at a four-in-one friendship, and what identity is when you invest so deeply in people outside yourself.
Dog Medicine (Julie Barton) is a short, lyrical depression memoir about a woman who, after a year in New York, has a significant nervous breakdown, comes home to her parents' place in Ohio and then gets a golden retriever puppy who saves her life. It sounds cliche as hell, but one of the writer's mentors is Cheryl Strayed (Dear Sugar), so if you like that sort of close, emotional writing, this one is good for that. I kept reading because so many parts of it were familiar to me (she grew up in a suburb of Columbus; her older brother is abusive, which my sister Anya spoke of every chance she got; she moves to Seattle, where my sister Erika has lived since the late '80s; this all takes place in 1996-97, formative years for me too; I never wanted to live in New York either; I too have ferociously loved and longed for a dog). It depicts a much, much more severe depression than I've ever experienced, but it was also familiar to me -- I think it's a book I'd give to people who don't understand what going through depression is like. Anyway, it's a little like H Is for Hawk, if you read that (which I highly recommend; that book is stunning).
I've also started a book about how people fake their deaths in this day and age, but last night I got distracted by a book of travel writing by a guy named Bob Shacochis, apparently a National Book Award winner and all kinds of other plaudits. The book is called Kingdoms in the Air: Dispatches From the Far Away, and the first/title essay is about traveling through a region in Nepal about ten years after it really opened up to tourism, to see how it's changed. He's still in Kathmandu at the moment, which sounds like a much different city than I was imagining. I'm learning a lot -- it's also very relatable because one of my best friends from high school took a gap year to live in Nepal, which we all though was completely ill-advised because it was during all the Maoist revolts and the assassination of the entire royal family and that sort of thing -- just the same period Shacochis is writing about. (I mean, this friend, who was of the "raised without antibiotics and very cavalier about skirting the rules everyone else had to follow" sort, also casually tried to get out of her State Department-mandated vaccinations, including for bubonic plague, and only relented when she found out she wouldn't be allowed back into the United States if she did, so -- she's always been kind of full of ill-advised life choices, which I say with love and frustration and love.)
Last, and not snatched from the office, I'd long been curious about a book called City of Thieves, a work of fiction by the Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff. I resisted it because ugh, GoT overexposure for miles, and it seemed a little Everything Is Illuminated-y in that it's framed as a true story his grandfather tells him about life in Leningrad one winter during WWII. And yet... when I finally read Everything Is Illuminated, which, fuck wunderkinder like Jonathan Safran Foer, oh my god I loved it so much -- and while these are incredibly different stories and treatments, City of Thieves is... basically a perfect book. The quick version is that a young Jewish teenager and a charismatic deserter from the Russian army are sent on a mission to procure some eggs for a colonel, who won't shoot them both if they succeed. It's also exactly the kind of story I want out of the Big Band Witches -- very small and very personal and very high-stakes in a totally self-contained way, against the backdrop of the world falling apart. Very funny, wonderful characters, excellent plotting -- like, I loved this book and would recommend it to everyone, though, I mean. It's gruesome, in parts. Wartime is not pretty!
I also have a long
magpieandwhale post I've been meaning to write about all the absolutely incredible graphic memoirs and novels I've been reading over the past few months. One that I'd been avoiding and which moved me and made me howl with laughter and cry is The Story of My Tits by Jennifer Hayden, about both her family history of breast cancer and her own growth as a person through how she relates to her breasts. It sounds so dopey, and the drawing style is so cartoony (it almost looks like those Red Bull ads), but oh my god, it's so, so masterful. And that's not even getting into Rutu Modan's The Property, or Nicole Georges' Calling Dr. Laura, or Unterzakhn by Leela Corman. They all make me want to do that -- and frankly, while chatting with
byzantienne this week, I realized later that I have this idea for a children's book that would be a marvelous comic, for kids and adults both, so... that could be a thing to do.
Tomorrow I get to see a big mashup of Shakespeare history plays with
oliviacirce, and I am so stoked. \o/ Happy Saturday, all!
This was originally posted on Dreamwidth, where it has
comments. I would love to hear from you at DW! If you can see this post, you can comment here using OpenID. Thanks!