Library Haul

I’m back in the United States which means I’ve checked out an inappropriate amount of books and movies from the library.

Here’s what they are:

Books:

• White Negroes: When Cornrows were in Vogue… and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, Lauren Michele Jackson
• Women who Run with Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estes
• Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and Sublime from Tin House
• Forty Stories, Donald Barthelme
• In the Gloaming: Stories, Alice Elliott Dark
• The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Toni Morrison
• A Village in a Valley, Beverley Nichols

 

Movies:

• Pick of the Litter
• Becoming Astrid
• Cold War
• Good Manners
• Land of Mine
• Room 237
• Maria by Callas
• Mandy
• Night Comes On
• Shadow (the one from last year)
• You Were Never Really Here
• Miss Hokusai
• Prospect
• November
• L’Amant Double

A Decade of Films: 2013

This is a short list, in large part because I’ve missed a large number of films from 2013.

But I did enjoy…

• From Up on Poppy Hill: It’s a cute anime!
• Blackfish: A devastating documentary about what captivity does to orcas!
• The Conjuring:  A great modern horror film that has since created an expanded universe of lesser modern horror films. Excepting Annabelle: Creation. That sh*! was nasty.
• Her: Joaquin Phoenix falls for disembodied AI Scarlett Johansson. Relatable.

I have not yet seen (but do intend to see): Room 237, In the House, The Hunt, Fruitvale Station, Inside Llewyn Davis, 12 Years a Slave, Oldboy, and The Past.

Links 6/15

Hi hi hi. I missed the links post last week not because I didn’t have enough to share, just from pure laziness.  So it’s a bit heavy on the links today, but I have broken them down into bite-size and easily digestible categories.

Trailers:

• Robert Redford looking fine.
• How toTrain Your Dragon is trilogy-ing (!), and this time there’s a lady-dragon!
• Jamie Lee Curtis is back for a Halloween sequel!
• Doggies! Apparently service dogs go through intensive training and aren’t just born being helpful little angels?
• I’m considering a post detailing all of the ways the Tim Burton Dumbo trailer is a crime against the original.
• The next installment in the universe of The Conjuring.

Father’s Day:

• A wince-worthy compilation of Dad Jokes.
• The New Dad: What the evolution of stock photos shows about our changing understanding of paternity and parenthood.

Identity:

• On avoiding the box and embracing your multi-faceted self.
• Body positivity is selling you something.
• Raising a feminist (with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Trevor Noah).
• The stifling nature of masculinity today.
• Kate Spade’s Death and suicide contagion
  If you or a loved one or a general acquaintance is struggling with getting through, please reach out to or for help. We’re all in this together.

Miscellaneous:

• How ASMR became an internet phenomenon.
• This Parisian restaurant only lets you in with a baby or a bump.
• I’ve been following this illustrator for a long time and now she’s selling some of her prints of Etsy!
• Bumblebees use scent and color patterns to tell flowers apart.

Links 6/4

Due to a weekend-trip hiatus (NYC was great, thanks), this links post is a bit later than usual.  Coincidentally, many of these links seem to have a bit of an LGBTQ theme.
Happy Pride!

Let’s get the smell stuff out of the way first:

• Auklets are a bird species in which males demonstrate fitness not only by very fancy and sexy crests, but seemingly also by emitting a strong tangerine scent, research finds.
• Study finds that activation of a certain smell receptor speeds the progression of prostate cancer, suggesting new treatment methods via blocking of the receptor.
• Department stores reevaluate traditional beauty and fragrance marketing techniques as the beauty industry changes.

All the feels:

• One of the best things about the cultural shift toward acceptance of LGBTQ lifestyles (beyond thousands of people being able to live their truth) is the uptick in adorable stories like this.
• This animated short made me cry.
• If babies wrote travel reviews, too funny.

Film thoughts:

• You may have hard of the Post-Western- are we living in the age of the Post-Hero?
• DC vs Marvel action scenes (and why Marvel’s are so much better). Despite not being a fan of either company, I thought this was a very interesting analysis.
• The Power of the Vampire Myth
• Why Solo isn’t doing as well as previous Star Wars films.

Current events:

• A comedy bit about Mamoudou Gassama, France’s immigrant hero (but mostly about the French).
• Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and my own interracial relationship.

Odds and Ends:

• The ‘twink’ controversy: Why can’t black men be twinks? and Can men be objectified? A response to the ‘twink’ controversy.
• Mental health is a journey: five lessons learned from treatment.
• How to get ride of clutter
• Two lovely children’s books: Prince and Knight and Julian is a Mermaid.
• Oh no.

Friday Links 5/11

Happy Friday and Happy Mother’s Day weekend!
Do you have any plans?
In a few hours we (my parents and I) will be going up to Belfast, Maine to spend the weekend with my Aunt Susan and Bill, whose mother owns an alpaca farm.  There will be alpaca shearing, vegan food, and tactful discussions about Infinity War without mentioning to movie fan Bill (it’s so nice to be around other movie fans) that I never plan to see it.

I’ve been reading a lot, falling behind on the films I have checked out from the library, gardening for hours a day, and enjoying the springly weather. I also cooked some interesting pancakes yesterday so that  have foods when I return next week. I will report back.

What’s happening on the worldwide web?

• Speaking of movie people, this film looks like it could be amazing. Also really excited for The Seagull, an adaptation of one of the few Chekhov pieces I’e actually read.
• A beautiful essay that I’m at a loss as to how to describe.
• The Duchess of Northumberland sounds like a fun lady- she created the garden at Alnwick Castle, possible the deadliest garden in the world.
• How does Deadpool always win the promotion game? This is genius.
• One of the greatest things about being back in America is the access to SNL’s youtube uploads. I know the main story (DESERVEDLY) is the release of This is America by Donald Glover- but let’s not forget about the Barbie skit.
• #MeToo and Junot Diaz: Cycles of victimization and victimizing, sexual harassment, celebrity and race.
• When two celebrity ladies (internet fashion personae?) give birth in close succession and get together to share their experiences with the early days of motherhood.
• I love this Public Place Meditation Guide– it’s very closely related to some wisdom my mother shared with me years ago: practice seeing the divinity in everyone around you.
• A mathematical model may explain how two brains agree on the experiential profile of smells.
• Possibly the most charming interview I’ve ever seen. I think I may have just fallen in love with all three of these men.
• Have you liked any pages created by Russian bots?Ask Facebook.
• A complex algorithm predicts the likelihood of final season Game of Thrones deaths. Bye, Daenerys.
• An amazing photograph. I love whales.

All The Magazines

The full title of this post was going to be ‘All The Magazines I Ever Subscribed To’, and then true to form I got pissed off by the dangling preposition and ‘All The Magazines To Which I Ever Subscribed’ was a bit pretentious.
It’s better to hide how pretentious I am until the actual meat of the post, and keep the title innocuous until all reading visitors are trapped.

I’m going to try to divide this post up into a rough chronology, but the magazines don’t actually fit clear delineations so well, and there was more overlap than I’m going to present in this post.  All in all, the time segments are, in actual fact, much more wiggly.

Elementary:
The only magazine to which I can REMEMBER being subscribed in Elementary school is Ranger Rick.  In case you weren’t blessed with Ranger Rick in childhood and have not run into it in any other way, it’s a wildlife-focused publication for kids ostensibly helmed by a cartoon raccoon.  There are puzzles and stuff.

Early Middle School:
In early middle school I had an odd mix of the following:

• Seventeen
• TeenVogue
• Young Rider
• Horse Illustrated

I got caught up in the fashion magazine thing after reading a few after sleeping next to them on my cousin Megan’s floor.  The first TeenVogue I had was the one with Chanel Iman, Karlie Kloss, and Ali Michael together on the cover.  It’s kind of bittersweet because since then two of them have become hugely famous top models.  Ali Michael has struggled with anorexia (much as I have).  And I can’t say how much of it was fed by the beauty-and-body-focused publications of Seventeen and TeenVogue.  And it was my first experience with really being exposed to rampant consumerism and the heartache of wanting so much and desiring so many out of reach beautiful things was new to me.  Growing up is weird.  Mixed in with the pain of discovering life as an adult are also the glimpses back at simpler things (Traumarama! Stupid personality quizzes! Horoscopes!).

And then as I got more serious about riding I spent a fair amount of time poring over Young Rider and Horse Illustrated.  I have particularly strong memories of a Horse Illustrated guide to nematodes and how to deworm your horse.  Other standouts: sheath cleaning, recovery from colic, poisonous plants (yew!), and how to say goodbye to your horse when it needs to be put down (I cried reading it).

Late Middle School into High School:

• Vogue
• Elle
• Allure
• Marie Claire
• Elle
• Lucky
• Harper’s Bazaar
• Practical Horseman
• Dressage Today

From Middle School to High School I guess I just took a step up all around to more serious publications, both with regards to sartorial whatevers (I don’t think I was ever subscribed to ALL of these at once) and horsemanship.

High School Addition:

This Old House I added in High School. I loved TOH and would still love it if it hadn’t changed hands and altered in many ways afterward.

Earring Porn: Fauna

I’ve written before about how I’m never going to get my ears pierced (well, never again) because it would add needless complexity to my life, largely via increased accessory options.

That still doesn’t stop me from marveling at great works of ear ornamentation, especially when it’s in the form of various animals hanging off your lobes, which is all any of us really ant in life.

 

Elizabeth Cole:

Seaman Schepps:

Anoushka:

Dolce & Gabbana:

Les Nereides:

Brent Neale:

Elizabeth Cole:

My Book Wishlist on Amazon

It was a long time ago that my default Amazon wish list was renamed ‘Book Wish List’ and colonized by- you guessed it- books.
But not just any books- the books that my library doesn’t carry.  I’m aware that I pretty frequently sings the praises of the Boston Public Library conglomerate/system, which allows you to check out any book in the Greater Boston area and have it shipped to your local library.  But that doesn’t mean they have every book I have ever wanted to read. Almost, but not quite.

I don’t usually buy books. I also don’t usually shop on Amazon anymore (given that they still advertise on Breitbart and I find it problematic). But Mom (who originated this politically-minded ethic) recently told me that we have a fair number of Amazon points. So maybe I’ll make an exception for some new used books around my birthday time…

And that inspired a visit to my list, and then, as per my usual compulsions, some much needed pruning.  The oldest book had been added to the list two years ago.  Which isn’t too bad, but still almost 1/10th of my life.  So some stuff was eliminated and some had been acquired by the library (!).

Here’s what remains:

• Mad About the House: A Decorating Handbook
  It hasn’t been published yet, so finding it used on Amazon is not an option, as of now.
• Paris in Stride: An Insider’s Walking Guide
  I recently started following this illustrator on Instagram and am always on the lookout for Paris recs.
• Home Sweet Maison: The French Art of Making a Home
• Parisian Chic Lookbook: What Should I Wear Today?
  I enjoyed the original Parisian Chic by Ines de la Fressange. I’ve heard that this one isn’t nearly as good, but I’m still interested.
• My Little Paris
  I subscribe to the My Little Paris newsletter via email. They share lots of fun news about the city and favorite locations.
• Une Femme Francaise: The Seductive Style of French Women
  Clearly books about Paris, style, and the intersection of the two are one of my pets.
• Don’t Be a Tourist in Paris: the Messy Nessy Chic Guide
• The New Paris
• Impressions of Paris: An Artist’s Sketchbook
• Am I There Yet?: The Loop-de-loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood
  Mari Andrew, whose illustrations I sometimes share in links posts, published a book!
• Yours Always: Letters of Longing
• The Book Lovers’ Miscellany
• The Milk of Dreams
  Children’s stories by an excellent surrealist author.
• How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life
• The She-Devils
  So hard finding this one in English (Les Diaboliques in French).
• Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
  Stefan Zweig.
• The Story Cure: An A-Z of Books to Keep Kids Happy, Healthy and Wise
  I liked The Novel Cure, and as a big fan of children’s literature I feel like this one seems pretty promising.
• How to Live Like Your Cat
• What Flowers say: And Other Stories
  George Sand short stories.
• Book of My Mother
• A Book of Book Lists: A Bibliophile’s Compendium
• The Book of Forgotten Authors
• The Joy of the Snow
  Elizabeth Goudge, noted children’s author.
• Gio_Graphy: Fun in the World of Fashion
• The Place to Be
  The best destinations for different moods, according to Lonely Planet.
• Dress Scandinavian
• I’d Rather be Reading: A Library of Art for Book Lovers
• The Art of Discarding: How to Get Rid of Clutter and Find Joy
  The original KonMari method.
• Siddhartha’s Brain: Unlocking the Ancient Science of Enlightenment
  Buddhism and neuroscience- pretty up my alley.
• Tryst
  A mid-20th century ghost story like The Uninvited and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.  hard to find.
• Ladurée Savoir Vivre: The Art of Fine Living
• Quiet Houses
  Intertwining yet distinct ghost stories.
• A Child Again
  Robert Coover cynically and nostalgically retells childhood fables and tales.
• The Name Therapist: How Growing Up with My Odd Name Taught Me Everything You Need to Know about Yours
• The Diary of Lady Murasaki
• The Library
  Zoran Zivkovic is an excellent name.
• The Blood of the Vampire
  Like Dracula, one of the original Gothic vampire novels. Also check out Sheridan’s Carmella.
• Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances

It’s kind of funny because the books tend to fall on one of two extremes.  the library doesn’t carry them because they’re more obscure, but half are more light/frivolous obscure while the others are foreign/old/scholarly.

Links 4/29

It’s been in some ways an absolutely awful day but I’m still pretty content.  To explain the first part of that, I was fueled by food poisoning sometime around 2 am last night and my stomach is still feeling pretty tender.  On top of that, I wasn’t able to find the perfect plantings for my garden urns.  I’m thinking maybe nasturtiums.
To explain the latter part, it’s the birthday of one of my best friends and I got to see her for the first time in what feels like forever.  And in spite of my relative nausea, hanging out and catching up was lovely.

I’m enjoying Middlemarch, A Quiet Place was fantastic, and seeing the Art in Bloom exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday was beautiful and completely brought out my inner elderly white lady.  But what can I say, I love flower shows and I won’t deny it.

I have a scarcity of links this week, and you can decide if that’s good or bad!

• Allure on women in the fragrance industry.  Like fashion, its a business led by men that caters largely to women.
• Certain scents are found to reduce dogs’ stress levels in animal shelters.
• A list of things that intimidate me. Oddly relatable. What would be on your list?
• Self-discovery comes in all shapes and sizes.
• Scientists discover an enzyme that can break down PET plastic.

Truly, that’s all I have. It’s pretty shameful.

BUT

The yoga retreat has been picked!
*drumroll*
RADIANCE SUTRAS FLOW
Man am I ready for some ecstatic dance

I mean, not right now, because I have food poisoning, but in general.

Links and Things

After a short hiatus that coincided with finals period and stress and projects, I am back in the US of A and home in Boston where there are cats and vegan food and gardens that need working it.

And a smallish backlog of links.

• All about the three-person committee that approves (and rejects) baby names in Iceland.
• “When you’re feeling frisky, try slow dancing in your kitchen with a healthy twenty centimeters of clearance in between your torsos.” and other sex advice from a woman in a Cialis commercial.
• The Problem with “Not Caring” about Pop Culture: relevant, revolutionary stories can come from anywhere — even a makeover show.
• Insert Millennial joke about Etat Libre d’Orange making a fragrance specifically for me [here].
• Yale University advancing the science of smell.
• This short story made me tear up… nice to be given back some faith in humanity.
• Very extra background extras– even better than Part 1.
• Just over here learning about The Dutch Angle.
• The story tellers who read aloud to Cuban cigar rollers. Wow.
• The story of the pilot who landed the Southwest Airlines flight.
• Cardi B is changing how black women are pregnant in public.
• Eight decades of royal British corgis are at an end.
• An analysis of The Simpsons and the Problem with Apu. Just jump right in here at Part 2.
• And a whole lot of exciting trailers: Solo, The Meg, The Incredibles 2, Mary Shelley, Hot Summer Nights (Heyyy, Timothee Chalamet!), Hereditary, Three Identical Strangers.